slut shaming

Slutshaming and gossipmongering

Eminem played a concert at Slane Castle in Ireland and 63 people were arrested. But the news online was not about the performance or the arrests but about a girl giving a guy a blowjob. She is now being mocked and shamed and has been given the epithet SlaneGirl. Sadly the hashtag #slanegirl is apparently trending in Ireland.

The slut-shaming is apparent with nobody criticizing the men involved, the people who took photos, the people who put photo’s online or the people who happily spread the photo’s on various social media. Some of the discussions are balanced this blog post or this but there are also the discussion threads on Reddit and other sites. Most harmful in the wider sense is the widespread shouting on Facebook and Twitter.

There has also been good support in discussions online, on Twitter and what about the Facebook page: Solidarity With Slanegirl We Suck Dick Too

So thanks to social media I wake up in the morning to find out people are angry at other people having sex. Oh the shock and horror. Imagine that.

What still surprises me is the way in which the gossiping about someone nobody knows but feels the need to include photographic proof and judgements of the person. All this rage and indignation… does it really stem from the fact that someone we don’t know gave a blowjob to someone else we don’t know? Really?

There are social reasons for gossip and pointless smalltalk but the need to be among the ones who spread the images are difficult to tease out for me.

Posted on by mklang

Public shaming with technology

A question that has been bouncing around my head for a while, and maybe this is because of an article I’m working on now, is why do people use technology to shame, defame, slander or insult in ways that they would never do without technology?

This is not a new discussion. In the early Internet days part of the answer that was often used was the idea that people felt that they could be anonymous online and this made “bad behavior” permissible or possible.

The important thing about this anonymity was that it was a perceived sense of anonymity as opposed to real anonymity. This caused many to believe that if anonymity could be taken away technology users would behave themselves.

Surveillance would resolve bad behavior.

This thinking created the idea of enforcing real identities online.

Countries like China and South Korea and companies like Google and Facebook have for different reasons implemented real identities online.

Naturally policies and regulations such as these have been criticized.

But do we behave if we do not believe ourselves to be anonymous online?

Apparently not.

Look at the abuse that Marion Bartoli, the woman’s Wimbledon champion, faced.

With tweets like “Someone as ugly and unattractive as Bartoli doesn’t deserve to win” there is a direct connection between physical appearance and physical skill. Sadly, of course, this connection is more common when it is related to women.

What is interesting is that many of those who offered opinions like this (and worse) were not anonymous and yet they were still openly hostile, belligerent and maybe slanderous.

The Swedish clothes company H&M printed clothes with pictures of Tupac Shakur, a 21 year old Swedish woman, wrote to question on H&M’s Facebook page asking why they thought it was ok to use the picture of a man convicted of sexual abuse in their clothing.

As a result she received thousands of comments, she was threatened with, amongst other things, rape, stoning and drowning. The main discussion was whether or not H&M had behaved correctly by not being actively enough in removing comments.

But what is interesting is that the comments where all on Facebook, people seemed to be happily open with their misogynistic, threatening and illegal comments. There was no illusion of anonymity, the users were easily identifiable by everyone and yet this did not stop them.

Bad behavior online is not prevented by openly identifying everyone.

Posted on by mklang

Slut Shaming: Notes from a panel

My university has decided that it must act more quickly to join into a larger social debate on current events and to this end they arranged an open event on cyber bullying. The topic was well chosen as in December Göteborg experienced “slut shaming riots” when groups of youths attempted to catch and punish the person they thought was behind a local slut shaming account on Instagram.

The event was in the form of a panel with psychology professor Ann Frisén, police commissioner and chief of the youth section Birgitta Dellenhed, and myself. The university vice chancellor Helena Lindholm Schulz moderated the panel and three thoughtful and perceptive school teenagers were given the role of questioning the panelists before the audience were given time for questions.

The event was held in the old university main hall and was very well attended.

Professor Frisén opened with a presentation of what the concept of cyber bullying was and presented the findings from her research. Her worked confirmed that many children and young people experienced cyber bullying. I was next and then the presenters session was completed by commissioner Dellenhed explaining how the youth section worked and the basics of the recent slut shaming riots.

My role was to talk was on the technological side of the problem. As the reason for the panel was the result of slut shaming I focused my talk on technology’s role in slut shaming. I began with a restatement technology as neutral by using the well know “Guns don’t kill people”. In this perspective I explained that technology is not misogynistic per se but it is important not to forget that the technology is embedded with the values of the creators and adapted by the users.

I used a timeline of the last decades social media innovations to show that we have in a particularly short time evolved a whole new communications infrastructure. This infrastructure has enabled us to do things which we previously could not. This enabling has created new behaviors that may previously been unacceptable.

The ability to do new (and maybe unacceptable) things through technology means that it is our use that brings into question the rightness or wrongness of the situation. Users need social cues and guidance to know the ethics of their actions. Carrying on in technology at time minimizes the ethical social cues and makes behavior online morally complex.

As the whole event was focused on slut shaming and the riots there was a call for order and justice underlying everything that was being said. So I tried to bring back some balance by pointing out that the value of freedom and freedom of expression is important to our lives and societies. Yes I raised a warning finger against moral panic.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie

The questions from the students were very interesting and deep. They reflected a need for both space and security. The complexity of this paradox (surveillance and control) was not lost on them. The questions from the floor were mostly good but towards the end was a gruff man demanding more surveillance, law and order. If we know who did it why don’t we prosecute and punish? His comments were applauded which made me think that some of the finer points were lost on the crowd.

The police explained that they do not ignore prosecutions but finding the guilty is not easy. She also pointed out that the person behind the account is also a victim (in some ways). I tried to argue that to catch the guilty in the way he was proposing would entail surveillance of all the innocent and was not compatible to a free and open society. But he denied that he was talking surveillance.

Most of the questions carried the discussion along nicely and the whole event seemed to be enjoyed by all.

The panel and the venue

Posted on by mklang

Slut Shaming, misogyny and technology

This evening I shall be participating in a panel on slut shaming. The university has been quick to organize this panel in response to the slut shaming riots in December. The panel has the Swedish title NÄTMOBBNING – vad är det och vilken roll spelar den nya tekniken? which places the focus on two things (1) what is cyberbullying (2) what role does the new technology play.

Obviously the technology is vital. You just can’t have cyberbullying without the cyber. But there is an interesting undertone to the second question and my role will be to try to strike a balance between explaining why the technology does create or aggravate human behavior at the same time ensuring that the technology itself is not a problem.

Misogyny is not created by technology. BUT… the social norm systems embedded in the technology and the technology users MAY create misogynistic socio-technical systems. Therefore it would be strange not to place some of the (moral) social responsibility on systems developers.

Guns don’t kill people. But gun designers develop superior killing machines and placed in the hands of people with intent they become much more efficient at killing people than a bag of soft toys. (Gotta love an odd metaphor…)

So that’s the plan. Please drop in, if you happen to be in the neighborhood. It’s at 6pm in the university aula at Vasaparken.

Posted on by mklang