Dominator Tentacles

The recent hacker attacks on radical feminist websites is an example of the dominator model growing a new tentacle.

A few weeks ago, a group of anonymous hackers mounted attacks on several feminist blogs and websites. The attack was nothing new: women’s voices in general, and feminist voices in particular, are silenced daily by violence, threats, and shaming, on the Internet and in real life.

As a result of the recent attack, there are fewer radical voices on the web. A few radical feminists have taken down their blogs; some will not be reopened. Others have made their Flickr photostreams private. At least one blog and one forum are now private; a muting of voices if not an outright silencing. Going private, having to hide: the parts of the radfem community that are still intact are no longer fully open, and no longer fully a part of the human conversation on the web. 

The hackers exchange communications at some notorious sites which I have visited. (I had to shower myself and sage my computer afterwards.) They appear to be a group of sociopathic personalities whose discourse is trite, tired, and boring. A single comment from one “Anonymous” caught my attention, though, and has stuck in my mind:

“Remember, we are not political. We are not Republicans. We are not Democrats.”

I’ve been mulling this over. After all, these same hackers have also taken down gay websites. Attacking gays, attacking feminists; hmmm, seems like a political agenda to me.

But let’s suppose that Anon’s actions are motivated, as Anon seems to say, by a sort of juvenile nihilist philosophy; not by politics, and not by any desire to support big government, big corporations, and the status quo. Because Anon is a rebel kind of guy. An anarchist, perhaps. He’d never carry water for, well, anybody.

Interestingly, however, Anon never seems to take down the big sites. Walmart.com and the Pentagon are safe from his attentions. It’s not that Anon is a big fan of Walmart or the government. It’s just so much easier to attack the vulnerable. Big business and big government aren’t vulnerable on the Internet. They can afford not to be.

Small discussion boards and blogs, particularly ones that advocate unpopular points of view, are often run by individuals who put up their own funds, if they can scrape them together, and who must be their own IT departments. They can’t afford the type of security that requires the big bucks. And since they have jobs (unlike Anon, apparently), they have to put their desire to maintain an Internet presence in the balance with supporting themselves and their families. When the crunch comes and time pressures set in, it’s not the Internet presence that wins out.

So the actions of these “apolitical” hackers do have a political end: they remove unpopular, radical, fringe viewpoints from the web. Big government doesn’t have to eliminate the subversive websites; Anon will do it.

Sorry, Anon, it looks like you do carry water for the dominators. And you didn’t even realize it, you putz!

Wouldn’t it be great to have an open web, where even the most marginalized groups can be heard? The dominator model, which dictates how human organizations should operate, doesn’t like open. It doesn’t like consciousness, community, or cooperation. Like Anon, the dominator model believes in establishing “cred” by bullying others. And the dominator model extends its tentacles just about everywhere, including inside our own minds, so sometimes we don’t even know how to live by any other model.

As a feminist blogger once put it, “many ghouls of the patriarchy have slimed our brains.”Those ghouls have certainly slimed Anon’s brain.

Anon is just another tentacle that the dominator model has extruded.

So I’m wondering: how much do we want an open web? Enough to recognize a tentacle when we see one? Enough to support free access to free software, including the expensive technology and services that make sites secure? Enough to get the slime out of our own brains, and stop giving a pass to dominator-style web discourse, such as bullying and building cred?

I don’t like it that radical voices, however unpopular, are being expelled from the human conversation by online thugs. I like it even less that it’s happening with hardly any notice, and without comment by more mainstream writers.

Here’s a story about the incident at a news site. I’m not linking to any of the feminist sites that were attacked, because one of the ways Anon decides who to target next is by following links. I guess that means my voice has been muted a bit, too.

Misogyny bares its teeth on the Internet

Update

The Flock staff sat down together last Friday for an uncomfortable meeting, and I’m happy to report that it went really well.

We met to discuss culture — open source culture, mass culture, but mostly Flock’s culture. Specifically, we met to figure out what went wrong in our response to the “rape humor” thread on one of our lists. We reviewed what was written, and those who had responded to the “humor” had a chance to explain why and how they had responded.

Everyone had a chance to speak. No one was interrupted. It was as if we had an invisible talking stick. (Giggle and make New Age jokes, if you like — the talking stick system works.) For my own part, I was very relieved to hear my co-workers affirm that the thread under discussion was offensive to them just at it had been to me. And I felt understood, on this subject at least.

In the future, if offensive talk comes up in a Flock forum, Flock will have a more unified message. We’ll articulate our values more clearly.

When there’s uncomfortable subject matter to discuss, the easiest thing in the world is to duck out of it — to find other, more pressing subjects, to be distracted by the latest firedrill — anyone who has been in a long-term relationship knows the avoidance tactics! But we stayed at the table and discussed this uncomfortable topic until we understood each other.

I am very proud of us.

May I Finish?

My husband, who is Japanese-American, once commented that the Japanese spoken by women is so different from that spoken by men, it’s as if Japanese is really two different languages. I asked my mother-in-law about it, and her comment was succinct: “Ladies must be very polite.”

This comes to mind because I’m thinking about a phenomenon that’s familiar to many (if not most) women: being interrupted while speaking. I was interrupted — ignored, really — during a meeting yesterday. I was asked to do a bit of essential writing (informing our brave friends who downloaded 0.4.10 that they must throw away their profiles before downloading 0.6). I needed to figure out where this tidbit should be put — in the Release Notes, on the website, or both — and I said, “I need more information…” One of the engineers began talking about something else, and my query was left twisting in the wind.

I suppose I could have objected, and on another day I might have. But I was tired, and wishing for coffee, and so angry over being ignored that I simply left the room. (And went out for coffee.)

Sociologists have been researching male/female conversation patterns for a few decades. And there’s pretty good evidence that men interrupt women a lot.

In fact, men often interrupt outright, and they do this far more frequently than women do, several studies have shown. Candace West and Don Zimmerman, sociologists at the University of California, recorded a number of two-party conversations. When men spoke with men or women with women, there were relatively few interruptions, and those that did occur were balanced between the two speakers. When men conversed with women, however, not only did more interruptions occur, but 96 percent of them involved men interrupting women.

Psychology Today: Girl talk, guy talk: do men and women really have distinctive conversational styles?

But what can be done about it? Stomping out of the room and going for coffee is not really a solution. Legislation won’t help.

Should I interrupt more? Talk louder? Frankly, I don’t want to do that. I WANNA BE ME! And I’m a person who listens to others, and takes turns, and doesn’t shout. Which isn’t to say I’m not assertive and persistent — my co-workers can attest that I am both of those.

Here’s my proposal. In any meeting, there surely must be men who notice when someone is being interrupted. So guys, here’s what you do: object to the interruption. Say, “Excuse me, but _____ didn’t finish what she was saying.” I am asking for this because I must, on a daily basis, attend meetings where I am the only woman in the room. Frankly, it is tiring and discouraging to keep trying to get a word in edgewise. Help me out here, guys. It’s the manly thing to do.