
Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online - jimsojim
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/21/a-woman-violinist-exposes-10-years-of-lewd-fetishizing-messages-from-men-online/?tid=sm_fb
======
6stringmerc
What a terrible experience, yet I'm not surprised to know such things happen.
I hope it's theraputic for her to get these out, and if she can turn the
intimidation into some financial gains then so be it. Is there a way to
discourage the behavior? It's a tough problem.

As an anecdote, I just had a discussion with a female community college
professor, PhD, one who had plenty of bench science experience before
teaching. We are both born and raised in the US. Without naming specifics
here, we both agreed that while US culture has made attempts - and is making
attempts - to grow past gender subujation, there are numerous other cultures
which aren't even trying.

We noticed the cultural issues regarding women can be very obvious in a US
educational environment. As in, for a woman to be in a position of authority,
certain cultures behave in ways which do not acknowledge the earned, official
status. I believe the phenomenon is real, and is a day-to-day reflection of
what the violinist was exposed to in private. Also, it's one thing in person -
but the internet allows for all sorts of 'border crossing' and people from all
over the world are capable of reaching out and harassing someone, male,
female, or otherwise.

In summation, I think US culture is attentive to a lot of 'weak points' that
need to be addressed (gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, handicaps),
as difficult as they are for a diverse society...while some others are, well,
really lacking in this arena. Like I said, I'm not going to name any one
particular one or five, because it's not my place - it's up to the members of
those cultures to enact their own change.

~~~
bsenftner
Great comment, not sure why it was down voted. Cultures outside the US are
often surprising.

~~~
msie
Because it comes off as being slightly smug?

~~~
unprepare
Personally, I feel that downvotes should only be used for comments that do not
add anything constructive to a conversation.

I don't see how a downvote contributes constructively to the thread in this
situation.

------
joopxiv
I like that she doesn't censor the 'authors' of the messages. Public shaming
might be the only remedy against this creepy shit. But that may very well be
naive thinking: if these guys would think they were doing something wrong they
would probably have used an alias.

~~~
mulander
Would be funny if they experience harassment out of being exposed as a
harassing person. This seems something that could happen on the internet.

~~~
aikah
> Would be funny if they experience harassment out of being exposed as a
> harassing person. This seems something that could happen on the internet.

Yeah, the whole vendetta thing certainly is "funny" /s

That's exactly how people defending "righteous causes" end up being trolls and
harassers themselves.

~~~
benten10
>That's exactly how people defending "righteous causes" end up being trolls
and harassers themselves.

When one misuses their abilities to harass/intimidate others, _some_ of their
liberty should be taken away, wouldn't you agree?

------
daleharvey
> There's nothing we can do

Yes there is, the first thing would be to not attempt to dismiss it

> "of course there will be some bad apples."

Or to victim blame

> Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something
> similar?

People facing similar harassment are all women, telling them to hide certainly
isnt the answer

(apologies, was supposed to be a reply to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425590),
I cant internet)

------
szukai
Glanced over quickly, some are more crude attempts to "flirt" than to creepy,
but I guess that just goes with the status quo given the complaints girls get
on dating sites like Okcupid.

Kinda cool to see it all at once I guess?

~~~
dbg31415
Let me throw this out there too...

I had a conversation with a friend after finding pictures of his girlfriend on
OK Cupid. I was like, "Hey either your girlfriend is trying to cheat on you,
or someone is stealing her identity." He laughed, and said (paraphrased), "No,
she kept complaining about how she didn't feel attractive, so we posted an
account there for her to get some more attention. We read the comments
together and she gets a confidence boost knowing people find her attractive."

~~~
dvdgsng
Thanks for posting this. The whole debate needs a lot more counter-
perspectives and this is a pretty good one.

Here is another one. [http://theslot.jezebel.com/canadians-elect-guy-named-
justin-...](http://theslot.jezebel.com/canadians-elect-guy-named-justin-as-
their-leader-1737554573) Just imagine the outcry in the feminist community if
the genders were swapped and this had been written by a man about some female
politician.

