Misogyny, rape culture, racism in relation to journalism, media, and Reddit

[pochercoaster]

So, I found this nice piece about the Reddit fiasco, but just as I was about to post it in the Reddit thread it was closed. So here's a thread wherein we discuss how abusive behaviour exhibited by trolls such as Violentacrez is symptomatic of a greater problem and is not just some individual anomaly.

Well. This discussion got very strange, but I don't think there's a lot of life left in it [...] And from the outset this thread was destined to be a unanimous "Christ, what an asshole" thread, but as stated, got strange.

Firstly I want to say I appreciate the stance that the mods took on this issue and moderated accordingly, but I do think there is actually a lot left to be discussed. This guy is an asshole, no doubt, but why not talk about why he's able to get away with being an asshole, and the various cultural and societal mechanisms that enable his behaviour? I understand that the previous thread sort of devolved into piling onto one person, though, so in response I present this new thread, untainted by said dogpiling.

The article is long, but here are a few quotes. There are multiple links in the article for further information/explanation; I didn't include the links in the quotes:

Trolls are cultural scavengers, and engage in a process I describe as cultural digestion: They take in, regurgitate, and subsequently weaponize existing tropes and cultural sensitivities. By examining the recurring targets of trolling, it is therefore possible to reverse-engineer the dominant landscape.

Consider trolls’ deeply contentious but ultimately homologous relationship with sensationalist corporate media. For example, when trolls court emotional distress in the wake of a tragedy by posting upsetting messages to Facebook memorial pages and generally being antagonistic towards so-called “grief tourists,” they are swiftly condemned — and understandably so. But when corporate media outlets splash the most sensationalist, upsetting headlines or images across their front page, press the friends and families of suicide victims to relive the trauma of having their loved one’s RIP page attacked by trolls (and in the case of this MSNBC segment, by forcing them to read the hateful messages on camera), or pour over every possible detail about bullied teenage suicides, despite the risks of “copycat suicide,” the only objectively measurable media effect, and in so doing slap a dollar sign on personal tragedy, it’s just business as usual. In both cases, audience distress is courted and exploited for profit. Granted, trolls’ “profit” is measured in lulz, not dollars. Still, the respective processes by which these profits are achieved are strikingly similar, and in many cases — which I chronicled throughout my dissertation — indistinguishable.

I am not arguing that members of the media are trolls, at least not in the subcultural sense. I am however suggesting that trolls and sensationalist corporate media have more in common than the latter would care to admit, and that by engaging in a grotesque pantomime of these best corporate practices, trolls call attention to how the sensationalist sausage is made. This certainly doesn’t give trolls a free pass, but it does serve as a reminder that ultimately, trolls are symptomatic of much larger problems. Decrying trolls without at least considering the ways in which they are embedded within and directly replicate existing systems is therefore tantamount to taking a swing at an object’s reflection and hanging a velvet rope around the object itself.

What this means is – to quote Susan Werner (@pyroshy) – if our response to Chen’s exposé is to focus solely on Michael Brutsch, “we’re letting all the systems that enable him off the hook,” and losing sight of the broader culture of complicity in attitudes that lead to extreme cases like Violentacrez/Reddit’s creep culture. In fact, I’d argue that the real story in Chen’s piece is not so much the disclosure of Violentacrez’ identity as it is the culture at Reddit that enabled him – and the parallels to how our culture as a whole produces and consumes sexualized and exploitative images of girls and women.

A related concern is how many commentators seem to consistently confuse the disclosure of Violentacrez’s identity with actual accountability for his harmful behavior (again, thanks to Susan Werner/@pyroshy for elaborating the issues here). Precisely because Brutsch’s actions are part of a broader culture of exploitation, outing him as an individual is not the same thing as addressing misogyny and racism in online media/culture.

[...]

But unmasking Violentacrez is a first, not a final step. The profile of his behavior and the culture that supported him is much more than an occasion to castigate him; it’s an opportunity to turn the mirror on ourselves and our media culture. If we neglect that opportunity and are merely satisfied that a creep was uncloaked, the only benefitted parties here would be Gawker and Adrian Chen, who have another viral piece on their hands and come out looking like heroes despite their own participation in the culture they’re calling out.

This would be a shame – but it’s also precisely what I expect will be the overall outcome of all this.

The bottom line I guess is it would be a mistake to treat this as a story where Redditors are the “bad guys” and everyone else is blameless and good. I say this a lot, because it seems to frequently need saying; we have to look at these issues at a cultural and systemic level if we ever hope to address them substantively.

