A few months ago, John Scalzi noted that:

In my experience, talking to women bloggers and writers, they are quite likely to get abusive comments and e-mail, and receive more of it not only than what I get personally (which isn’t difficult) but more than what men bloggers and writers typically get. I think bloggers who focus on certain subjects (politics, sexuality, etc) will get more abusive responses than ones who write primarily on other topics, but even in those fields, women seem more of a target for abusive people than the men are. And even women writing on non-controversial topics get smacked with this crap. I know knitting bloggers who have some amazingly hateful comments directed at them. They’re blogging about knitting, for Christ’s sake. . .

I can contrast this with how people approach me on similar topics. When I post photos of processed cheese, I don’t get abused about how bad it is and how bad I am for posting about it. People don’t abuse me over my weight, even when I talk explicitly about it. I go away from my family for weeks at a time and never get crap about what a bad father that makes me, even though I have always been the stay-at-home parent. Now, it’s true in every case that if I did get crap, I would deal with it harshly, either by going after the commenter or by simply malleting their jackassery into oblivion. But the point is I don’t have to. I’m a man and I largely get a pass on weight, on parenting and (apparently) on exhibition and ingestion of processed cheese products. Or at the very least if someone thinks I’m a bad person for any of these, they keep it to themselves. They do the same for any number of other topics they might feel free to lecture or abuse women over.

It’s this sort of thing that reminds me that the Internet is not the same experience for me as it is for some of my women friends.

…

Men build discursive spaces and discursive norms based on their own experience. And for instance, in a male-built discursive space, a threat of sexual violence may be viewed by male participants as an obvious joke. After all, the vast majority of men will never experience sexual violence in their lifetime. (Fewer than 4% of men will be sexually assaulted.) And so within the context of a male discussion on a World of Warcraft forum, for instance, it may seem entirely innocuous to use ideas of sexual violence to express one’s views on the game, or to use “rape” as a verb to describe one’s gameplay skills.

…

At one point during class I was talking about male privilege, and one student asked me to explain. He noted that he is a man and he doesn’t feel particularly privileged. In response, I noted my own privilege: “When I leave the building late at night, I don’t give a second thought to my safety as I walk to my car. If it’s ten at night, if it’s dark, I just assume that I’ll be fine. But for many women, there is a constant thought process: Do I find someone to walk me to my car? Is it safe at this hour? What are my options?” And then I asked, “who has gone through that train of thought recently?,” and every woman in the class raised her hand. And then they told stories: About avoiding parts of town; about setting their schedule in certain ways; about making sure that they had someone to walk them out; about being on their guard, all the time. The need to guard against the possibility of sexual assault is simply not part of most men’s everyday thought process, while it is a major part of many women’s everyday lived experience.

And the fact that as a man I don’t have to spend mental energy thinking about protecting myself from sexual assault is itself part of male privilege. One part of male privilege is that you never have to notice the ways in which you benefit from male privilege.

…

Women face these kinds of microaggressions on a daily basis, in all sorts of environments ranging from the workplace to the public sphere. And they seem to be especially prevalent (surprise) in discursive spaces built by and dominated by men. (It’s true that not all women struggle to express themselves in male-built discursive spaces, and some women develop real facility for the kind of bullying that sometimes passes for dialogue on the internet. But, as Danielle Citron’s work makes clear, many don’t.)

And then when someone (almost always female) stands up against the male-constructed discursive norms in which threats of violence and sexual violence can be characterized as merely a joke, she is attacked for being oversensitive. These attacks are another instance of denying of the reality of women’s experiences. Male commenters discount women’s experiences as irrelevant if when those experiences don’t conform to male discussion norms. Feminist blogs have a term for this: Mansplaining, where a male interlocutor explains to a female writer that she ought to ignore her own experience and bow before his superior wisdom.

…

Male privilege on the internet — or in law, or in society at large — isn’t going away any time soon. But let’s call it out, and let’s label it for what it is. When male interlocutors tell a female writer that she is overreacting and just isn’t getting the joke, they are speaking from a starting place of male privilege. They are assuming that casual threats of violence are something which can easily be shrugged off, and are ignoring the vast difference between lived experiences of men and women in America. And they are denying the reality of something which, in all likelihood, they don’t even understand.

This is a great article all around because it explains the differences between the experiences of men and women online very straightforwardly. I also like how it’s clearly not an article that seeks sympathy from the audience– it is merely stating the differences between the criticisms that male and female bloggers receive on the internet, and it analyzes the reasons behind why the male bloggers receive far less personal attacks than female bloggers though. I’m having troubles tracking down an article that sought out female journalists and asked them what kind of responses they get towards their work– and you can probably guess what kind of hate mail they received– but the article that resulted in Scalzi’s response should be read too and is here: <a href=”http://glutenfreegirl.com/warm-brown-rice-and-grilled-vegetable-salad/”>a food blogger finally telling her readers about the personal attack she gets just for blogging about cheese.</A> It’s bizarre how a normal food blogger who doesn’t even participate in heated topics on her blog still gets people’s blood boiling for the simple act of talking about what kind of foods she ate and how she liked them.

