“I’ve discovered through the internet you can do anything you want so long as no one sees your face; it’s like the wild west over here” -Carl
Today is another leisurely day for me, so I’ll be writing about something less research based and more in the realm of argumentative fun. Many people have recently become aware of the site 4chan, owing to the site being the platform for the recent massive leak of celebrity nude photos acquired from breaches of their accounts on iCloud servers. The leak has been dubbed “The Fappening”, which seamlessly combines the internet’s collective love of both masturbation and M. Night Shyamalan puns. In any case, as anyone remotely familiar with 4chan should know, the users, at least some and perhaps most of them, pride themselves on the fact that the site is widely considered to be a cesspool of the internet’s waste. This allows them a certain leisure in expressing views which are, shall we say, less than orthodox. There is a saying originating from the site that goes, “There are no girls on the internet”, though most of you have probably heard it by another name: “Tits or gtfo”. Examining this phrase in somewhat greater detail provides us with an interesting window in men and women’s psychology: both in terms of how we tend to perceive the world, and how others in the world tend to perceive and react to us in turn. Buckle up, because today should be fun.
Always take proper precautions when venturing into the internet
So let’s start with a quick breakdown of the phrase, “There are no girls on the internet”. One 4chan user helpfully provides the meaning of the phrase here, and the heart of the idea is as follows: in offline life, people tend to respond to women in certain, positive ways simply because they are women, rather than because of anything else particularly noteworthy about them. By contrast, the user implies that life on the internet is more of a meritocracy where gender should play no particular role in how people respond to you. Accordingly, when women try to draw attention to their gender online, they are trying to cheat the system and receive a certain type of preferential treatment on that basis alone; the implication is that people online don’t, or shouldn’t, take kindly to that kind of behavior. This idea of, “there are no girls on the internet” was then morphed into the phrase “tits or gtfo”, with the latter phrase suggesting that if women want to call attention to their gender, they should just post a naked picture of themselves as an admission that there is nothing else interesting about them and they can’t stand on their own personality and intellect without relying on their gender to support them.
Now this sentiment might strike some people as profoundly misogynistic, perhaps owing to the manner in which it is expressed. At it’s core, though, it seems to be a rather egalitarian idea: gender shouldn’t matter when it comes to how people interact with each other and preferential treatment on that basis should be done away with. The reason I’m discussing this sentiment is to contrast it with another perspective I’ve come across recently; one that suggests women aren’t welcome on the internet. This perspective holds that women online – and offline, for that matter – are subject to disproportionate amounts of harassment simply because they are women, rather than owing to any kind of behavior they enact or things they say. These two perspectives seem to be at substantial odds with one another with respect to one critical detail: do people like women for being women, or do people hate women for being women?
Obviously, the question is too simplistic and paints the issues with far too broad of a brush to be a meaningful one, but let’s try to answer it anyway; just for fun. To answer such a question one needs to begin with some kind of standard as for what counts as appropriate or inappropriate treatment. Let’s return to the Fappening as an example. Some posts on Jezebel.com find it appalling that certain sites won’t take down the nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, citing concerns for the privacy and sensitivity of the women in question as the justification for their being removed. Other posts suggest that it is good that charitable donations motivated by the Fappening are being refused, because the money isn’t coming from the right places. Now that we know Jezebel’s stance on the matter of respecting people’s privacy, we can turn to their sister site, Gawker.com (both sites are owned by Gawker Media). Gawker seemed more than happy to take a stand against respecting people’s privacy by previously posting links to the Hulk Hogan sex tape, suggesting that “we love to watch famous people have sex” and are not terribly troubled by the fact that Hogan was secretly filmed and did not want this video to be released; they were so unimpressed by Hogan’s complaints, in fact, that they tried to refuse to comply with his request to have it removed.
Sure, the situations are a bit different: Jennifer had her privacy breached by people breaking into her online account, whereas Hogan was covertly and unknowingly filmed. While I can’t say for certain whether the writers at Jezebel would be totally happy with someone filming himself having sex with Jennifer without her knowledge and releasing the tape despite her protests, my inclination is to think they would condemn such actions. Also, to the best of my knowledge, no one has claimed that whoever released the Hulk Hogan tape “loathes men” and “wants to punish men just for existing”, though some have suggested this as being the motivation for the Fappening pictures being stolen, just substituting “women” for “men”.
“The only conceivable reason to want to see her naked is because you hate women…”
Though not conclusive by any means, these two cases suggest that it’s plausible that the same behavior directed at, or enacted by, men and women will not always be met with a uniform response. Maddox, over at The Best Page In The Universe, recently put out a new article and video outlining other instances of this kind of double stand with respect to comic book characters; a topic which I have touched on before myself with respect to both superheroes and Rolling Stone covers. In the video, Maddox shows, quite clearly, that Spiderman and Spiderwoman have been depicted in almost identical poses on the cover of comics, but the female version was apparently perceived to be overly sexualized and an embarrassment by some, despite the male version apparently never being noticed. There’s also the research I’ve covered before suggesting that women appear to get reduced sentences for similar crimes, relative to men, if you’re looking for something less anecdotal.
