Weekly 2
article response
The Male Gazed by Kate Loss
The Male Gazed evaluates the prevalence of the male gaze in social media. The article hones in especially on the emphasis of straight, white, male gazes in the creation of sites and uses Facebook as a main example. I was particularly drawn to this topic and I strongly resonate with the ideas that were discussed.
The issue of males as creators was especially interesting to me because they talked about the prevalence of male heads in the industry. It reminded me of a talk I had gone to about Activision CEO Eric Hershberg. During the Q+A part of his talked he was asked about why there were so few female coders and designers in the workforce. His response was that if women were really the best of their fields, they would be hired. It didn’t come down to gender in his mind. Hershberg boiled it down to schooling and the fact that females just weren’t interested and education was at fault for not garnering that interest. Yet this was not true in the class setting: a respectable half of the game class consisted of females and stats proved that 46% of the gaming community was made up of females. I was also reminded of a particular incident in high school when a group of boys were conducting an experiment on gender and how well each gender scored basketballs. I volunteered and after missing nearly each shot, I remember one boy retorting, “Why do all girls suck at sports?” The XYZ comic illustrates the same point.
One female’s actions become a representation of her entire gender as long as it fits the norm. As long as the actions of one female fit into the already defined stereotypes of what females are capable of, there was no question about the status quo. If they didn’t fit into the norm, they were considered strange or “special.” This reaffirms their lack of skill in coding, in mathematics, sports, and it also reaffirms the norms of social media. It’s much more understandable for a male to keep their profiles strange or artsy but when a female were to do it, they were automatically considered strange. There’s also a different type of curation that is prevalent in female social media that also dictates social experiences. Whenever I am with a group of girls, time is almost always allocated to taking pictures and creating memories for social media. When with a group of guys that is less likely. I don’t think that it’s because either group prefers photos or not, I am camera shy and I am always pulled into photo opportunities with girls. Social media as an experience for women becomes more about “Look, I am having fun!” to yourself but also to an audience. This is all fine but the article emphasizes that, unfortunately, this interaction isn’t a two way street. The idea of male voyeurism is much stronger than the female one and because of the curation of female social media it just further pushes these norms.
I really enjoyed this article because it wasn’t an idea that I had really fleshed out in my head. The ideas that these power structures were already so engrained in the creation of social media was something that I would clash with once in a while with new updates but this article really brought to light issues that I hadn’t thought of at all.
What immediate changes can be made to address or fix these hierarchical issues of social media?
A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell
This article made me feel so uncomfortable and angry. It explained a case of “cyber-rape” in the online community of LambdaMOO where a user, Mr. Bungle sexually assaulted multiple characters in the platform. When I was first reading the article I had a bit of skepticism about the idea of cyber-rape and the setting before I realized this was first released in 1993. I think that this incident and the article makes me so uncomfortable because as the internet and reality become more connected with the advancement and comfort of the internet, these cases of harassment and assault become more graphic and closer to reality. I think the biggest case that comes to mind is Christina Grimmie’s murder. There are also multiple cases of women being harassed out of conferences and death threats, the biggest example here being Anita Sarkeesian. The connection of Persona and person becomes extremely blurred now. To the players and members of the LambdaMOO community it is understandable the outrage that was the outcome of the bungle incident. It was a reminder to me that the internet is not inherently a “safe-space” for people.
My anger came from the fact that people would not allow guidelines for others to experience the space safely. The whole talk of freedom of expression reminds me of this. The choice of being a terrible person and doing whatever you want should be your choice on the internet but the active choice of being able to block and ban those people should also be a choice. If it hinders someone’s experience it should be their freedom of expression to completely get rid of those people in those spaces. This “freedom” should be a two way street. I still don’t understand the resistance to creating “safe-spaces” on the internet. If the only pleasure you can find online is though harassing other, usually marginalized groups of people, it should be a choice to get rid of those people.
I was just generally tired of reading this by the end because I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand the resistance to what seemed like the easiest and most obvious answer there was for the situation. The anonymity of the internet seems really to only protect the aggressors because the communities try to use these spaces to be more open in spaces where they can’t really be open in real life. It seems so crazy the insistence to make these spaces “apolitical” because the communities that congregate in niche spaces often are not.
How valid are the issues of assault and abuse if these issues are committed online?