A blog like this cannot avoid commenting on the case of Caroline Criado Perez who has received rape and violence threats, and insults via Twitter after she campaigned successfully to have a picture of Jane Austen on new UK banknotes. Neither the very proper and long dead Jane Austen, or symbolic pictures of the great and good on banknotes, spring to mind a something likely to trigger anti-feminist and misogynist venom. Nor was this venom a one off event – an odd ‘weirdo’ behaving strangely. Women who came out publically to support Criado Perez, and criticize people who use online spaces to abuse and threaten women, such as the MP Stella Creasy then also got threatened. It was even reported that Del Harvey one of Twitter’s directors has in the past had to deal with rape threats. One horrible conclusion seems to be that the reduction in sexual threats and harassment on the streets and in our workplaces has not stopped people imagining it and taking it to online spaces where many people seem to feel that it is permissible.
It has also been a surprise that Twitter’s response: to create a ‘report abuse’ button to try and stop this kind of behaviour has been criticised by many liberals some, of whom are women, as media censorship; a restriction on free speech. As if threats and abuse are not antipathetic to free speech, which they clearly are since their intent is to intimidate others to stop their speaking or acting in certain ways. And women in particular.
Last year I blogged about research by Lisa Nakamura from the University of Michigan who argued that digital culture was one of the main environments where young men learned to perform a particular kind of extreme misogynistic masculinity, under the label of ‘trash talk’ . Her paper suggested that there was a growth of trash talk, and an increased acceptance of ‘trash talk’ rather than any diminution effect that might be produced by improved behavior in the fleshy world. A recent Guardian item followed the twitter abuse story with one on the extreme and accepted nature of this kind of abuse in the online gaming world.
This is a particular issue for those of us engaged in online education. As we move to using informal social media, and mass online open courses, with little teacher/instructor moderation, we need to find ways to stop trash talk coming in and intimidating the women in our learning spaces. Because if Lisa Nakamura is correct- come it will. The young men joining us to learn will have been socialized into using trash talk in their other online environments and many young women will have come to accept its occurrence. But that won’t make it acceptable, just hard to tackle as a gendered abuse of power.
