Online Abuse Gender Gap

As I was just commenting here, I'm working some overtime hours this week and won't have as much time for posting. But I thought this comment by Hardheaded Liberal at My Left Wing was a good one, and worth a quick front-paging before I go: Markos probably has heard and accepts that rape, like domestic violence, is about power and domination over women (or vulnerable men in prisons). But in any event he doesn't understand that threats of violence have the same function of "keeping women in their place" and supercharging the belief of the bully (online or other) that he has a "natural right" to do whatever he wants to to keep any woman "in her place." A lot of education is needed for some progressive bloggers, but those of us who understand the reality should be polite to progressives who still have a lot to learn. Let Markos apologize if he realizes that he should, but let him figure that out himself -- after he has seen the arguments as well as the rants and rhetoric. The Ku Klux Klan found that threats of violence were very effective in depriving the freedmen of the franchise after the Army was largely withdrawn from occupying the Old Confederate States after the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876. And when threats didn't do the job, the KKK simply burned out the families of local African-American leaders (killing entire families) and/or lynched the leaders. Online threats, cyber-stalking, physical stalking, domestic abuse, are all forms of violence against women. And these forms of violence have the same purpose as the suppression of freedmen and the suppression of conflicting groups in Iraq -- that is, to establish hierarchy, here to render women subordinate and vulnerable. Markos is just one of many males who does not recognize clearly enough (if at all), the huge gender gap between women and men in perception of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. It is similar to the huge gap between African-Americans and all other ethnic communities in perception of the state of race relations at any point in time: Many surveys I have seen over the years show that, e.g., when 80% of whites think race relations are good, roughly 80% of African-Americans will report that race relations are poor. I've been a civil rights lawyer for 35 years. But it has only been in the last 15 years, when sexual harassment cases have became a major feature of employment law/civil rights law practice, that I have seen example after example of predatory males (bullies all) demeaning the women they work with in every conceivable way. Markos also is apparently not aware of how many women become hyper-vulnerable in childhood or adolescence. Molestation, incest, step-father rape, and other sexual abuse drives large numbers of young women into the world pursued by demons of guilt, shame and self-hatred because they have been victimized by sexual abuse. Just as many African-Americans were cowed into subservience by all the social constraints of America's proto-apartheid, large numbers of women live on a narrow edge between confidence/self- respect and impotence/self-blame. It does not take an immediate threat to their persons to push them over the edge onto the side of impotence.

Blogswarm: Take Back the Blog

Earlier, I linked to Take Back the Blog! March, a My Left Wing essay by Bruce Godfrey of Crablaw's Maryland Weekly. He has now crossposted at Booman Tribune as well. An excerpt... As noted above, April is a traditional month for the Take Back the Night marches. The four TBTN marches I attended at Princeton over 15 years ago were very important events in my life and who I became as a person. In a previous diary I blogged about the impact of those marches on my personal and professional life. I learned more from those experiences than from all except perhaps two of the 30 courses I took while I was there. So I am announcing the first annual Take Back The Blog March, a blogswarm in defense of women's right to be left alone in peace at night, including in the night of cyberspace, to be published on April 28, 2007. If you care about women's dignity as people and as FULL participants in this community - not the Daily Kos community but rather the community of all liberal and progressive bloggers - I hope you will consider contributing. I will maintain the swarm list of links for Take Back the Blog March at my own site, Crablaw Maryland Weekly, and will prepare a link logo in the next few days for that purpose (or if you have a good logo, please contribute.) Contributions will be welcomed that stand up for the dignity, privacy, sovereignty, self-determination and freedom of women against all forms of predation - in the blogosphere, in cyberspace generally, and in regular life. I mentioned the need for a link logo to Demetrius, and he created the following. People are more than welcome to download and use them to promote this blog event. For my part, I plan to keep adding posts here as I find them (and as the feeds become available.)

Blogging while female

I first learned about the crass, insensitive remarks of Markos Moulitsas in this post by skippy, and later found a post by Steven D at Booman Tribune. In a later diary, Steven included what Markos actually said: Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you'll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist -- evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said "death threats". [...] But so what? It's not as if those cowards will actually act on their threats. For better or for worse, this isn't a country in which media figures -- even hugely controversial ones -- are routinely attacked by anything more dangerous than a cream pie. Since last night, I saw that skippy had updated his post with the following: addendum: feminazi, commenting over at echidne's blog, asks this question: i sent a email to http://www.mothertalkers.com/contactus asking them why they support misogynists through advertising. why don't you do the same? good idea! Except, I don't know how much choice they have, given that you see *this* at the bottom of the home page on that blog: © 2005, Kos Media, LLC I may be only a C-rate blogger (on a good day), but what do we *usually* do when we want to hold a public figure accountable for something they've said? Isn't it usually *their* advertisers that we write to? Or how about writing to some of the politicians and public figures who post diaries at Daily Kos. This Wikipedia article has a list. I wouldn't recommend this if Markos' remarks were a one time thing, but as shirlstars' comment here indicates, this is part of a pattern of behavior. See also: How not to be an asshole: a guide for men Why the lack of concern for Kathy Sierra ? Take Back the Blog! March, a My Left Wing essay by Bruce Godfrey of Crablaw's Maryland Weekly. Finally, as I noted here, I really haven't had it in me to do much blogging lately, and I'm still not feeling all that verbose at this point. But I do consider this to be an important issue, and, even if I don't manage to blog more about it, I'm going to make a point of adding relevant entries to my page of Google shared items, which you can find here.