Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

[Lucius]

Male author claims women can't write "Space Opera":

 

http://www.themarysue.com/dark-beyond-the-stars-review/

If I were to follow the link, would I gain any insight into why he bothers to make an obviously false assertion easily refuted by anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the subject?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary doubts it.

[Pattern Ghost]

Who in the heck is "the author"? Why don't they name him?

[Lucius]

Who in the heck is "the author"? Why don't they name him?

Because he's badmouthing this anthology in particular and women who write science fiction in general as a way of drawing attention to his own writings, and they don't want to give him free and undeserved publicity.

 

Yes, I did decide to follow the link.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Back and forth on a palindromedary

[Zeropoint]

Well, next time I'm up around Powell's City of Books, I'm going to get myself a copy of "Dark Beyond the Stars".

[Pattern Ghost]

Because he's badmouthing this anthology in particular and women who write science fiction in general as a way of drawing attention to his own writings, and they don't want to give him free and undeserved publicity.

 

Yes, I did decide to follow the link.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Back and forth on a palindromedary

 

I guess it does make sense not to give publicity to a publicity whore. My brain isn't working that well this month, thanks for the hand.

[Nolgroth]

Yes, but how will I know which author to avoid if they don't name him? I'll be honest that I am not going to Amazon to do whatever research they think I am going to do. I'm just too lazy for all that.

[Cygnia]

 

Society Has Assigned Gender Roles to All Our Foods

 

[Cancer]

True story.

 

I joined the local chapter of the Association for Women in Science in the late 1980s (for years I was the only male member), and in 1990 or so I went to a chapter pot-luck lunch at one member's house. I brought (having made both by myself) chicken taquitos and guacamole.

 

Literally every other non-dessert non-beverage dish brought ... remember, these are made and brought by women science professionals circa 1990 ...

 

 

... was tabbouleh.

 

About fifteen bowls of the stuff.

 

 

 

Other than being the comic contrast, I had nothing to do with that stereotype.

[Cygnia]

 

Why Don’t Queer Butch Women Exist in Games?

 

[Lucius]

Yes, but how will I know which author to avoid if they don't name him? I'll be honest that I am not going to Amazon to do whatever research they think I am going to do. I'm just too lazy for all that.

Perhaps they're not trying to get anyone to avoid him, or to get anyone to avoid any author in particular.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Unavoidable palindromedary

[gewing]

Stupid people shouldn't

[Cygnia]

Nerd Guys, Pandering, and “Forced” Diversity

 

Seeing as I’m a masochist, I’ve spent little time scrolling through the comments, and a recurring train of thought piqued my interest. In nearly every comments section of a piece on diversity, a sentiment similar to this one can be found: “They shouldn’t be forced to pander to women/minorities/SJWs. They should make what they want to make!”

 

“Pandering” is a word that comes up quite a lot in these sorts of discussions. They’re totally fine with diverse characters, these people (mostly guys) say, so long as it isn’t pandering to a certain group. “They should make a female protagonist because they want to, not to please feminists,” as a redditor put it.

Artistic integrity comes up in these situations too…but I’ll come back to that.

 

Hilariously, these same people declare it “pandering” anytime a piece of media features anything that deviates from the standard gruff white antihero-centric formula that dominates so much of current entertainment.

[bigbywolfe]

Stupid people shouldn't

Shouldn't WHAT?

[Nolgroth]

So outrage for the purpose of outrage then? Makes little sense to me. Meh.

 

Perhaps they're not trying to get anyone to avoid him, or to get anyone to avoid any author in particular.

Lucius Alexander

Unavoidable palindromedary

[Cancer]

Stupid people shouldn't

  

Shouldn't WHAT?

X, for all actions X. Dying is not an action.

[Cygnia]

http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/25/9399169/united-nations-women-cyber-violence-anita-sarkeesian-zoe-quinn

 

 

The Broadband Commission Working Group on Gender gathered at the United Nations yesterday to present its findings on what they consider to be a "rising tide of online violence against women and girls."

The full briefing aired live on the UN's streaming website. An archive of the footage is now available for on-demand viewing.

[Pattern Ghost]

The UN likes hyperbole, and doesn't understand what internet trolls are.

[Ranxerox]

The UN likes hyperbole, and doesn't understand what internet trolls are.

