A lot of you guys are understandably upset, because someone out there is trying to punish you for following a blog that happens to talk about sex and feminism. Trust me, I hear ya. I’ve been feeling slut-shamed and bullied and attacked for years, and what kept me going through all of that were the kind comments and messages that I received from the same type of people who are now being targeted. So I really, really appreciate that there are so many of you being supportive of me and of each other. (Just look at all the folks volunteering for my “skank-army” in my preceding posts!) That said, I don’t expect anyone to be a martyr, and I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with displaying your support anonymously.
If I had the choice two and a half years ago to keep my boyfriend’s identity hidden, then his life and our lives would be a lot easier today. That choice was taken from us, because he was outed on JuicyCampus, and due to that incident (as well as several incidents targeting my friends from college), I decided to stop blogging on SexAndTheIvy.com. When I started this blog, there was a marked difference in content. I mention Patrick and my friends in a purely superficial way, and most of my writing is about feminism. When I write about sexuality, I do so in an academic manner and don’t relate it to my personal life. I make a purposeful effort nowadays to not write anything even remotely intimate about any of my relationships.
I present the above as a cautionary tale. While I wouldn’t have the life and career I have now if I hadn’t experienced the trial-by-fire that is Internet harassment, I wish I could have spared myself the stress and anxiety that resulted from writing publicly about my life. As Tiger Beatdown’s Sady Doyle wrote in response to this debacle:
Before I moved to New York, I made a point of asking a lot of people from New York how to keep myself safe there, what to do and what not to do on the street. They should give girls these tutorials before they move to the Internet. Because it sucks to change your behavior in response to someone else’s bullying, but sometimes, out here where the basics of self-defense are still being worked out, it seems particularly harsh to figure all of these things out on your own.
And by the way, because Sady wrote the above, she was called a “dumb cunt” on an Internet forum where a lot of this harassment is taking place. In the same forum, the female readers who “liked” my post were identified by name and called “cum-guzzling ho”, “whore”, “slut”, and “skank”. The male readers were accused of having Asian fetishes and wanting to fuck me. I’m not linking to any of the above for obvious reasons. While some of you have asserted that you will continue to put your name on comments on this blog, I think it’s hard to predict how you’ll react if you’re targeted, even if you know of the potential consequences ahead of time. (I do appreciate the sentiment, though.) I was very lucky that I encountered an understanding employer and that I now work with progressive publications, but it would be irresponsible to ignore the fact that online bullying campaigns can cause problems in your professional life. (In the most extreme cases, it can force you to leave your job, as Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan did.) And even if your boss doesn’t find out, no one likes to read cruel remarks about themselves, even if they know they’re untrue.
When I say that you shouldn’t demonstrate a modicum of support for this blog unless you are absolutely prepared to deal with being anonymously attacked, I’m not making an understatement. And I’m not writing various frantic blog posts about it because I’m Such A Selfless Blogger!, but because when this type of stuff happened to my roommates and friends and boyfriend and people I knew in real life and really cared about … well, I didn’t have any warning, and neither did they, and it frankly sucked. Of course, we deserve to exercise our right to free speech without fear that someone out there is going to republish the contents of our LinkedIn profile, take a bunch of made-up and out-of-context quotes, and paste our name all over it in hopes that this will prevent us from one day getting a job. I shouldn’t be receiving anonymous emails informing me of my home address. Patrick shouldn’t get emails calling him a rapist. There shouldn’t be an entire blog devoted to misrepresenting every post that goes up on my website.
Unfortunately, we currently live in a society where the above can and does happen. But at some point, law will catch up with technology, and the Internet is going to cease being a Wild Wild West. (JuicyCampus, for one, no longer exists. Vindictiveness and cruelty apparently don’t constitute a viable long-term business strategy.) Until the scum of the net are wiped out, take heart in the fact that your online bullies know they’re fighting a losing battle. They’re willing to out you for what you support and believe, but they’re not willing to out themselves. They know their actions are wrong, and they know that there is no shortage of people willing to tell them that if they were to reveal themselves. So they cower behind a keyboard and fall back on the same old hackneyed sexual slurs and laugh about being so much better than all those “whores”, because as long as they can call us names anonymously and get props from their cyber-friends, they don’t have to confront the fact that no one gives a shit about what they think outside their hateful little corner of the web.
To put this into perspective: they have a Blogspot page full of poorly articulated rants, and I have an entire skank-army. I hope for the former’s sake that the twain shall never meet.
