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Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

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Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#2
I like that she doesn't censor the 'authors' of the messages. Public shaming might be the only remedy against this creepy shit. But that may very well be naive thinking: if these guys would think they were doing something wrong they would probably have used an alias.

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#4
I read that (deep) learning algos can decide if a message is positive or negative.

Could they learn if a message is a harassment so we could implement a automatic filter for such things?

-- Edit --

I mean this is really bad and we should get these dudes to stop somehow. But it greatly reduced my anger looking into my inbox, when I stopped seeing spam in there. The spammers did never stop...

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#5
post #2

I like that she doesn't censor the 'authors' of the messages. Public shaming might be the only remedy against this creepy shit. But that may very well be naive thinking: if these guys would think they were doing something wrong they would probably have used an alias.

Would be funny if they experience harassment out of being exposed as a harassing person. This seems something that could happen on the internet.

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#7
What a terrible experience, yet I'm not surprised to know such things happen. I hope it's theraputic for her to get these out, and if she can turn the intimidation into some financial gains then so be it. Is there a way to discourage the behavior? It's a tough problem.

As an anecdote, I just had a discussion with a female community college professor, PhD, one who had plenty of bench science experience before teaching. We are both born and raised in the US. Without naming specifics here, we both agreed that while US culture has made attempts - and is making attempts - to grow past gender subujation, there are numerous other cultures which aren't even trying.

We noticed the cultural issues regarding women can be very obvious in a US educational environment. As in, for a woman to be in a position of authority, certain cultures behave in ways which do not acknowledge the earned, official status. I believe the phenomenon is real, and is a day-to-day reflection of what the violinist was exposed to in private. Also, it's one thing in person - but the internet allows for all sorts of 'border crossing' and people from all over the world are capable of reaching out and harassing someone, male, female, or otherwise.

In summation, I think US culture is attentive to a lot of 'weak points' that need to be addressed (gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, handicaps), as difficult as they are for a diverse society...while some others are, well, really lacking in this arena. Like I said, I'm not going to name any one particular one or five, because it's not my place - it's up to the members of those cultures to enact their own change.

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#8
Look so many things wrong with this.

1) The guys.

2) There is nobody there to verify the guys. I mean... nobody is making sure the person who posted those pics are the actual people, so now, "Oh hey that looks like my neighbor, Joe." But we don't know if it was Joe, or someone pretending to be Joe, or who just looks like Joe, or someone who hacked Joe's account as a prank. And why this is important... lives get ruined on these sorts of accusations.

3) The message it sends that "all guys" are just pervert sex monsters who want to rape cute online girls. If not "all guys" most, or many... anyway the point is really just that this woman set up a highly public profile, and we have no idea what percentage of guys who looked at it were douchebags. I'm guessing it's sub 1%.

So look, anecdotally, some guys on the internet are douchebags. Sure, no question. But is this the right way to combat it? Meh. Not really.

SOLUTION for reducing the number of comments like these. After midnight add a drunk captcha to the forms. "You must do math to proceed." Or, "You must use proper spelling and grammar to send messages to someone you don't know."

Re: Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

#10
As is well known, there are lots of people who get some sick pleasure from announcing their vile and chauvinist thoughts.

"Real names" don't seem to help. I would guess that the senders of these type of messages are socially isolated enough to not see any real social consequences of openly harassing people, women in particular.

So, what's the solution? There doesn't seem to be a proportionate response that life more difficult for online tormentors. Further, any legal response would be justifiably difficult to reconcile with freedom of speech.

It's just unacceptable in my mind that the current balance of power is so skewed towards people who harass others online.

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