Blackamazon writes about the connections between doxxing (connecting someone’s online persona[e] to their offline identity), internet mobility, and online cultural capital for people of color and other marginalized groups. That is, the negotiations POC and other marginalized people have to negotiate between the need for safety and privacy and the credit, compensation, and ability to challenge dominant narratives that come with having an established or “real” identity online:

Lili Loofbourow talks about how “free speech logic” applied to creepshots turns girls’ and women’s passive existence into active consent to invasions of privacy while presenting the active decisions of trolls to disseminate images of girls and women without their consent as passive, and also frame the revelation of a man’s name as an invasion of privacy that circulating images of female bodies without permission is not:

Aaron Brady/zunguzungu unpacks the “legal culture” behind objections that outing people like Violentacrez is a violation of “free speech” rights.

So there's some food for thought.

In summary:
-The kind of exploitative behaviour that trolls exhibit online is similar to exploitation in the media.
-So trolling, or rather the exploitative nature behind it, is hardly unique to internet culture, and sprung from a culture that is already overwhelmingly exploitative/anti-consent/victim blaming/abusive.
-In my experience, many people tend to treat online behaviour as some kind of anomaly or idiosyncrasy without real-world implications. It's this idea that the internet does not happen in "real life" and therefore trolls should be immune from consequences.
-Dialogues about people such as Violentacrez tend not to go much further than "wow, what a dick" (if it gets there at all, depending which company you're in...) And while outing an abuser is fine, it doesn't solve the problem that society enables abusers, and if the dialogue is simply left at "wow, what a dick" then we can't expect meaningful change. The dialogue needs to be taken further.
-Trolling behaviour is really just the same old racist, misogynistic shit that's been around forever
-Seriously, posting the name of a pedophile online is an invasion of privacy, but taking pictures of women/girls without their permission and posting them online ISN'T?
-So much victim-blaming and slut-shaming, AUGH.
-It doesn't matter if what Violentacrez did was legal or not; it was immoral. Seriously, the law doesn't give a crap about victims.

[pochercoaster]

On ruining Violentacrez' life.

One point many Violentacrez defenders emphasize is that his life will be ruined by Chen’s decision to expose him. By this they mean chiefly that he will likely be fired and become unemployable thanks to Google searches like the ones you describe. But it’s telling, isn’t it, that these are the terms in which they understand a life to be ruined? People whose photographs are posted online–particularly in the contexts Violentacrez encouraged–stand to have their lives ruined too. Many girls and women have undergone extraordinary suffering (with some, like Amanda Todd, committing suicide) because of these “free speech acts.” But this particular kind of ruination doesn’t count; according to the terms these defenders use, only employability is relevant.

I’d suggest that while of course men and women both value their employability (and the ways in which their names appear in Internet searches), only women stand to have their lives ruined in this other manner, which goes unnamed and unrecognized because a) it happens offline (while bad Google results are visible, it’s much more difficult to point to or describe the dissemination of your body and the consequences, b) it involves “social” as opposed to economic ruin to which men are less vulnerable (unless they’re sex offenders) and c) it only involves female “victims” who are quite easy to blame. If your uncle stumbles on a nude photo you sent an ex-lover on one of the sites he visits and forwards it to family and friends, oh well–you were the agent of your own ruination.

This kind of humiliation doesn’t count according to defenders of internet anonymity; an event only counts as damage if you get fired. Only by discounting this other sort of exposure and denying that it constitutes damage can Violentacrez’s defenders claim that he is a victim and people photographed against their will aren’t. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, and if they find out, BFD.

But this logic is worth chasing too: the reason your life is ruined if your boss fired you over something you did online is that you can’t make money. Your ability to pay for room and board might be compromised, and so you won’t eat, you might not have a place to sleep, etc. Your quality of life goes down in measurable, material terms. Someone psychologically devastated by having their body displayed to thousands of perverts is also quite likely (should they become depressed) to be unable to work, to eat, to sleep. If the criteria for “life ruination” is the inability to support oneself, the endpoints for both hypothetical situations are quite similar.

Two other things: Eric made the point that people in tech are likely to consider Google results more damaging than images, as likenesses can’t be easily Googled. It seems to me that tech folks are the ones most likely to know that facial recognition software is already a reality, and will become more mainstream soon. The distance between a photo and a name was never as great as it seemed, and it’s diminishing daily.