 

I apologize if I am misinterpreting you comment, but if you were receiving hundreds or thousand of death threats and people were doxing your address and other personal information, I suspect you would not consider the potential danger to yourself hyperbole or the internet trolls harmless.

[gewing]

Shouldn't WHAT?

Fill in the blank. I often use drive, but have known people to use vote, breed, breathe, own guns...

 

 

Edit, in this case I think I was referring to either writing novels or promulgating their opinions in the public sphere.

 

Though I would tend to oppose laws aimed at silencing them too.

[Nolgroth]

I wonder if online trolling a address/personal info doxing is that much higher for females than males? Truly. Is there really a legitimately larger sample or is it that something that has been happening primarily towards a male demographic  is suddenly being turned towards a female one? In no case is it justified towards either sex. Just one of those inquiring minds want to know things.

[Ranxerox]

I wonder if online trolling a address/personal info doxing is that much higher for females than males? Truly. Is there really a legitimately larger sample or is it that something that has been happening primarily towards a male demographic  is suddenly being turned towards a female one? In no case is it justified towards either sex. Just one of those inquiring minds want to know things.

 

Hope this satisfies your inquiring mind.

 

Cyber Harassment: Yes, It's A Woman Thing

[薔薇語]

 

Hope this satisfies your inquiring mind.

 

Cyber Harassment: Yes, It's A Woman Thing

 

 

So, here is an issue I have with people asserting that online harrasment is a gendered issue: what makes the cut? Most studies I have heard of list all unwelcomed experience into the same category. And while I think there is value in that kind of undistinguished macro level research, it isn't getting quite at the issue that people are discussing, or so I think. When others question the veracity of the claim that it is a gendered issue, I think most individuals are wanting to single out credible / semi-credible threats of violence AND actual attempts of violence from what they considered every day trolling. To help highlight this difference, me saying something to the effect of "I hope John Doe gets run over" or "Good Gosh I'd love to 'copulate' with Jane Doe" is substantively different from "I am going to go to John Doe's house Tuesday and slit his throat" or "If I ever get close to Jane Doe, I am going to rape her". 

 

Why do I bring up the above distinction? Because I think it is far too common a practice by supporters of the gendered view to lump both sets together and thus imply the interchangablity of the two sets. I do not personally think and would imagine that most individuals when pressed would also not think that they are interchangable. I was triggered to bring this up because the third line of the article you linked has this gem of a statement "threats and sexually explicit messages". I think most individuals who think the bare claim of the gendered nature of the online treatment of folks would find it puzzling that "Sexually Explicit messages" and "Threats" are lumped together as mutually interchangable ideas. And lets keep in mind that if a 'sexually explicit message' has a threat of violence (i.e., I will rape you!), then it has already risen to the level of "threat" and does not need to be mutually listed as the mutual listing only distorts numbers. 

 

But perhaps I am being too pedantic in my reading. Perhaps the author's intent was to say "threats and threats with a sexual undertone / overtone to them". Since I could easily be engaging in biased reading, it behooves me to check the link they provided. Luckily they did provide an actual link as most places parroting such messages rarely do. So clicking on the link to the University of Maryland, I find that it just takes me to a department homepage and that page is not directly linking me to any study. This is concerning as the source you linked to was trying to bolster their point using some still unidentified study. How am I suppose to confirm the veracity of their claim and the validity of the original study if no link is provided. And the fact that they implied a link to the original source while actually providing none suggests a level of deception on their part that is not acceptable. But again, perhaps I am being too critical. Lets continue forward. 

 

They actually link to WHO@ (Working to Halt Online Abuse) to help bolster their claims. That was nice. And the fact that there are links to actual data sets is nice. But I actually have no knowledge of who this group is and am at least a bit reluctant to take their word as truth. And their data sets suffer from some limitations in who is involved. Thus the ability to draw strong and reliable inferences from their small data sets to the population as a whole is limited at best. But lets at least hear them out on this issue. The article says:

 

In 2007, 61 percent of the individuals reporting online abuse to WHOA were female while 21 percent were male. 2006 followed a similar pattern: 70 percent of those reporting online harassment identified themselves as women. Overall, in the years covering 2000 to 2007, 72.5 percent of the 2,285 individuals reporting cyber harassment were female and 22 percent were male. 70 percent of the victims were between the ages of 18 and 40 and half of them reported having no relationship with their attackers.

