
Code Like a Girl: Harassment of Our Authors Is Not OK - DinahDavis
https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/harassment-of-our-authors-is-not-ok-f0266d21f460#.sw8x46v1e
======
6stringmerc
Being a person who worked to attain an English degree, I like to think I take
the meaning of words with a bit of seriousness that might otherwise be
considered going overboard. It's natural to be a critic, and, in turn, be open
minded to other people's thoughts, positions, and logic.

What the linked article describes, in linguistic terms, is not harassment. At
least not without examples. Harassment is a specific type of human interaction
- it's negative, very much so. While there may have been actual harassment of
the young author, what was quoted is not a description of harassment.

In plain English, the quote says "I received contacts by people I'm not
comfortable being in contact with" and that is, to me, a worthwhile concern to
have as a young person engaging in the online realm. Be it social,
professional, or otherwise. When I had a dating profile that said "Not
interested in under XX age or if you have children" and I got contacted by
people who were in one of those categories, that's not really harassment - it
could've potentially gotten to that point if I had responded or said some kind
of derogatory comment - but it's a social interaction.

Writing online or in any public forum is a form of attention seeking. The
internet is, after all, a communications platform at its root. However, this
article frames unsolicited contact on open internet platforms as harassment,
and that is not fair to the English language.

I'm not clamoring for specifics, nor disputing that the interaction(s) may
have been uncomfortable. If there was legitimate harassment, that's a valid
point and should not be cheapened, and an example, or "comments of a ____
nature" would simply be helpful. I've had my fair share in real life and
online. What I am a stickler about is using loaded words inappropriately,
because it does a disservice to everyone involved: It misleads readers and it
brings the author's motive for such word selection into question. It hurts an
otherwise constructive dialog.

~~~
mgleason_3
Exactly. What is clear is that the young person did not want the attention. So
for Dinah Davis to write another article grinding her axe seems rather
insensitive.

And then to jump to "I am beyond angry and disgusted that this has
happened."?!? Based on what?!?

Could it be that her parents saw the posts and asked their daughter to put a
stop to it? Would you still be "angry and disgusted"?

Maybe she's from a culture where its not OK?

Or, maybe she just didn't feel comfortable with it and very politely asked to
delete it. And instead it was turned into something more.

~~~
DinahDavis
I did consider that and thought about whether or not I should post. I knew
that posting would bring more attention to it, but I also felt that by not
posting I was allowing things like this to continue and that is not ok. I felt
there was value in standing up for someone who decided to write for our
publication, and was approached in an unwanted way. At least this way there
are thousands more people that are aware that situations like this happen.In
the future, we will try to protect our young posters against this by
anonymizing their content.

~~~
6stringmerc
That last sentence is a really good, solution-oriented and reasonable
approach. In reflecting on this post-post I recalled how ZeroHedge would use a
'default' name (Tyler Durden) for posts. If one could be used for "Voice From
A Young Person" or something to that extent, I think that can be a good outlet
and ring-fencing of personal information. Good luck!

------
diggan
Maybe the article is missing some information, but why wouldn't older people
be allowed to talk to young people? I'm relatively young (24) and for my
entire life, I've been talking with old people to gain knowledge. Why wouldn't
this be ok?

~~~
maqr
The post is tagged "sexual assault" by the publisher, so I assume there was
some sort of lewd messages. That would make it not ok.

It is really hard to tell from the article if there was criminal behavior by
members of our community targeting an underage girl or if she got a bunch of
followers that happened to be older men and freaked out.

I think that's an important distinction. We all know it's not ok to solicit
underage people. I'm not sure if it's still ok for older people to talk to
younger people.

~~~
diggan
There is no mention of "sexual assault" or even "sexual" in the submitted
story, not sure where you get that from.

"unwanted attention" simply means (for me at least) that someone gave you
attention, that you didn't expect. I would assume that people expect that to
happen when you write in a public place and also submitting it to places like
HN and elsewhere.

If this really is about "sexual harassment" and not saying "Hi, cool story"
via Twitter, then I can understand the frustration and it's obviously not ok.

But the article doesn't make this clear and I don't want to make the
assumption either...

------
elgabogringo
Creepy guys send unsolicited messages to girls on the internet... How is this
worthy of a blog post or an upvote?

~~~
bvinc
Yeah. It's bad. I feel sorry for her. I can't say I'm surprised. But what am I
supposed to do with this information?

~~~
Zikes
The implication is that HN is to blame, since there were some "negative
comments" on here. (Un)fortunately the majority of those comments seem to have
been deleted[1] so there is no opportunity for us to review the facts and form
our own opinion.

Without that context, the author's message seems only to be that HN is a bad
place that fosters negativity and sexism.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112888)

------
FussyZeus
No it's not ok, but you're publishing to a worldwide audience and I'm sorry if
this is a tired argument that pro women (myself included) people are tired of
hearing, but there are ALWAYS going to be a certain subset of creeps you have
to deal with. Believe me it's a privilege to be male that the vast majority of
males don't fully appreciate, myself included until very recently, that we
don't generally have to deal with this kind of garbage, but I genuinely can't
envision a future where this isn't the case.

That does suck too because I'd love to see more women getting into STEM,
especially coding.

~~~
atrophying
Speaking as an lady old fart on the Internet, it wasn't nearly this bad 15, 20
years ago. I've spent literally decades in some of these Internet communities,
and the level of disrespect women receive on the Internet has skyrocketed in
the past 10 years. Used to be that shit like doxing was incredibly rare; now
it's an everyday occurrence and has to be factored into most women's social
media.

There's also a lot to be said for standing up and saying, "hey, this isn't
okay behavior." Because it won't change unless this kind of behavior is
brought into the spotlight and their perpetrators left to scurry like roaches.

~~~
FussyZeus
> Speaking as an lady old fart on the Internet, it wasn't nearly this bad 15,
> 20 years ago.

That I will definitely agree with, but the demographics were much different.
Back then the Internet was almost entirely professional companies and
university students. Now it's literally everyone, and that means you get
roughly the same ratio of shitty people to normal people, amplified by the
fact that all you need to start a twitter account is an email address.

I get that a lot of people have issues with Facebooks real name policy, but
forgetting the problems than transgender folk have with getting Facebook to
let them use the name they want, it has done a great deal to curb harassment
on that platform.

IMHO you can have a good community, you can have an anonymous community, but
with regular people in the mix you can't have both.

