why i hate the internet.

I think the nature of the internet necessarily skews the various "performances of self" that one engages in on a day to day basis. There's this idea of creating a brand for yourself. Persona maintenance. Everything becomes a commodity or an image (or both). It's why I hate the internet. The way we act like it can replace the feeling of many bodies together in the same room. The way it removes accountability and identity and makes everyone a commodity to be maintained and groomed and charm and seduce and completely empty if you ever dare to dig a little. It's so isolating and alienating.

harrassment.

i am a moderator on a dating website. every day i see dozens of women flagging men for catcall-y messages. these are not the sorts of flame messages i discuss in "men, women and rejection"; they are not explicitly hostile or hateful but they reveal a sexism that is perhaps more insidious.

some examples include [sic]:

"Didn't I tell you that I think you got a fatty down there?​"
"I bet you've heard it before, but you have great breasts! I'd love to see you naked! Do you want to fuck? :)"
"I'd stick it in your_butthole"


i did not blacklist these men. perhaps i should have, but i didn't.


when i first started this job, i firmly agreed with the dominant cultural attitude about sexual harassment: "get over it" "it's not worth getting upset" "you're on the internet; you need a thick skin". this was before i started doing research, before i began actively cultivating an awareness of sexual politics, gender relationships and, feminist ideologies about sexism.

now i am left with a conundrum:

if i were to remove every entitled son of a bitch who sends a woman a disrespectful message, i would have to blacklist somewhere in the area of 75% of the male users.

but telling the women to get over it is not the right answer either. how can i not stand up for women in this rampantly disrespectful environment? how can i feel okay about having let all three of those guys continue using the site when those messages clearly made women users uncomfortable? sure, it's hardly more disrespectful than the real world but here i have some power: i can decide who deserves the privilege of usership. and who doesn't.

and what does sexual harassment even mean online? if the third commenter doesn't follow up when the woman doesn't answer, can it be written off as an idle query? just a guy looking for fun. "boys will be boys" it's not threatening. she is using a dating website one purpose of which is to facilitate sex. anal sex is not inherently disrespectful or threatening.

should it be written off? or should i have blacklisted him for simply having the gall to say that in his first message?

and what about the women who are open to these sorts of things? plenty of people use the site who are looking for sex, women and men. and what about sexual conservatism in this country? i am much less likely to be offended if someone propositions me about a threesome or anal sex or anything, really than some of my friends because, even if i am not personally interested, i know there are others who are and i respect that.

and then there's a problem of connotation. i'm almost positive the man who wrote the second comment thought it was a compliment. but the woman who flagged him was offended.

how the hell is anyone supposed to navigate these waters?



ps. what about boob shots. should those be deleted? men's chest shots?

aggression and male powerlessness before a "sexual" woman.

in May I was on a fourth or fifth date with a guy I’d been casually seeing for a few months (we didn’t hang out very often due to the fact that he lived in Jersey, an hour away on NJ Transit, which suited me and my desires for dating perfectly). We’d both had a few drinks by this point and the conversation turned toward feminism (on which I’d just started doing some really in-depth research in the last month or so), and my views on what I’d been calling “Closet Sexism” in Western society for years and would periodically rail against, despite my lack of vocabulary and rounded out knowledge.

            However, just a few days earlier I had started reading a book by second-wave feminist Susan Douglas in which she attacks that same idea (she calls it “Enlightened Sexism”) and so it was a bit of an inevitability that the topic would come up.

            My date listened to my arguments quite respectfully, asked a few questions, and challenged some of my ideas, which I sometimes had to concede due to lack of knowledge or to avoid getting into any serious fight. It was altogether a very egalitarian discussion, until we got to the issue of jobs. He pointed out that more women are employed than men (in retrospect I’m sorry I didn’t site this, and ask if there was a more legitimate reason for this fall in male employment than laziness.) Instead I pointed out that in 2009 the top five jobs for women were secretaries, registered nurses, elementary & middle school teachers, cashiers, and retail sales persons.

            It was at this point that my date said something that left me speechless. He suggested that when a woman enters a group of men, the dynamic changes and the men start competing for the woman sexually, which undermines the productivity of the group.

