Fear as a Way of Life: Why Women In Comics Don’t ‘Just Report’ Sexual Harassment

[daredtowork]

11. The Methods to Shut Women Up are Routine

For women the worst thing is they are so easy to recognize. You can see it coming a mile away. But pointing it out doesn't matter because everything around you is structured to enable men to shut women up when they try to talk about misogyny.

I can boil it down to 3 basic steps. You see this same approach used anywhere "men in packs" can be mobilized: Wikipedia, Reddit, various forums.

Scenario: woman makes a comment men want to shut down - probably about misogyny.

1) Men adopt an intellectually-superior pseudo-rational posture. They say their views are objective/neutral/scientific and then demand women meet the standards they set out in order to disprove the male POV which has been posited as supreme. The woman is expected to buckle under and self-censor from sheer awe at male argumentative prowess.

2) If the woman doesn't bow to cheap rhetorical tricks, the man then invites friends and attempts to bully with numbers. If it's an editing site, an "editing war" ensues. If it's a voting site, the goal is to vote down the woman so her comment gets hidden. On a forum, the goal might just to be to overwhelm the woman with so many negative comments that she will feel unpopular, so therefore she must be wrong.

3) If the woman still hasn't been subjugated by the first two tactics, men seek to game the system. They look for exploits and obscure rules that they themselves don't follow. They trick other people into enforcing the rules for them. This used to be an egregious problem on Wikipedia where there are a LOT of obscure rules, and the game was to trick an admin to lock the article on your last edit.

Why are the above problems misogyny? Can't women do these things, too? Women aren't perfect. Women can certainly do mean, sneaky, and manipulative things.

I would argue, though, that it is mostly men that coordinate the above efforts as "pack" activities and view exploiting the system as a legitimate way to "win". I have never seen any of the above done by groups of women. I have a further argument about where men get acculturated to these practices, but I'm not allowed to make it here since these very practices have already been used against me.

As I said, EVERYTHING is structured to disallow women to do anything about it.

And, yes, it is very frustrating to be called "paranoid" and "defensive" when you're actually a very level-headed person and know exactly what's going on.