(SHIRLEY to SHIRLEY)
There have been examples of online harassment crossing the line into physical threats but, thankfully, this is rare. Susan Clerc (p.82) believes that, whilst being significant, such accounts are often exaggerated in the media serving to dissuade women from participating online. Just as women have learned to avoid certain physical public spaces for their own safety, so women avoid certain areas of the internet where they have previously been verbally attacked, have witnessed such attacks or believe attack to be a possibility. As Jacquelin Burgess notes , ‘what is perceived to be real, is real in its consequences.’ (p.116)
Sexually violent postings online are made possible due to the anonymity the internet affords its users and the confusion about what constitutes ‘real’ harassment in the ‘unreal’ space of the internet. Note these comments I found on Youtube,
'I am gonna track down this whores address and ride the fuckin shit out of her..After I am done with her poop will be falling out of her ass because I'll have messed it up so much with my big dick that she will not be able to hold her shit in! Damn she is fine!'
Posted by princiculous, found 10 March 2008
with reference to this Feist video:
and:
'ugliest bitch ever born of a woman_this is the worst song ive ever hear she should probably go fall off a cliff into a pit of used needles'[sic]
with reference to this Peaches video:
'Women, especially, need to discuss and understand the implications of online harassment because it affects our ability to use the medium and, thereby, to take part in something that will only become more important to our freedom. How many women would have voted had polling places been in dark alleys?'
Stephanie Brail (p.143)
These sexually violent descriptions were targeted at one woman because she was deemed attractive, and at another woman because she was deemed unattractive. The aggression appears to be motivated simply by the appearance of 'woman'. It is hard enough to know when harassment in ‘the real world’ should be taken seriously; for instance being flashed at is relatively common but, despite being distressing, seldom reported. In the case of flashing, we know to contact the police and give a description of the perpetrator; but how many of us know how to report online offences like the ones above when we do not know the person's name, face or even location? The difficulties caused by anonymity combined with anti-censorship rhetoric have caused a number of feminist writers to compare the contemporaneous policing of the internet (which seems, ostensibly, left to the individual concerned) to the lawlessness of the Wild West. And that hardly conjures up pictures of fairness and equality.
But we must not think of online anonymity purely as a vehicle for ‘bad men’ to metaphorically jump out of the bushes at ‘vulnerable women’. If we think of the internet as being a place without touch could we then think of it as a place to exercise feminist agency more safely than is possible in the 'real world'? Online harassment may be distressing but does not generally cause fear for physical safety. As Judith Butler writes (p.21),
‘The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence. The body can be the agency and instrument of all these as well, or the site where “doing” and “being done to” becomes equivocal. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine.’
What may be met with violence in the ‘real world’ may only be threatened with violence on the internet; anonymity may give strength to those who wish to do the unfeminine thing and fight back.