I have a really, really embarrassing confession to make. I used to consider myself both an anti-feminist and a men’s rights activist. I was a fresh-faced undergrad with little worldly experience, and as I struggled to find my ideological feet I somehow became convinced that women already have equality. The logical conclusion was that feminism is simply a power-grab which aims to crush men under the iron boot of sexist family courts, car insurance policies, and patronizing goofy dad characters in commercials. I’d go into more detail about my beliefs but they really weren’t all that original. Just trust me when I tell you that I was an idiot.

My awakening came during a summer spent working in Ottawa. Through careless kijiji subletting, I inadvertently wound up living in a house with five other people, most of whom were ass-slapping, gay-bashing, molson-chugging bros. That summer was the first time that sexism was really presented to me in a form that I could recognize. I was shocked when my roommates secretly filmed each other’s one-night stands, ignored my concerns that a girl in the living room may have been too drunk to consent to sex (luckily, she fell asleep and was left alone), and dismissed women athletes on the grounds that “I could beat her without training”. Suddenly I started to realize that maybe the campus feminists had a point.

Here’s thing thing about that summer: It changed my normative opinions little, if at all. I had always believed that women deserved full equality with men in every aspect of their lives, but before that summer I was under the mistaken impression that such a condition had already been achieved. My error was almost entirely factual. Once it was corrected by exposure to a very obvious form of discrimination, I discovered the depth of my own privilege remarkably quickly. It’s never easy to admit that you’re wrong on such an emotional issue, so I needed that shock to initiate the process of reforming my opinions.

I like reading articles like this where people describe the moment where they started noticing the world around them changing due to their own perceptions shifting.

Though I have often heard students or workshop participants describe someone as not having “a prejudiced bone in his body,” I usually suggest that they look again. Prejudice is one of the inescapable consequences of living in a racist society. Cultural racism—the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of color—is like smog in the air. Sometimes it is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it in. None of us would introduce ourselves as “smog-breathers” (and most of us don’t want to be described as prejudiced), but if we live in a smoggy place, how can we avoid breathing the air? If we live in an environment in which we are bombarded with stereotypical images in the media, are frequently exposed to the ethnic jokes of friends and family members, and are rarely informed of the accomplishments of oppressed groups, we will develop the negative categorizations of those groups that form the basis of prejudice.

…

To say that it is not our fault does not relieve us of responsibility, however. We may not have polluted the air, but we need to take responsibility, along with others, for cleaning it up. Each of us needs to look at our own behavior. Am I perpetuating and reinforcing the negative messages so pervasive in our culture, or am I seeking to challenge them? If I have not been exposed to positive images of marginalized groups, am I seeking them out, expanding my own knowledge base for myself and my children? Am I acknowledging and examining my own prejudices, my own rigid categorizations of others, thereby minimizing the adverse impact they might have on my interactions with those I have categorized? Unless we engage in these and other conscious acts of reflection and reeducation, we easily repeat the process with our children. We teach what we were taught. The unexamined prejudices of the parents are passed on to the children. It is not our fault, but it is our responsibility to interrupt this cycle.

This article was just too good to not share another segment from it.

Some examples will highlight this process. Several years ago one of my students conducted a research project investigating preschoolers’ conceptions of Native Americans. Using children at a local day care center as her participants, she asked these three- and four-year-olds to draw a picture of a Native American. Most children were stumped by her request. They didn’t know what a Native American was. But when she rephrased the question and asked them to draw a picture of an Indian, they readily complied. Almost every picture included one central feature: feathers. In fact, many of them also included a weapon—a knife or tomahawk— and depicted the person in violent or aggressive terms. Though this group of children, almost all of whom were White, did not live near a large Native American population and probably had had little if any personal interaction with American Indians, they all had internalized an image of what Indians were like. How did they know? Cartoon images, in particular the Disney movie Peter Pan, were cited by the children as their number-one source of information. At the age of three, these children already had a set of stereotypes in place. Though I would not describe three-year-olds as prejudiced, the stereotypes to which they have been exposed become the foundation for the adult prejudices so many of us have.

Sometimes the assumptions we make about others come not from what we have been told or what we have seen on television or in books, but rather from what we have not been told. The distortion of

historical information about people of color leads young people (and older people, too) to make assumptions that may go unchallenged for a long time. Consider this conversation between two White students following a discussion about the cultural transmission of racism:
“Yeah, I just found out that Cleopatra was actually a Black woman.”

“What?”

The first student went on to explain her newly learned information. The second student exclaimed in disbelief, “That can’t be true. Cleopatra was beautiful!” What had this young woman learned about who in our society is considered beautiful and who is not? Had she conjured up images of Elizabeth Taylor when she thought of Cleopatra? The new information her classmate had shared and her own deeply ingrained assumptions about who is beautiful and who is not were too incongruous to allow her to assimilate the information at that moment.

No link for this one, because I took it out of some reading I was doing.