Re:Speaking up
by RyanMcGreal on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @06:54AM
(#5170183)
Please, please, please take the blinders off. This is unambiguously a misogynist attack that follows a painfully well-established pattern of targeting and harassing women online - a pattern that nearly every single woman who has a significant online presence experiences.
Please, please do some reading on this - it's not hard to find reports and analyses of online woman abuse, and it's not hard to recognize the recurring themes and motifs, which prominently include image-based harassment.
Please take your blinders of. This attack follows the well-established pattern of targeting and harassing anyone online -- a pattern that nearly everyone with a significant online presence experiences.
That the perpetrator uses the most effective means available doesn't make the attacks misogynist, just because the target is a woman and the means is sex. That's like saying that choosing a knife to stab someone to death is obvious knife-ist behavior by the perpetrator. It's the misogynism of society and culture as a whole that is responsible for this; whether the perpetrator is misogynistic in excess of the culturally given amount is a question that we cannot answer based on the evidence.
This whole jumping to conclusions is just a bit much for me.
Couldn't she just as well be targeted because she rejected some nerd who had a crush on her? Or even by another woman who is jealous of her?
That obviously doesn't make the actions any better, but seems a more plausible motivation to me than "a random guy running a smear-campaign against a random woman, only because she's a woman".