The last point concerns how the different genders are socialized to understand identity and privacy, and it occurred to me as another reason why men might invest more heavily in their name compared to their image than women. Men are socialized to see a name as unchangeable. Women aren’t, as it’s still widely expected that they will change their names when they marry. Their names were never supposed to attach to them as people; the name was a sliding marker intended to index one’s affiliation with a masculine unit. I don’t know if this is still the case, but seven years ago it was much more difficult for men to legally change their names than it was for women to do so. Women have not historically been socialized to wed their identities to their names; quite the contrary.

Thoughts on Free Speech Logic and Violentacrez. There's a quote from this in the previous post, but here's the whole thing.

Two things strike me about the Violentacrez business. The first is how the free speech defense—as applied to posting photos of underage girls and dead underage girls in an explicitly erotic context meant to humiliate and degrade—rests on the logic that “she posted these photos, so they’re fair game.” Posing for photos constitutes an act for which any and all retaliation and “use” is fair, no matter how private their original contexts—including ex-partners circulating erotic photos, including photos taken of women unawares, including men commenting on and masturbating to them. The implication is that posing=guilt, that owning a body and being photographed in it is an action for which reprisals are fair and should have been anticipated before the subject of the photographs did what she did. In contrast, Violentacrez’s activities are framed as passive. All he’s done is circulate existing photos, and “frame” them differently. He has “done” nothing and deserves nothing, whereas women have owned bodies and posed in them. Circulating is passive, existing is active. Chen’s piece highlights how extremely *active* Violentacrez’ practices are, & how specific the intentions. It underlines the malignant intent and removes the passive framing. This stuff takes massive effort.

The second point is the curious stance that circulating photographs of women doesn’t constitute a violation of their privacy because they’re not named. Their anonymity is preserved.

Let me repeat: these are PHOTOGRAPHS. These are the objects police use to identify criminals. These are things that explicitly and routinely constitute evidence. They are precisely the opposite of anonymous—they are vehicles of anti-anonymity. And yet many people in this community bizarrely insist that they are somehow irrelevant, and that posting them is not a violation of a person’s privacy.

Whereas connecting a username to someone’s actual name—not to their body, just to another label, another way they exist in the world—is a MASSIVE PRIVACY VIOLATION.

The implication is that privacy resides in your name, not in your body. If you’re a man with the luxury to think this way, your body is understood as a sort of irrelevant accessory to your name, the thing that really matters. An invasion of privacy isn’t interpreted as a literal invasion. Although they plainly are, men’s bodies aren’t understood as being capable of being penetrated. People with this mentality don’t see a photograph as an invasion of privacy because they don’t experience the image of their bodies as being connected to the privacy that is capable of being violated. Of the genders, one is overwhelmingly more likely to think this way and to conclude—astonishingly—that having a username connected to an actual name is an invasion of privacy whereas a photograph of someone is not.

Creepshots and the self-fulfilling prophecy of free speech. Just pretend I bolded this entire piece because it is excellent.

If “Violentacrez” was seen as a criminal, unmasking him would be universally understood to be a praiseworthy thing to do. Sheltering a criminal is not something anyone defends; what they do, instead, is argue that the criminal in question is not really a criminal, or that the law is unjust. But if you accept the legitimacy of the law, and if you accept that the criminal in question broke it, then there is no virtue to be had in sheltering him. To the extent that you accept that an act is legitimately criminal, in other words, free speech protections do not apply to it. This is a subtle point, but it’s also not that controversial: as the famous “fire in a crowded theater” example demonstrates, “Free Speech” is not and cannot be a blanket protection of all speech, as such, but the right to speak without fear of being prosecuted simply for the communicative content of that speech. If your speech is assault, it will be prosecuted as such; if your speech is conspiracy to commit murder (or god help you, terrorism), it will be prosecuted as such. If your speech is criminal, it is not protected.

By contrast, it is only when you believe that an act is not criminal that prosecuting it, for any reason, will seem like a violation of free speech (as so many people seem to believe). It is only when society has no legitimate interest in regulating, prohibiting, or punishing a particular form of behavior, that it will seem to you that “free speech” protects it. Otherwise, we accept all manner of infringements on speech. It’s just that, on those occasions, we understand that speech to be a vehicle for some other kind of act or violation. In those cases, it isn’t the speech that’s being criminalized, but the act of violence it’s being used to commit.

I’m not interested in what the actual law actually says, however; I’m interested in what this distinction tells us about what we believe to be legitimately criminal, what kinds of behaviors we believe society has a legitimate interest in regulating or prohibiting. This is what people mean when they talk about the first amendment, after all, since Congress is not threatening to make any law prohibiting Adrian Chen from outing a scumbag on Reddit. The argument is about what the law should be. And this is important: the law is one thing, but our legal “culture” (our “should be”) is something slightly different. It’s the way we understand and describe ourselves to have a common social interest in promoting, protecting, or criminalizing something. Legal culture not only describes how and where the actual law is enforced—such that some criminal offenses are treated much more harshly than others—but our cultural beliefs are often part of the process by which the law evolves and changes.

