New Map of the Blogsphere

[james_davis_nicoll]

Charting the network of jocks, gadget hounds, political junkies, and porn aficionados



1: Daily Kos, tough on BushCo, soft on death-threats against women (the little darlings).

2: Boingboing. Well, at least it isn't Aintitcool.

3: The lost souls of Livejournal, little-known and too self-absorbed to care. Oooo, a reflective surface!

4: Highly interconnected blogs. The bright dot is Michelle Malkin. Note that when I say "bright dot", the map is not the territory.

5: The pornoverse, almost as peripheral as LJ and if not self-absorbed, definitely focused.

6: The jocks, making their way through the blogosphere with that endearing squinched up expression, like a Neanderthal presented with a laptop.

Comments

[deor.livejournal.com]

Women not only get more threats but especially more of the ugly sexual threats variety, which can get pretty damn scary.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There was a discussion on Crooked Timber in which a female participant (I think it was Belle Waring) told people to cut it out with the stupid racist and sexist attacks on Malkin and Ann Coulter, since it isn't as if there aren't perfectly legitimate ways to attack them. Some way down the thread, one of the male commenters (I think it was John Emerson) argued that while he understood the reasoning, it still seemed like holding back if you couldn't use every weapon in your arsenal against egregiously nasty people, and holding back wasn't something he was fond of.

The thing I don't think he entirely got was the collateral damage to potential allies from this kind of thing. If Ann Coulter says something evil and stupid, which she does approximately seventy times a day, and your response is to make some sexist crack about her Adam's apple, you haven't just attacked Coulter; you've also likely discouraged participation by women who might be sympathetic to your point of view, but don't want to be the object of stupid sex-based attacks over their looks. And that goes 10x for calling someone a whore and issuing rape threats.

[cyperus-papyrus.livejournal.com]

Well said.

Sexist attacks against a woman who says nasty things does not effectively counter what she says and only lowers the attacker to the same level of egregious nastiness.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

As a trans gendered female, my initial response is a T-shirt with Coulter's picture on it and a bar sinister through it with the caption:
"Not One of Us!"
And that's about as far as I go.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Specifically, the threats are scary because so many women feel vulnerable to rape, battery, and other forms of assault.

This sense of vulnerability is partly practical -- we all know someone who has been raped, and many of us have been raped ourselves. It's also partly cultural, since (A) many of us were not taught effective ways to defend ourselves (changing in the yuounger generation), (B) many of us were taught that any rape or assault was our fault, which adds shame and helplessness to the emotional mix, and (C) many of us were taught that boys, physically strong as they are, would be irremediably damaged or destroyed if a female said the wrong words or even beat them at chess, therefore we tend to hold back so as not to shatter a man's delicate ego.

The other cultural component to this is that men tend not to fear rape or assault. Yeah, rape happens -- in jail, of course, but also out of it. I know several men who as adults were raped by women and even more who were raped as children. Although most actual muggings and beatings are male-on-male violence, guys don't seem to take that into account as a possibility -- whereas the calculation of rape probabilities is something many women do constantly and even unconsciously. Or maybe guys just don't talk about the fear.