I think you're being a bit overbroad in speaking for all women (that's the kind of thinking which leads to sexism in the first place). Frankly the 'consequences' here are receiving a bunch of unsavoury PMs. i.e., there are no real-world, physical, dangerous consequences. So the fear of contributing to a community because of it is unfounded. It's just a side-effect of Internet culture, and it happens to men too.
The author received private messages saying that someone jerked off to a picture of her at a conference and also photoshopped pictures of her full of blood.
Those sorts of messages -- even in isolation -- have real-world, often physical, consequences. This attitude that sexual harassment is only harmful if it's a physical assault needs to go back to the 1950's where it belongs.
>Those sorts of messages -- even in isolation -- have real-world, often physical, consequences.
No, in the vast majority of cases they don't. Trolls gonna troll, sorry. I'll bet we can count on one hand the number of times Internet death threats have led to actual deaths.
There's a reason authorities don't investigate or prosecute stuff like this.
>This attitude that sexual harassment is only harmful if it's a physical assault
Sorry, what? How is a death threat sexual harassment?
I don't know how to respond to your assertion that receiving violent messages on a regular basis is only harmful if there's a credible threat of follow-through.
It's simply not normal to have to read email threatening you or making sexually harassing statements. No one should have to put up with that. The fact that you seem to think that this is normal is deeply concerning to me. If you regularly receive harassing messages, that's not okay and I'm really sorry. I'm really glad that you're apparently able to handle that without lots of mental anguish, but it's not something we as a society should shrug off.
> How is a death threat sexual harassment?
Please read the linked post. If you can't find the instance of sexual harassment in the author's blog post... god help you.
You're trying to move the goalpost here, and folks are right to not let you do it.
If you think abusive behavior is OK, show some courage of your convictions and just say it outright. Don't sit here playing word games that make you look like a coward.
I don't think abusive behavior is OK, I just don't think Internet PMs or e-mails even register above 1 on the 10-point scale of things that are abusive. Sexual assault at a conference is reprehensible and must be dealt with; abusive private messages are an uncomfortable consequence of participating in an anonymous distributed network.
If someone sent you an email every day from different email addresses with the same text saying they were going to rape and murder you, and included your home address, pictures of your family and pictures of weapons, that wouldn't bother you?
How do you know there are no real-world consequences? You're just gonna assume it's some 14-year-old kid trolling you and not one of the many insane people in this world who might actually do something? Based on a hunch?
The day I seriously worry about a 14-year old internet wanktard harassing me in my home is probably also the day that I go to jail for blowing away said internet wanktard because they were unlucky enough to threaten me in my home whilst I was there.
>You're just gonna assume it's some 14-year-old kid trolling you and not one of the many insane people in this world who might actually do something? Based on a hunch?
Based on evidence and reasoning through probability. Thousands of Internet trolls send tens of thousands of death threats every day. On a given day, the probability that even one of those death threats is acted upon is a sliver greater than zero. As in, maybe there are one or two cases per year worldwide where a troll brigade carries out some real-world action corresponding to its threats. Though even that, I suspect, is an overestimate.
Wow, completely insensitive to reality. Photoshopped photos of blood and so on represent serious intimidation. Which one is the troll and which is the one who follows through, finds your address and makes it physical?
I would say that death threats can have very real-world consequences, and if I were to receive them the real-world consequence would be that I would be scared for my life. You tell me how that isn't the real world..
> It's just a side-effect of Internet culture, and it happens to men too.
This is false-equivalence horseshit. It may also happen to men, but it happens a couple of orders of magnitude less. I've spoken at a number of conferences and never received anything like this. If you talk to prominent men and women in tech about their experiences, they get radically different levels of abuse.
Also, Internet culture is not something that has been going on for thousands of years. It is entirely new. So either a) this should be a pretty easy fix, or b) it's actually part of something bigger than "Internet culture".
I don't know who you're talking about and curiously neither does Google. This comment appears to be the only mention of 'Val Adams' to ever appear on HN.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're above making up names in hopes that nobody will check your references. Could you provide a link detailing whatever incident you're talking about involving Val Adams?
