BayformersInDisguise

Does your book factor in the abuse from women towards women? I find in this discussion it’s often left out that much of the abuse of women, especially intense abuse that spurs suicide, comes from women and it feels like a lot of people who take up your position make it all about male on female hate. In my high school, a girl was driven to suicide by a group of girls on Facebook and then the next week people came in to lecture us on misogyny on the internet as though this girl was driven to suicide by boys and that just never sat right with me.

It’s interesting that you make the point about good faith debate, while I do agree I also think there’s a flipside there which is that female users online are a lot more likely - this is just my anecdotal experience - to conflate good faith pushback with abuse or harassment. I’ve never been reported by a male for having an online argument even if heated but I have been reported by female users for some pretty milquetoast discussions and I do worry if maybe in some cases there’s an issue of over reporting. I do think the sexualised stuff and threats are awful and I wish sites would do a better job of watching out for that, and in their defence a number of sites have limits on when and how you can send images to users.

At the risk of sounding flippant, do you ever hear feedback from women and yourself think “on that you could have just blocked them or logged off”?

Lol - a man’s dirty pen pals posts explicitly for mutual sexual fantasy roleplay doesn’t mean he’s somehow ok with online abuse & harassment of women… nothing on there is harassment or abuse. So why would you link them to this question? Come to think of it, why would you see my question and think “better check into this person’s history”? Weird

It’s an MRA position for me to want people to accurately address harassment against women?

I’m pretty sure the MRAs would say “if it bothers you so much, leave”. I didn’t say that. I just asked if OP had info on who does the abuse & to what extent. I have no idea how you’re at a point in your life where you think that me wanting to address all sources of harassment against women makes me an MRA. OP herself even acknowledged mine was a valid point

Nope, I wasn’t doing that at all. I want online abuse to go away and it’s hard to do that if you have people who only acknowledge it from one direction, which fortunately isn’t the case with OP, she seemed more down to earth than I’d expected.

Nope, i fully acknowledge that both online and offline men make things unsafe disproportionately for both men and women. I just wanted to put it out there that disproportionate isn’t the same as 100%. Unfortunately there’s an inverse deflection which, as you’re doing, is when people confront any argument that it isn’t entirely men try steering the conversation away to vague allegations that the other person is downplaying it.

If someone talked about drownings and how we needed more lifeguards at the local pool, I don’t think it’s deflecting away from pool drownings for me to ask “do we know how much of it is people drowning in pools and not lakes and rivers too? If we’re allocating resources we might want to know that”.

And as I said it stuck in my crawl how when girls in my high school cyber bullied a girl to death, the school’s response was to discuss misogyny & male abuse against women.