Re-post: “How could they not have known?!”
I expect it’s hard for someone not in the thick of things to know what’s going on. My coworkers don’t get the same comments I do, my male gamer buddies don’t have people freaking out or getting, er, excited when they speak on voice chat, my pure white friends don’t get told to go back to their home country (it’s this one, thanks) and we tend edit all the intentionally hurtful stuff we can out of our public environments so as not to give the hurtful folk the satisfaction of public attention but at the same time we render the problem invisible to outsiders. And then when we do talk about it, we’re met at first with incredulity because, well, how could they have known?
Despite the fact that women are much more visible in many geeky communities, there still seems to be an undercurrent of hatred from a small but loud segment of population. I wish I could suggest a solution that doesn’t winding up with just a set of variations on the unicorn law where it’s always up to women in the communities to bring this stuff up (and face the backlash from people who didn’t know and don’t want to believe). Perhaps the better question here is what advice can we suggest for potential allies who’ve just gotten broadsided by this and really could not have known? How can allies be better prepared for problems when they occur, and more aware of the undercurrents before something happens?
I’ll leave these as “ask a geek feminist” style questions for our commenters.
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DoctorJay:
January 5th, 2012 at 8:47 am
The men who do this kind of thing don’t do it in public, not even in “man-only” spaces. There are spaces where it happens, but those are carefully selected for like-minded individuals.
So the only way the rest of us can know about it is if the victims tell us. I wouldn’t care to call that fair, there’s nothing fair about it.
However, it’s also the case that men are very, very poor at reporting abuse. Mostly the abuse they experience is from other men, though not exclusively. So in some weird way, there’s an opportunity for solidarity. I firmly believe that someone who would say abusive things to women would say them to a man as well, as long as they felt they could safely do it.
oldfeminist:
January 5th, 2012 at 10:25 am
One problem is that, if you share your experiences, you get a shock reaction, but compassion fatigue develops and suddenly “you’re making too big a deal about it.”
Even with many people who are generally sympathetic and who believe you, they eventually want to ignore it again, because it never seems to go away.