            Although it is true that adding a member of the opposite sex to a previously single-sex situation does change the dynamic, I was furious at the idea that this should be an excuse— to suggest that women should be excluded from jobs because men cannot control themselves is deeply insulting to me. We are all adults here and yes we all have a sex drive (to some degree or another) but this is the 21st century. We have put people on the moon, for fuck's sake. I'm sorry you're horny, deal with it.
            Additionally, it implicitly legitimizes sexual harassment in the workplace. "Boys will be boys, right? They can't help themselves when in the presence of a woman, poor dears; they're just powerless."
            I sputtered and shouted about this for several minutes but we were seeing a show and had to leave so I stopped in the bathroom while he went outside to smoke. When I rejoined him, I apologized for my outburst, for the possibility that I might have come on too strong.

            This brings me to my punch line in the story: in spite of what I saw (and still see) as my legitimate outrage, I felt compelled to apologize for perhaps being too aggressive. I can’t tell you when I learned that in our society an “aggressive” woman (one who exhibits strong emotions of any sort) is quickly labeled a “bitch” but the conditioning is there; even while I hate getting called “sweet” or any variation on that theme, I could not escape the conditioning that said that such an outburst was not kosher, for which I must therefore apologize.

stupid shit

if every time anyone said something stupid on the internet, they were banished, there would be no one left

sex-negative.

in the united states we have a largely unquestioned assumption that sex is bad, "dirty." it is largely taken for granted that teenagers who have sex will be negatively affected by it. (see: "abstinence", meaning self-restraint or self-denial, a word used both for sex and for drugs) this is both ridiculous and true. (like most things human there is a messiness and a tendency towards contradiction which logic can't really successfully reconcile)

it is ridiculous because genetically, evolutionarily speaking, when children hit puberty their bodies are preparing themselves to reproduce so in fact, sexual exploration is completely natural and probably necessary at that age. people refer to sexual desire as "need" and "hunger" for a reason: we do need it

nevertheless, teens are affected negatively, all across the country. BUT i will contend that the problem is not the sex itself (as commentators and researchers and religious extremists all tout); it's the attitudes we hold about sex that are so damaging. the simple fact is that we do not give adolescents the resources to understand and respect what is happening to them as they grow up. i, for instance, had very little awareness/understanding of it; it just kinda happened and I dealt with it as best i could. furthermore, because of the stigma against sex, i did not feel comfortable talking about sex in a candid way with anyone, neither adults nor peers.

so what we have is children reaching puberty in a wildly over-sexualized culture where everywhere you turn you are bombarded with sexual imagery but without any safe forum or way for them to learn about it free of pejoration or stigma against it. no shit kids don't know what to do with themselves; no shit they throw themselves into hook-ups and violent relationships. they don't know any better because adults DON'T TEACH THEM.

we live in a sex-negative society and the problem is NOT sex. the problem is cultural.

occupy year one.

some pictures from Occupy

i don't know any of these peoples

i hope they don't try to sue me

though why they would since i'm not making any money doing this...

Men, Women & Rejection: An OKCupid Feedback Loop

In my time delving into the bowels of the online dating world, I have noticed a very disturbing trend in the interactions between heterosexual men and women. Two aspects, of a high rejection rate maintained by most women users and the anonymity and unaccountability of the Internet, work together to cultivate intense misogyny in the men of online dating.

Anyone who engages in online dating knows a few basic facts. Alice Paloma covers many of them in her post Original Self Summary but here’s a quick review: in general, demand for 21 - 35 year old women is far greater than supply. Many women receive dozens of messages a day, while men are lucky if they get one a week. As is the nature of the supply/demand dynamic, the women users can be very selective. This creates a “paradigm of rejection” and a power dynamic in which women have far higher status than men. Indeed, many women never respond to a first message; the rejection is implicit in the absence. In fact, according to one OKC employee, the most common form of rejection is “no reply”.