Now none of this is intended to generate some kind of competition over whether men or women, as groups, have it worse. Rather, the point of this analysis is to suggest that men and women, on the whole, tend to have it differently. There are relatively-unique adaptive problems that each sex has tended to face over our evolutionary history, and, as such, we should expect some differences in the psychological modules possessed by men and women. This can cause something of a problem when it comes to discourse regarding whether, say, women are facing a disproportionate amount of harassment online, because what counts as harassment in the first place might be perceived differently; we are all swimming in seas of subjective perceptions that our minds create, rather than bringing them in from the outside world in some kind of objective fashion. What is “threatening” to one person might be innocuous to another, depending on the precise nature of the stimulus and of the mind perceiving it.
For instance, Amanda Hess references an uncited study that found “accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.” Why are “sexually explicit” and “threatening” messages grouped together in that sentence? Well, if the results of Clark and Hatfield’s classic 1989 study are any indication, it’s likely because women might perceive a good deal of unsolicited sexual attention as unpleasant or harassment. However, men might receive that same sexual attention as pleasant and welcome. It is also likely that women will receive a lot more unsolicited sexual attention from men than men will from women, owing the minimum requisite biological costs to reproduction. Grouping “threatening” or “harassment” in the same category as “propositioning” strikes me as precisely the type of thing that can lead to disagreement over how much harassment is going on online. (I think this study is what Amanda is referring to, in which case “feeling horny?” counts as a threatening or sexually explicit message; it’s certainly one of those things, anyway…)
This is a somewhat long-winded way of suggesting that men and women might, and likely do, tend to both perceive the world differently and expect to be treated in particular fashions. If people expect some standard of treatment they are not receiving, they might come to perceive the treatment they get as being overly hostile, unwelcoming, or unfair even if they receive the same treatment as everyone else. This point works just as well for people reacting to the treatment of others: if I expect you to get a certain level of treatment and you don’t, I might try to come to your aid and condemn others for how they behaved on your behalf. That’s not to say that people are, in fact, getting equal treatment in all cases regardless of gender (they often don’t); just to point out that our perceptions of it might differ even if they were.
I’m not saying that such treatment isn’t hostile either; plenty of treatment people receive online is downright threatening, from death threats, to abuse fantasies, to plain old public shaming and ridicule. I’ve received a series of what one might consider abusive messages from strangers online after winning a game we were playing, and that was only after 30 seconds to five minutes of interacting without even talking in a recreational activity; an experience not unique to me by any means. One could imagine that the frequency and intensity of this abuse increases substantially as one becomes more publicly known or begins voicing controversial opinions widely (like calling an entire subculture bigoted or not supporting dedicated servers for your FPS).
“Thanks for your thoughtful message, XxXx420NoScopeFgtxXxX”
In fact, one very reasonable suggestion is that the vitriol present in some of the harassment people receive online is designed specifically to get a rise out of the person receiving it; it’s the M.O. of the internet troll. When it comes to women receiving harassment, for instance, we might expect that women receive particular types of abuse because women tend to be most bothered by it, but they do not receive abuse because they are women. The goal of those sending the abuse is not to make some kind of social or political statement about an issue or express contempt for an entire gender; it’s just to get under someone’s skin. However, when a different group is being targeted for harassment, the content of the harassment should be expected to shift accordingly.
A good example of this would be 4chan’s trolling of the MMA fighter War Machine (which, I am told, is now his legal name): when users on 4chan found out that War Machine’s father had died after his son’s unsuccessful CPR attempt, they began to tell War Machine he had killed his father (on the anniversary of the death, I would add). This harassment didn’t take that form because people hate those who perform CPR, fathers, MMA fighters, or men more generally; it only took that form because it was what people thought would get the best rise out of him. Judging from the subsequent self-inflicted injuries War Machine documented publicly, the attempt was pretty successful.
“That’ll show ‘em…”
However, just like the immediate point of many trolling comments is to upset others, rather than to make some honest statement, the reactions people have to online harassment should be expected to be every bit as strategic as the trolls themselves, even if not consciously so. Just like the Gawker sites don’t appear to be consistently concerned with privacy (“Yes” with respect to Jennifer, “No” with respect to Hogan), and just like people don’t perceive Spiderman and Spiderwoman to be equally sexualized despite near identical poses on their covers, so too might outrage over online harassment not be evenly spread between targets, even if the harassment itself is quite similar. So, whether the internet is a place of general equality with respect to gender or hostility towards women depends, in no small part, on what kind of treatment people are expecting each gender to receive.
That said I wouldn’t want to accuse any person or group of over-reacting to the harassment they receive just for being them; I’m sure that harassment is particularly unique, and evidence of a widespread bias against you and your friends.