For example, our legal practice around torture and legal due process for brown people changed after 9-11, far less because the actual law changed than because a whole lot of people agreed (even by their silent assent) that it was okay for them to change. “Stop and Frisk” is only legal because a lot of people are okay with it. And so forth. Rape is illegal, but a lot of rapes are, in practice, legalized because the victim wore a short skirt, or got drunk, or was raped by a “nice guy,” or any number of other factors. And when Occupiers slept in tents in public parks, for example, they often did so in violation of the law. A lot of people were appalled to see police using tear gas, riot clubs, and rubber bullets to drive them out, because a ten o’clock camping violation is not the kind of crime that most people see as requiring violent force; at most, it is, and should be, a minor civil infraction. But enough people were okay with seeing dirty hippy occupier anarchist scum getting arrested and beaten for breaking the rules that the police were able to get away with doing it.

Put differently, the point is that law, on its own, is often not really the actual determining factor in determining how “the law” is actually adjudicated. The words might be there on the books, after all, but our culture tells us how to read and interpret them. For a wonderful explication of this idea, see Desmond Manderson’s paper “Trust US Justice: Popular Culture and the Law” or listen to him lecture on it here. Scalia and Thomas might pretend to believe that the law can speak for itself, but they’re either liars or stupid, and I don’t care to argue with either class of person. So put them aside. And whether or not the sorts of things Violentacrez did on Reddit were actually illegal is another question I’m uninterested in trying to answer, for all sorts of reasons, starting with the Victorian moralism and indifference to suffering that informs how laws about obscenity are written.

What I want to observe, then, is simply this: when people invoke “free speech” to defend a person’s right to take pictures of unwilling women and circulate those pictures on the internet, they are saying that it is okay to do so. They are saying that society has no legitimate interest in protecting a woman’s right not to have pictures of her body circulated without her consent. Her consent is not important. If all of the things that Michael Brutsch did, as “Violentacrez,” are protected free speech, then we are saying they are legitimate. Freedom of speech only protects the kinds of speech that some version of the social “we” has determined not to be violent. And by saying that what he did was protected, we are determining that those forms of violence against women are not, in fact, violent. And this matters because something so insubstantial as “culture” has a powerful impact on the actual practice of the law. The more we value a man’s right to violate the integrity of women’s bodies, the more stand behind that as merely “speech,” the less we will understand the violation that such acts always imply and propagate. And the more we think this way, the more invisible these forms of violence become. The more we understand creepshots not to be a violation—and circulating them to be a morally neutral act—the less we will be able to understand women to be people who can be violated, since the mere act of occupying a body that can be photographed becomes the consent required to do so.

[Kim]

Thank you for these posts.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

All of this stuff was said in the old thread but was funnier when we said it.

[shiney]

Well, good thing this subforum isn't about being funny then, mister see you in the discussion forum in a week.

I get that being snarky and smarmy is your thing and in a number of threads that's fab, this subsection is something we are trying to actually clean up though and

[Terex4]

Damn that's a lot of information to digest and comment on

Its almost impressive just how self-centered people are. Many of them actually believe that because they don't recognize the woman in a photo, its somehow anonymous. But this really is just an extension of what we already see all the time. If any one of these people defending this sort of behavior had a compromising photo of themselves distributed online, they would be calling foul from the start.

Originally Posted by pocheros

-In my experience, many people tend to treat online behaviour as some kind of anomaly or idiosyncrasy without real-world implications. It's this idea that the internet does not happen in "real life" and therefore trolls should be immune from consequences.

This is something people really need to wake up to. I don't know how many times I've heard people saying things like "oh no, someone said something on the internet. RAAAAAAAGE" while, at the same time, these same people have friends and/or other relations that they only interact with online, or, you know, let loose a string of slurs and insulted someone's mother because they died in a video game or insulted Harry Potter

So, I think its more of just not being able to understand when something doesn't apply to them with the distance and pseudo-anonymity of the internet to further remove them from those consequences and any reason to feel sympathetic.

[Ecks]

many of the points above are part of why I'm glad I no longer have consistent internet access, why I no longer browse the shitholes (NPF being an exception), and why I've cleaned up my act behavior and thought-process wise.