 

 

Interesting numbers for sure. But let me take this moment to cue you all into a terribly deceptive trick used to prove points - choosing your data sets and ignoring ones not proving your point. I know this sounds obvious but it is extremely important. If you ever hear of a study that discusses school performance or under performance of any particular group that doesn't cover an entire life chapter (until the end of Primary school, until the end of secondary school, until the end of college) be extremely weary of what is being fed to you. More likely than not, all their strong data gets destroyed in the remaining year or two. For example, you will occasionally hear how students who attend preschool out perform their non-preschool-attending counterparts. And those claiming this who have seen the data and have some desire to be honest will usually add on the caveat of "until third grade" or so. Why? Because after that point, the major differences between pre-school attending students and non-attending students starts to be wiped out. The effects of that extra education have a shelf life of only a few years. So when I see this article use only a portion of the data to prove a point, I am reminded of those statistical tricks. But does this author engage in those kinds of deceptive practices? Let's see. 

 

To aid in this I have created a Google Doc spreadsheet with the relevant data that can be found here. The highlight is that the values this person used are accurate on whole and hold up over the whole set, there was an interesting omission from the article: the perps. I found this data quite interesting. It suggests that in the author's established time frame, known male and female perps were in neigh equal proportion. Over the whole of the available data, known male perps were at about 41% and known female perps were at 36%. I would think that this kind of revelation would help open up a new dialogue about 'gendered' harassment. While it is true that a member of a group can be prejudice against that same group, it isn't exactly in keeping with the common belief of online harassment that both men and women are, in largely equal proportion, harassing others. That really goes against the generally held notion that Online harassment is an act that men perform against women. 

 

So, my ending conclusion on this whole issue (the issue raised in the link) is that the link really proves nothing and adds nothing. I think this for a number of reasons:

 

No links to reliable and trust worthy data.

Only provided data is from self selecting individuals and the information is subjective at best

The distinction between harassment and 'threats of violence' is not made clear in any data and that goes to the core issue at hand. 

The data set provided is extremely small. Over the course of 13 years they only garnered just over 4,000 entries.

 

Foreign Orchid. 

[Pattern Ghost]

I apologize if I am misinterpreting you comment, but if you were receiving hundreds or thousand of death threats and people were doxing your address and other personal information, I suspect you would not consider the potential danger to yourself hyperbole or the internet trolls harmless.

 

I think the rising tide comment is hyperbole. And what harm have the mouth breathers actually done? I do believe they should all be tracked down and charged with the crimes they've committed. I just dislike hyperbole UN grandstanding.

 

And let's put this in context: The UN fails miserably to do anything about depots filling mass graves, so let them fry some bigger fish before making a mountain out of a mole hill. Unless the internet trolls have backyards filled with the bodies of thousands of dead women, I'm not buying the  hype from the UN. It smacks of a grasp at publicity for acting on a trending topic.

[Ranxerox]

So, here is an issue I have with people asserting that online harrasment is a gendered issue: what makes the cut? Most studies I have heard of list all unwelcomed experience into the same category. And while I think there is value in that kind of undistinguished macro level research, it isn't getting quite at the issue that people are discussing, or so I think. When others question the veracity of the claim that it is a gendered issue, I think most individuals are wanting to single out credible / semi-credible threats of violence AND actual attempts of violence from what they considered every day trolling. To help highlight this difference, me saying something to the effect of "I hope John Doe gets run over" or "Good Gosh I'd love to 'copulate' with Jane Doe" is substantively different from "I am going to go to John Doe's house Tuesday and slit his throat" or "If I ever get close to Jane Doe, I am going to rape her". 

 

Why do I bring up the above distinction? Because I think it is far too common a practice by supporters of the gendered view to lump both sets together and thus imply the interchangablity of the two sets. I do not personally think and would imagine that most individuals when pressed would also not think that they are interchangable. I was triggered to bring this up because the third line of the article you linked has this gem of a statement "threats and sexually explicit messages". I think most individuals who think the bare claim of the gendered nature of the online treatment of folks would find it puzzling that "Sexually Explicit messages" and "Threats" are lumped together as mutually interchangable ideas. And lets keep in mind that if a 'sexually explicit message' has a threat of violence (i.e., I will rape you!), then it has already risen to the level of "threat" and does not need to be mutually listed as the mutual listing only distorts numbers. 