With such a low success rate, it's only a matter of time before even the most optimistic men (men who are looking for relationships, who read women's profiles and who send relevant messages) start to feel downtrodden and bitter. This can lead any combination of the following effects/results:

1.) The Form Letter

Many men draft one Form Letter and proceed to send it out to as many women as possible (as suggested in the post, "A Touch of Psychopathy'"). This turns online dating into a numbers game; the more women you contact the more likely someone will respond. However this approach has a major pitfall: most people can spot a form letter by the end of the first sentence and women, as we’ve already seen, can be very picky. Couple this with a near-empty profile (a result of the unconfirmed assumption that women won’t bother to read the profile) and many men never get a response. It becomes a feedback loop.

2.) The Profile Rant

In the year since I started trolling OKC’s Flagmod feature, I have seen several dozen examples in which men use the Self-Summary section of the profile to vent their frustrations at what their experiences with completely unreasonable expectations of certain OKC women users. (It is impossible for me to tell how many women fall into this trap of expectations.) The Profile Rant in and of itself is not necessarily bad; in fact often they hit the nail right on the head about women’s selectivity. The problem here is, although this usually starts with an honest, if exasperated attempt to educate the women users they have a strong tendency to devolve into misogyny.

3.) The Rejection Flame and/or The Flame War

You know that feeling when you just really want to cuss someone out for being a total asshole (or not) but you don’t cause then you’d be a huge fucking douchetard? Welcome to the Internet: where assholes (developmental age: six) can call each other names with complete impunity. Yes, in fact I have worked with six-year-olds and the only difference is the level of creativity and vulgarity.

Some examples of Rejection Flame include [sic]:

“dumb cunt”

“Ok, sorry you Nazi slut.”

“You stupid cunt go fuck yourself”

Obviously there are more and less extreme manifestations of this. In fact Alice's comment in "Original Self Summary" is a very apt summary of the attitudes of many women users which have helped create this paradigm: "I am hot and most men want to have sex with me.  It’s becoming quite boring.  I don’t plan on having sex with anyone that isn’t worth having sex with.  I can afford to be extremely picky." Miconian's response [“You aren't very smart, you aren't very interesting, and you certainly are not "hot" by any reasonable definition”] is a textbook case of Rejection Flame in which someone arbitrarily takes out his frustration on a complete stranger.

While most people just block the user and/or flag the message, in certain situations (read: when both parties are assholes, developmental age: six) Rejection Flame seeds a Flame War.

If you spend any amount of time on online forums or chatrooms you’ve encountered a Flame War or two (or two hundred). Due to the same environmental factors that enable Rejection Flame, complete strangers can and do get into vicious arguments and engage in behavior that they would never condone if they could be held accountable for their actions. I have no way of knowing whether these men learned misogyny from rejection or if their latent or disguised sexism is merely revealed by these moments of supreme frustration. Most likely it is some of both. But nevertheless, this climate provides a window into a particular manifestation of male misogyny.

Because I see many conversations between many users I am able to discern these patterns but I’ll conjecture that most people are unaware of how endemic this dynamic is to OKCupid. My hope is that, once more people know about this, we can challenge this paradigm. To be clear, I am not blaming one gender or the other. These observable trends quickly develop into feedback loops and in order to break them we have to change the way both men and women conduct themselves online. I’m not saying this will be easy but at the very least we may start a dialogue and in my experience, the best way to change anything is to get people talking about it.

Disclaimers:

I don’t know if these models show up on other dating sites but the systemic forces of the Internet are basically constant so my hypothesis is yes.

This is an examination of specifically hetero-normative dynamics based on trends, not statistics.

Men are not the only users who exhibit these behaviors, although the way it manifests in women users tends to be slightly different. But this is a separate issue for a separate essay.

introduction.

This is an exercise in egoism. In saying what I think as clearly and with as little editing as possible. Difficult for me since I'm such a perfectionist, especially where words are concerned. I feel that the world of blogging is largely predicated on and defined by the idea that strangers care what the author thinks and will spend valuable time finding out. For my part, I don't know if you care but I think you should. So I have created a platform from which to spout my rambling opinions about life the universe and everything. But mostly sexism, the internet, and human interaction. Also whatever else strikes my fancy at any given moment. With the goal of being more interesting than the thousands of other egotists posting their thoughts online.

Cheers
-red


ps.: I'm also working on a zine. It will be better than the blog. More on that later.