------
benten10
As some others have noted, this will keep on increasing as more people use the
internet. As internet proliferation amongst less 'inclusive' societies (yes,
even less than HN!)increases, online threat, intimidation and violence against
women and minorities will increase.

The 'social media'/internet presumes a certain 'accepting', inherently
socially liberal order amongst its users. As more and more people who don't
fit that use the internet, there will be greater hate and rudeness and
intimidation in the internet, and the happy-go-lucky we-are-all-one destroy-
the-borders liberal dream will end. The internet will start reflecting the
extremes of our behavior, and it will be ever the scarier for women and
minorities.

It'll be interesting to see the evolution, and how it's handled.

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k__
I read that (deep) learning algos can decide if a message is positive or
negative.

Could they learn if a message is a harassment so we could implement a
automatic filter for such things?

\-- Edit --

I mean this is really bad and we should get these dudes to stop somehow. But
it greatly reduced my anger looking into my inbox, when I stopped seeing spam
in there. The spammers did never stop...

~~~
rabboRubble
That would be a great idea if all messages were not harmful in reality.

Unfortunately, some of those threatening messages are from real world
stalkers. Those need to be seen because the message might be the only clue
that the person has been targeted.

Such threatening messages must not be automatically deleted, rather seen,
saved, and forwarded to the appropriate authorities.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Messaging between people is a complex dynamic system. If stalkers knew their
messages never got received, they'd quit sending them (and perhaps stop
stalking in that way). Obsessing over the messages in sort of feeding the
stalker game.

------
dijit
This is a phenomenon I see a lot on social media honestly.

Go to any tweet of Emma Watson and try to read the replies without cringing.
It's sobering enough to never, ever, ever! wish fame on anybody you love, let
alone yourself.

The internet is a platform of speech for all with no restriction and it only
takes 0.01% of the crazy, batshit or just fanatical people to make it seem
like there is no hope for humanity.

I feel bad for her, being a female may make you feel somewhat less secure (I
can't speak for woman-kind so I could be way off base), while male stars get
the same kind of treatment- they're more likely to feel pretty sure that they
can fend off any depraved attack when their body guards are not around.

For people that are not super rich but have a reasonable amount of spotlight,
this can be the worst of both worlds.

------
bglazer
As is well known, there are lots of people who get some sick pleasure from
announcing their vile and chauvinist thoughts.

"Real names" don't seem to help. I would guess that the senders of these type
of messages are socially isolated enough to not see any real social
consequences of openly harassing people, women in particular.

So, what's the solution? There doesn't seem to be a proportionate response
that life more difficult for online tormentors. Further, any legal response
would be justifiably difficult to reconcile with freedom of speech.

It's just unacceptable in my mind that the current balance of power is so
skewed towards people who harass others online.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
The only solution I could think of would be for confirmed cases of online
harassment (however you determine something to be confirmed, I don't know) to
be sent to the offender's employer, or for something along those lines be a
part of background checks/E-Verify.

You're right, it does seem like the status quo heavily favors abusers and
maligns the abused. I'm sure there are several flaws with my idea. I just
can't think of much else that could change anything without being
extraordinarily invasive or punitive.

------
comrh
The comments I've seen on social media surrounding this article have to be
some of the worst ever, even for internet comments.

------
microcolonel
I don't have any public presence, and yet I get creepy messages as well. I
suspect the volume, ~100 creepy messages per anum, owes to being more visible.

A few of these messages sound aggressive, but most of them seem like lonely
dudes without outlets. Maybe they think they are the first to compliment the
lady.

And, although I'm sure I'll catch flak for saying this; there are in fact
women who get off on all these things[0]. They make up a large part of the
population. I'm not sure about the strategy, but the demographic for these
messages exists.

[0]:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsm.12734/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsm.12734/abstract)

------
devit
This looks like a publicity stunt.

If you selectively present anything you could possibly present in a negative
light and do so without context, you can make anything look bad.

If one were to look at the ratio of such messages to praise and neutral
messages, that would probably paint a very different picture.

Just numerically one can see that 1000 messages over 10 years is only 3
negative messages per day, and someone famous might get hundreds, meaning the
negative ones are a few percent...

It's a bit like collecting all the [dead] comments on HN, presenting them all
at once and then claiming that HN is a terrible community.