 

But perhaps I am being too pedantic in my reading. Perhaps the author's intent was to say "threats and threats with a sexual undertone / overtone to them". Since I could easily be engaging in biased reading, it behooves me to check the link they provided. Luckily they did provide an actual link as most places parroting such messages rarely do. So clicking on the link to the University of Maryland, I find that it just takes me to a department homepage and that page is not directly linking me to any study. This is concerning as the source you linked to was trying to bolster their point using some still unidentified study. How am I suppose to confirm the veracity of their claim and the validity of the original study if no link is provided. And the fact that they implied a link to the original source while actually providing none suggests a level of deception on their part that is not acceptable. But again, perhaps I am being too critical. Lets continue forward. 

 

They actually link to WHO@ (Working to Halt Online Abuse) to help bolster their claims. That was nice. And the fact that there are links to actual data sets is nice. But I actually have no knowledge of who this group is and am at least a bit reluctant to take their word as truth. And their data sets suffer from some limitations in who is involved. Thus the ability to draw strong and reliable inferences from their small data sets to the population as a whole is limited at best. But lets at least hear them out on this issue. The article says:

 

In 2007, 61 percent of the individuals reporting online abuse to WHOA were female while 21 percent were male. 2006 followed a similar pattern: 70 percent of those reporting online harassment identified themselves as women. Overall, in the years covering 2000 to 2007, 72.5 percent of the 2,285 individuals reporting cyber harassment were female and 22 percent were male. 70 percent of the victims were between the ages of 18 and 40 and half of them reported having no relationship with their attackers.

 

 

Interesting numbers for sure. But let me take this moment to cue you all into a terribly deceptive trick used to prove points - choosing your data sets and ignoring ones not proving your point. I know this sounds obvious but it is extremely important. If you ever hear of a study that discusses school performance or under performance of any particular group that doesn't cover an entire life chapter (until the end of Primary school, until the end of secondary school, until the end of college) be extremely weary of what is being fed to you. More likely than not, all their strong data gets destroyed in the remaining year or two. For example, you will occasionally hear how students who attend preschool out perform their non-preschool-attending counterparts. And those claiming this who have seen the data and have some desire to be honest will usually add on the caveat of "until third grade" or so. Why? Because after that point, the major differences between pre-school attending students and non-attending students starts to be wiped out. The effects of that extra education have a shelf life of only a few years. So when I see this article use only a portion of the data to prove a point, I am reminded of those statistical tricks. But does this author engage in those kinds of deceptive practices? Let's see. 

 

To aid in this I have created a Google Doc spreadsheet with the relevant data that can be found here. The highlight is that the values this person used are accurate on whole and hold up over the whole set, there was an interesting omission from the article: the perps. I found this data quite interesting. It suggests that in the author's established time frame, known male and female perps were in neigh equal proportion. Over the whole of the available data, known male perps were at about 41% and known female perps were at 36%. I would think that this kind of revelation would help open up a new dialogue about 'gendered' harassment. While it is true that a member of a group can be prejudice against that same group, it isn't exactly in keeping with the common belief of online harassment that both men and women are, in largely equal proportion, harassing others. That really goes against the generally held notion that Online harassment is an act that men perform against women. 

 

So, my ending conclusion on this whole issue (the issue raised in the link) is that the link really proves nothing and adds nothing. I think this for a number of reasons:

 

No links to reliable and trust worthy data.

Only provided data is from self selecting individuals and the information is subjective at best

The distinction between harassment and 'threats of violence' is not made clear in any data and that goes to the core issue at hand. 

The data set provided is extremely small. Over the course of 13 years they only garnered just over 4,000 entries.

 

Foreign Orchid. 

 

First you are seeing a deception where none existed originally.  The article in my original link is from 2009.  At the time the article was written, the University of Maryland homepage probably had a link to the research in question.  The link has just been taken down at some point in the last 6 years.  However, a quick google of "University of Maryland cyber harassment study" led me to this abstract.

 

Second it really does not matter how they define harassment as long as they define it the same way for both "male" and "female" bots. Because however they are defining it harassment the bots that are given female names are getting 25 times as much of it as the as the bots given male names, despite the fact that the code all the bots is identical except for the name that they use.  Stop and think about that for a moment.  Grief, however it is being defined, is being heaped in 25 times greater quantities just because the chatter is using a female name.  If it was twice as much abuse that would be bad and indicative a serious problem.  Four times as much abuse would be horrible.  But 25 times as much abuse!?!  Look even if the most the abuse in question is relatively minor, having a female name should not net you 25 times as much of it.  It just should not.

