Well, one thing's for sure: women who die for a cause or as heroes sure don't get as much attention

[muriel_volestrangler]

71. The only thing that got this talked about on DU was 'tits' in a thread title

The photos of her, and her apparent removal to a psychiatric hospital, happened a few days ago, which was when the media reported it. Even with the nudity, it's not a particularly big story in the media. No-one bothered putting the story here on DU (I had caught a brief mention on BBC radio, but I didn't see it as worth remembering to find online and link here).

No-one, as far as I can tell, had been posting about Tunisia much in the past month, after mentions of rallies about the killing of the opposition leader (which was early February, and did get several DU threads, though not with many replies). On March 13, we had 2 Tunisian LBN threads: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014423648 http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014423469 neither or which got any replies. A few GD threads have mentioned Tunisia, but nothing specifically about women's rights, or of Islam becoming repressive there.

It was the title of the New Statesman article (an article which has not attracted much attention on the NS website - 19 comments, when I looked yesterday), that got DU's attention. Within 3 minutes of it being posted, there was an SoP alert complaining specifically about the word 'tits' and nothing else. I can't tell if a Community Standards alert was ever sent to a jury or not. Within half an hour, a reply complaining about the use of 'tits'. Within an hour, after that more or less literal 'BatSignal', seabeyond was inaccurately saying it was the 4th thread about it (it was the first), and proceeded to denigrate the women involved, and to blame men as a group. And that was what got the thread, and the subsequent threads, going at full throttle - the attack on the Femen activists. Most people didn't like seabeyond's dismissal of the women as tools of men, or her claim that it was posted 'to put women in their place'.