~~~
thehoff
Have you read any of the messages she got? Hard to see how many of those were
taken out of context.

I guess getting 3 of those messages a day that she got (over 10 years) is
acceptable? What's the cutoff for being acceptable here so I know when I
should take her seriously.

What about the ones that seem like threats? What about the ones from the
person that was arrested for stalking another woman? When do those count?

------
JDDunn9
Title should read "female violinist".

------
ben_bai
She may be a violinist but she tweets like a sailor.
[https://twitter.com/mia_matsumiya](https://twitter.com/mia_matsumiya)

~~~
whatok
why is that relevant

~~~
ben_bai
it's not. but it's also not relevant that she is a violinist.

------
jbob2000
There's nothing we can do. Her music reached hundreds of thousands of people,
of course there will be some bad apples. As more and more people start using
the internet, this is only going to increase. There's going to be 3.5 billion
people on the internet soon, nobody can stop that tide.

Celebrities have solved this problem by moving a step away from the population
by using publicists and assistants to communicate. Perhaps people facing
consistent harassment like this should try something similar? Or work under a
pseudonym?

~~~
phkahler
>> Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something
similar? Or work under a pseudonym?

Perhaps we need to get rid of pseudonyms. A lot of this behavior would stop if
people had to be identifiable. Although that doesn't seem to stop them all -
you see some real names and email addresses in there.

~~~
mason240
Then post your name and address.

~~~
phkahler
>> Then post your name and address.

I almost do. You should be able to locate my real world postal address inside
of 10 minutes. Probably 5.

I'm not saying there should be no anonymity online. I think the default should
be identifiable, and sites and services can strip that info and provide
locally anonymous environments. That way you can't get anonymous attacks
unless you're participating in those places. It's easy to strip ID, but hard
to verify it if it's not built-in.

~~~
mason240
So you would require all online activity be done through "identity verifiers"
such as Facebook? You have probably seen how many issues Facebook's Real Name
policy has caused, and that doesn't even come close that level.

~~~
phkahler
No. I would have at least a secure subnet that uses a slice of IPv6 address
space to geolocate - encode lat/long/alt. As one example. So now if you know
where a packet came from, you can walk your ass over there and knock on the
door. I say a slice of the space because things mobile wouldn't work. There
are issue of course, you need to be able to support multiple carriers among
other things. But nobody is even trying to solve the problems around this, and
they won't because nobody from corporations to government agencies wants it to
exist.

------
dbg31415
Look so many things wrong with this.

1) The guys.

2) There is nobody there to verify the guys. I mean... nobody is making sure
the person who posted those pics are the actual people, so now, "Oh hey that
looks like my neighbor, Joe." But we don't know if it was Joe, or someone
pretending to be Joe, or who just looks like Joe, or someone who hacked Joe's
account as a prank. And why this is important... lives get ruined on these
sorts of accusations.

3) The message it sends that "all guys" are just pervert sex monsters who want
to rape cute online girls. If not "all guys" most, or many... anyway the point
is really just that this woman set up a highly public profile, and we have no
idea what percentage of guys who looked at it were douchebags. I'm guessing
it's sub 1%.

So look, anecdotally, some guys on the internet are douchebags. Sure, no
question. But is this the right way to combat it? Meh. Not really.

SOLUTION for reducing the number of comments like these. After midnight add a
drunk captcha to the forms. "You must do math to proceed." Or, "You must use
proper spelling and grammar to send messages to someone you don't know."

