TRIGGER WARNING: Rape, misogyny, general horribleness
I am asked all the time why I think Professional Internet Types tend to be male more often than female. Is it because women aren’t as aggressive about building an audience and so struggle amid the media saturation? Is it because women aren’t as funny, or aren’t as talented, or blah blah blah?Maybe we need to consider that one of the central reasons women artists/vloggers/musicians/etc. are less likely to rise to prominence online is that whenever women build an audience online, men threaten those women with rape and murder. And unlike traditional celebrities, most of these women do not have the resources to hire the kind of lawyers and bodyguards that one needs to stay safe.
Like all misogyny, and I want to emphasize this, this is bad not just for women but also for all human beings. We are better off as a species if everyone has a chance to be heard, and we are worse off if talented people like Kitty Pryde don’t have the basic safety and security that one needs in order to effectively make and share stuff.
But it’s not just these kinds of horrifying threats (which as pointed out above is “the most normal thing”).
I also want to say something to all those guys who are like I was as a teenager: You’re not a sick person trying to get someone’s attention by harming or threatening them, but you do have a weird relationship with the women who make work you like.* You think that if this person knew you, you could be friends…maybe more than friends. And so you want to get her attention, so you can get to know each other, because then you’ll definitely become friends or maybe—
Stop.
When you start falling down that rabbit hole, stop. I know it’s hard. But stop.
What we love—even if these people make highly personal and confessional vlogs or whatever—is the stuff they make, not the people themselves. And what we really want is for more of that stuff to exist in the world. So the only proper way to be a fan is to let them be, so that they can bring more good and useful stuff into the world for us to enjoy.
* EDIT: Many people are yelling at me for saying the person in the above ask is not a sick person harming or threatening people. That is not what I am saying here. I am speaking to the people out there who are NOT like this person, but whose excessive and sometimes romanticized attention can shut down discourse. I thought that was pretty obvious from the grammar, but I just want to underscore it.
#misogyny #tw: rape #rape threats #stalking #harassment #sexual harassment