 

Now, address the issue. You talk about intellectual honesty; well have enough intellectual honesty to actually address the issue.       

[薔薇語]

"t really does not matter how they define harassment as long as they define it the same way for both "male" and "female" bots"

 

Yes, yes it really does matter. And despite my comment above about how definitions matter, you seem to be willfully ignoring that point. 

When we are discussing this topic, a topic that has been highlighted in the last few years, it is very important to keep in mind what things are being counted. A violent threat, akin to those that we have seen promulgate the internet with individuals like Anita are wholly distinct from "feeling horny". And to liken the two as somehow being the same is to severely distort the image that is trying to be conveyed. 

The common notion of the harassment endured is one of violent aggression towards women entering the online world. One in which individuals like Anita receive real and credible threats of violence on a regular basis. That is the image that is being pushed and is claimed to be gendered. It is on this point that the critics of this assumed gendered violence raise the question: is it gendered? Is the violence or threat of violence woman receive online in keeping with the violence or threat of violence men receive? This is the ignored point that the supporters of the common message need to deal with. And by obfuscating it away by including extraneous amounts of non-comparable information, the message gets diluted and the integrity of that side gets drawn into question. 

---

 

Now, having my intellectual honesty called into question by you, Ranxerox, is not quite kosher. But since you seem to be screaming at the wind for me to address this point of yours, allow me to. 

 

 

Bots with female names received, to a higher degree than male named bots, messages of a sexual and or threatening nature. Looking at your link I do not see any source for the original data, so I can hardly confirm what they were including in those messages, so I have to make a good deal of assumptions based on less words than an average tweet on twitter.  It would seem that any message that could be construed to have a sexual or suggested tone to it was taken to be part of that 'Sexually explicit or threatening" group. The fact that no examples of the "threatening" messages were given gives me pause. And the fact that this group also engaged in practice of intermingling the two is also gives me pause. I would wager that the messages rising to "threatening" status were far more infrequent than those of a sexual nature. And it is the desire to see those numbers highlighted and compared that gets shouted down by your side, Ranxerox. 

 

 

So why is it that messages of a sexual nature must be taken differently than those of a violent nature (really? I need to explain this?)? Well, at the most basic level, everyone who has lived a few days as an adult most anywhere knows that one of the key distinctions between men and women is the classic "predator : prey" analogy. Be it due to purely cultural reinforcement or purely biological need, or a mix of the two, Men feel the need to pursue sexual congress while women feel no particular need (or so the trope goes). The roll of 'gatekeeper' has afforded women the ability to not need to be forward with their explicit sexual desires / requests. 

To put this into more context, when we look at a bar or nightclub, I would expect that the proportion of men initiating first contact with the goal of developing some layer of intimacy to be easily in that 25x range. Indeed, I would be surprised if it wasn't. Think back to your own personal history when dealing with the opposite sex. How often do you think men have felt  pressure to initiate first contact versus women? Think back to the number of occasions you have actually seen women initiate first contact. Without doubt it does happen, but the proportions will heavily skew in one direction. Now take that bar context and reduce it to simple Chat-Room interactions. Seeing more men initiate any conversation between opposite sexes and for those initiations to have a sexual component is not out of the realm of reason. Indeed, I would say it is to be completely expected. 

So, I feel lumping in my innocuous but sexually charge phrase of "Hey, Beautiful! How you doin'?" with threatening statements such as "I will kill you" is completely ignoring the reality of human interaction. One must not forget the context in which we live and operate when looking at things. This is something the advocate of the gendered nature of online activity seem to conveniently forget. 
 

--

Now setting aside that petty squabble you want to have, lets get back to the real issue: Is online violence gendered?

Do women experience more semi-credible and/or credible threats of violence or suffer from more committed acts of violence than their male counterparts? 

I do not know the answer to that question. It could easily be the case that the issue is truly gendered. It could be as night and day as some would seem to claim it to be. But before committing myself to accepting that truth, I would like to actually see some hard evidence. And not ill designed and over inclusive wastes of time. 

 

Foreign Orchid.