A Break in Our Scheduled Programming

I know I said that today's post would be about June Cleaver and the traditional family, but there's been a lot on my mind lately, so I'm afraid television's classic mom will have to wait a few days.

Also, as a warning, this post is going to be a downer. And there'll be some potential trigger words and situations and a fair bit of NSFW language--both in the body of the post and in the links. If you'd rather avoid these things, skip this post. Come back on Tuesday when I'll be talking about television again.

Those of you who keep up with the comic world, comics creators, and comic bloggers on Twitter may have heard this past week about a campaign to ban a guy who was using, among others, the Twitter ID @JonVeee (this and his other IDs have, to my knowledge, been suspended, thanks to the flood of people marking his tweets as offensive) to verbally attack women who write and women who write about comics. His tirades eventually started turning towards men in the comics industry, but the main focus of his rage was women.

And we're not talking a little ribbing here. We're not even talking about some jackass who trolls you until you block him and then moves on to torment someone else. If you want to know what exactly was going on with this guy, take a look at this piece by Heidi MacDonald at The Beat. Or this one by Sue over at DC Women Kicking Ass where she details how she spent well over a year dealing with this guy.

But I warn you, these are both rough reads that include this man's threats of rape and stalking, not to mention one charming incident in which he goes after a woman's children. Seriously.

This is an extreme case. Most people aren't trolls, and even most trolls don't do go this far--creating multiple IDs and using proxy servers to get back to sites that have banned or blocked him.

But he's hardly the only one out there giving women who talk about traditionally male dominated media a hard time. Remember Anita Sarkeesain from Feminist Frequency? Earlier this year, when she announced a Kickstarter for a video series exploring tropes and female characters in video games, she was met with a reaction that... well, just click here to look through some of the comments that got left on the video for the project.

And that's aside from the vandalism to her Wikipedia page and the creation of an online game in which the player punches Sarkeesian in the face, complete with visible bruising effects after each swing.

So, yeah, trolls are out there. They don't always attack women, and they don't always attack the well-known, but they're out there, and they target anyone that they feel is encroaching on their territory. They're just a fact of the Internet.

Something in the DCWKA post, though, caught my eye, and pretty much captures a cruel reality of the Internet.

Frankly if you are a woman on the internet you might as well have a sign on your back that says, “Troll me”.  If you have an opinion or focus on commenting in a male dominated field, you probably double your chances.

It's horrible, isn't it? It's also true.

Worse than that, it happens to women who are just trying to enjoy things.

In a conversation with one of my female gamer friends, she told me the story of when she explained her gamertag to some guys she with whom she was playing a game. She had recently changed her tag. When they asked her why, she explained that the one she had been using was feminine--it was pretty obviously the tag of either a female or gay man--and she didn't want to put up with the harassment that a feminine tag invites.

Or, as she put it to me, "I didn't want to be called 'cunt' or 'faggot' every time I played."

This happens, guys. This is a thing that happens to people. All the time.

I have been very fortunate--in my experience, the men I've met in the geek community have been great. Aside from a couple of jerky exceptions, I've never been made to feel unwelcome or treated like a lesser member of the community. 

But I'm an exception.

And the fact that is the case really sucks.

I'm not saying that I think all guys in geek culture treat women in their interests as though they don't belong. I don't even think that most men in geek culture are that way--I think the majority of guys in the geek world think it's cool when women develop enthusiasm of the stuff that they like.

The problem isn't the number of guys who are jerks. The problem is that they're louder than the ones who aren't. And that's something to think about.

So, I'm sorry for the serious and depressing post. But this sort of verbal assault and these threats being tossed around are a troubling thing to me, and it didn't seem right for me to ignore what's been going on.

I just wanted to join the people who are spreading news like this in saying, "This is not okay."