Online harassment and Cyber Mobs

Woman on the Internet encounter harassment online every single day, just because they make a public profile online. This is becoming more and more common, and happens a lot to online streamers, Bloggers and politicians. The fact that this happens mostly to women, it makes is very discriminating.

Anita Sarkeesian posted her speech on the website ‘’ Feminist Frequency’’ in December 2012. She launched a campaign where the object was to look at how women outstand in the world of video gaming. A bunch of male gamers weren’t too exited about this. They took it further and created an online hate campaign against Anita Sarkeesian. The issue of online harassment of women is pretty big. In an other article, ‘’Online harassment of women is a problem. Here’s what to do about it’’1, written by Timothy B. Lee, he writes about a woman who has experienced online harassment. A woman named Amanda Hess has got a lot of tweets from angry men. ‘’(…) Someone going by the name ‘headlessfemalepig’ had sent me seven tweets…. ‘’Happy to say we live in the same state. I’m looking you up, and when I find you, Im going to rape you and remove your head’’ ‘’. Hess was feeling terrified and embarrassed for being scared. What is the purpose of harassing women? Is it because the ones who hares women think we are weak and we just deserve it? Well, this tweet was a threat and Amanda Hess dialed 911. Even though we all know that threats of violence are illegal, the online harassments in the form of treats, isn’t a priority for the police departments. The online harassment is just as serious as a sexual harassment at a workplace. But the problem is, the harassment in a workplace has a higher priority than harassment on the Internet. The police will not do anything about it. It doesn’t make a difference whether the harassment is online or at a workplace. The women are offended in the same way in both situations.

Timothy B. Lee writes, ‘‘the problem is that police and prosecutors haven't made it a priority to prosecute those who make threats online. If people who wrote this kind of thing started winding up in jail, it would make the Internet a little more hospitable for our mothers, sisters and daughters.’’ The perpetrators should really learn from their mistakes, but no one does anything about it and they can just keep harassing women. The Internet isn’t safe for the

1 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-­‐switch/wp/2014/01/07/online-­‐harassment-­‐ of-­‐women-­‐is-­‐a-­‐problem-­‐heres-­‐what-­‐to-­‐do-­‐about-­‐it/ female users, they are too afraid. What if one of those perpetrators really made their threats physical, what would happen? The harassment is too real. But I believe the fact that when a perpetrator threatens a woman online and then physically harassing the woman afterwards, the police would see it as a high priority. It’s wrong that only the physical crimes are taken serious, but the crime and harassing on the Internet doesn’t mean a thing to the government or the forces of law and order. The online harassing is just wrong.

‘’And Congress had good reasons to exempt intermediaries such as Twitter from liability for the vile comments of their users’’. Of course the intermediaries shouldn’t be blamed for the harassment on their social website, but I do think that they should take care of the victims. They can’t just ignore the harassment of the female users; they should really do something about it. The intermediaries should delete or ban the perpetrators instead of letting them harass women every single day. How can a social website accept it? It is supposed to be safe to be on the social network and women shouldn’t be harassed, just because they use their freedom of speech to express something. Why aren’t men being harassed when they say something that might offend people? Simply because they are men. They obviously have more right to say something than women has.

If you take a look at how Anita Sarkeesian engages her audience, she does it in different ways.

In the video of her talking to her audience, she shows picture slides all the way through the speech. The first one she shows is of her sitting in her living room playing a videogame. She has been playing since she was 10. ‘’This is a photo of me at age 10 playing Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo, so I’ve been playing games for quite a while’’ The picture indicates that it’s totally normal for a girl to play a videogame just as it is for boys. As Anita says ‘’games have lots of positive benefits as well.’’ But her problem was, that in all these videogames the women are shown as ‘’sexually objectified, stereotyped and downright oppressive portrayals of women in any medium’’. She shows a picture of the sexually objectified women, to show ‘’non-­‐gamers’’ what she actually means and to show how women are portrayed. It’s used as her ‘proof’. That’s why she started the fundraising campaign, to look at the way women are represented.

The most conspicuous way she engage her audience, is by showing a slide with all of the harassment messages she received and all the threats. She wants to show her audience how outrageous the men and their messages can be. That’s her pathos. It makes us sympathize

with her and it kind of reveal an inner rage, but then again I think it’s a feeling of unintentional rage because we don’t now how it feels to be harassed if we haven’t experienced it. But her way, by using photos of all the violent and harassing messages, we read and understand the problem of the harassment and how horrible and awful it must feel to be harassed. She also shows a slide of the game that some of the perpetrators has made. It is again to show how outrageous it is and how far people actually go, to stop what they think is wrong. Anita also engages her audience by asking questions and answering them, to explain how their game works. She wants people to understand how the perpetrators work together and how they search for acknowledgement by showing off what they did to harass a woman.

As Anita Sarkeesian says: ‘’We can kind of think of this as an informal reward system where players earn ‘’internet points’’ for increasingly brazen and abusive attacks. Then they would document these attacks, and they would bring them back to the message boards as evidence to show off to each other – kind of like trophies or achievements’’

At the end she tells the audience about her own ‘achievements’, to show people how important it is to keep going strong and fight till you reach your goal, even though there’s a lot of people who would like to get you down. She tells that she raised 25 times what she asked for and that 7000 individuals contributed to make her project bigger and better. Even a lot of gamers are fed up with the way women are being treated and they speak up.

Her project started out to be just a little fundraising project to be a full time endeavor.

To keep fighting and to keep going strong is her message of her speech. In the end of her speech she says: ‘’Every day I am encouraged by the women who persevere, who continue to engage, and who refuse to be silenced. I truly believe that if we work together, we can create a culture shift where women, without fear of intimidation, without fear of threats or harassment, can be full and active participants in our digital world.’’ In this quotation, the message of the speech is clearly shown. Her goal and message is for women to be strong, ignore the harassment and live without fear. If all the women work together, they can support each other against misogyny and still be active participants in the digital world. It is a online fight being fought and the perpetrators are not going to win. The women should fight until they are