Creep shots, taking "private photos," etc. and spreading them around without the consent of people who appear in them is wrong, period. Let's take a real-world analogue here:

Let's call our pervert Donny. Donny goes around taking panty shots, and hides by open windows hoping to catch a girl undressing. He then goes around and tries to sell or hand out these photos in public. Does Donny get in trouble for this? Not as often as he should but it is still condemned as wrong, and an invasion of privacy (which isn't even the worst he's done, but we'll start at that) of the girls in question.

Now why is this crap suddenly protected as free speech just cause it's "omg online stuff needs to be PROTECTED! MY RIGHT TO BE A HUGE ASSHOLE ON THE INTERBUTTS WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING IT'S ME IS IN DANGER!"

Personally, I think "online anonymity" is a double edged sword. There are things we should be protected from divulging our identities for... but this privelidge is HORRIBLY abused at the expense of people who deserve better.

Being a dick to someone in public is wrong, but you're accountable for it by everyone around you who speaks up and says "Hey, fuck you, asshole!" So why is it that being at a keyboard while you're being a dick should make you any less accountable for what you're doing?

I dunno, am I just going on about stuff we've already all agreed on or do I have a point here?

[Overcast]

People are odd. The reason that some people don't try to take the conversation of this, even if they don't approve of it, further than very minor disapproval rather than wide view is a matter of minor etiquette. People feel uncomfortable discussing the matter itself and more than frequently react defensively. Not in itself for the sake of the culture as much as their possible place in it.

Inevitably these conversations make someone feel targeted, and sometimes rightfully so if they are indeed an enabler of sorts. This creates an awkward and unpleasant atmosphere as people are discussing an awkward, unpleasant, and painful situation. The growing pains of fixing it are gut-wrenching but ultimately beneficial. Though people don't want that inconvenience. What they want is sweeping instantaneous change so we can just get over it. Though that is obviously not possible. They want someone who rules the world to fight for it while they sit in the background. Though that is obviously not possible. They don't want to spread this uncomfortable feeling to everyone around them, but it is really the only way to make it better. Everyone has to feel the constriction of their bad decisions weighing on them, a large scale fit of guilt and self-hatred.

I know because I myself am still struggling with this issue on my own. Which makes me feel uncomfortable about everything that amuses me, even if people tell me that it is wrong. That makes me feel uncomfortable about my opinions about others, because of the potential problem of it. That makes me feel uncomfortable about myself, because I am not a part of the greater good and don't have that great desire to be. Though I know it would be best.

Don't really have a resolution at this point.

[Solid Snake]

Someone needs to tell me why CNN decided to give this man an audience without at any point writing something to the effect of "This man is a fucking piece of shit and should rot in the deepest depths of hell."

[pochercoaster]

Man, fuck that CNN article. Note how white dudes who are criminals always get humanized in the news- you never hear about any of their crimes without hearing about how hard they worked, how they're parents, or about how they supposedly regret their actions.

I have a problem with every other sentence in that article, seriously fuck that. AUGH.

He was, however, questioned by police because of assertions that he had sex with raped his stepdaughter.

CNN legal contributor Sunny Hostin said she believes the website is hosting "borderline kiddie porn." child pornography- pornography of minors, who are under the age of 18, is not "borderline kiddie porn"

Fixed those.

"Well, I am to some degree apologizing for what I did," Brutsch said. "Again, I was playing to an audience of college kids. And you know, when two years ago, when all of this was at its height, the audience was appreciative and supportive of the sort of gallows humor that I put out there."

Yeah, let's show how remorseful he is! I'm sure he's really sorry for what he did sorry he got in trouble. Also blame it on his supporters/audience.

Also, gallows humour. Like taking pictures of minors without their consent, and blatant misogyny and racism.

Looking back, Brutsch said his actions "were a huge mistake." He claimed he was addicted to Reddit and could not stop himself. The biggest thrill Brutsch said he got "was those meaningless Internet points," earned when "Redditors" voted for his posts.

Note how often white criminals are reported as having addictions or mental illnesses.

Brutsch -- who is married, with a stepdaughter as well as a son and a stepson who are both in the U.S. military -- told CNN he started out posting "mostly soft-core porn," such as "pictures of naked girls, that sort of thing."

Never mention a white criminal without mentioning how they're married and are affiliated with the military to appeal to patriotism and family values.

Days after the Gawker article, Brutsch agreed to talk exclusively to CNN on camera at a hotel room in Fort Worth, about six miles from his home. He said his employer fired him after the Gawker article. He had worked there for seven years.

Poor baby.