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Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

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Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#31
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those feminists who hate Trans-people. They are the ultra-extreme feminists.

Such feminists exist?! Please tell me you're joking. That's even more horrifying than Alice Schwarzer...

Not only do feminists who hate trans people exist, from what I can tell they're more widely supported and considered more feminist than trans women who criticise them for it. Even some of the more prominent trans feminists[1] think that way, presumably because the ones that don't get rather less support from other feminists.

[1] See for instance Natalie Reed's blog post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/12/13/complicit... Bear in mind that Cathy Brennan publicly outs trans women, encourages others to harass them, contacts their workplaces in order to try and get fired and their doctors in order to get them denied treatment. Somehow this is less objectionable - and more feminist - than the people she's targetting complaining about it.

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#32
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an ultra-extreme feminist? Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? What's the difference between social and political equality, and extreme social and political equality? How can two things that are equal be even more equal?

> Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? People who don't define it that way. Or people who (as in pretty much any controversity) feel compelled to see everyone who doesn't agree with them as an enemy to be taken down.

The normal term is 'radical feminism'. Andrea Dworkin for example has said:

"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women"

From her Wikipedia page:

In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform".[59]

Wikipedia citation for that is a b Dworkin. "Occupation/Collaboration". Intercourse. Retrieved February 14, 2013.

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well that's not feminism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

What can I say. All I have is a stack of dictionaries to check. Your beloved Wikipedia itself begins its feminism article "Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights" which agrees with the dictionaries I have and also with the simple definition I used above. If you think that using that definition means I'm guilty of…

As Friedman said, the ultimate end is the search for the acceptable means, and I think your little exchange highlights this pretty well.

Turns out, ideologies are rather good at branding themselves to appeal to all kinds of people, and at first blush, most ideologies sound eminently reasonable. That in no way implies that the actions of adherents to such ideologies are the same, or that the overall structure of the ideology couldn't lead to disagreeable outcomes.

The whole declaring equality and rights for all is the easy bit; that's just the ultimate end. The means, the dirty work of "defining, establishing, and defending", is where everything can and does go to hell. Feminists are just as susceptible to this problem as everyone else, and when they get it especially wrong, they create the blowback you are seeing.

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#34
Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article.

Kathy Sierra was attacked for being female. She did nothing that would cause people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting, unprovoked, and utterly wrong.

Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way, but it is. There are reasons why adults keep their sex lives private (and non-adults, regardless of chronological age, shouldn't be having sex).

I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point, and the men involved in the revenge porn clearly belong in jail. Anyway, she's been in a long-term relationship (with Hamm) for years, and she's clearly trying to better herself and recover from the mess she made of her college years (and the additional mess others worked to make of her life). And the last thing a person with an obvious biological mental illness needs is for a bunch of cowardly, anonymous, asswipes on the Internet to make it worse by tearing her down.

Where the anger rightfully belongs is on a culture, not on specific people or a gender. The Sex and the City fake feminism (it's actually one of the least feminist TV shows out there) is horrifying, but people like Chen should be left alone to work out their problems in as much peace as they can have.

This is a strange topic because I know exactly where that male anger comes from. The culture of casual sex (in high schools, colleges, and some professional circles) has broken down respect between the genders. It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them. It's a hideous culture based on social status and acquisitiveness ("Game") and it's left a large number of people (men and women both) unable to form mature relationships.

Most male misogynists are in what I would call the Misogyny Loop. (There's probably a Misandry Loop for heterosexual women.) Because they have negative and false beliefs about women (i.e. "all women are whores who fall for Game") they end up meeting and dating only damaged women, and the sampling confirms their incorrect (and, from our perspective, socially unacceptable) beliefs.

The real enemy, though, is a specific culture created by the worst of men and the worst of women. Sex and the City feminism is based on lowering moral standards for women (i.e. women should be able to behave like the worst 5% of men without consequence) when the real goal should be to raise moral standards for men.

I want to make it clear that I have no sympathy whatsoever for the 1% of men who engage in cyberstalking and doxxing. I do feel slightly bad for the 39% who have been led astray into casual misogyny by a fucked-up and perverted culture. (But I feel much worse for non-participating, innocent women like Kathy Sierra.)

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#35
post #30

So doing a Google search for the subject's former boyfriend (the one wrongly accused of rape, just by association with her), this Blogger post still lies as the third highest http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-patrick-... It strikes me as pretty obvious link-abuse, the kind that I thought Google's algorithm would squash, but apparently not. It's good practice to own your own name and domain...but in…

"It's good practice to own your own name and domain"

Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large, established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this.

The real problem here is that people still think that if they see something written down, it must be true. People might as well be reading The Weekly World News, though the kind of harassment described here would be well below the standards of WWN.

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#36

Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article. Kathy Sierra was attacked for being female . She did nothing that would cause people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting, unprovoked, and utterly wrong. Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog calle…

>she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't.

You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.

She was studying sociology and gender theory. As a woman I appreciate it when other woman have the courage to write about their lives in public, it enriches our own understanding of ourselves. If we all kept to ourselves there would be less information, especially for young woman whose lives are complicated (like young men).

Anyone has a right to keep a blog about anything she wants, using her real name, and not be attacked for it. The issue here is that people are posting vitriol about others, on sites where there is no allowance for rebuttal.

I just read a book about the Victorian-era, where it was fairly common to complain in the local newspaper about someone else, and the ethics of the papers allowed the attackee to issue a rebuttal in the same issue.

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#38
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those feminists who hate Trans-people. They are the ultra-extreme feminists.

Such feminists exist?! Please tell me you're joking. That's even more horrifying than Alice Schwarzer...

Yes and it's loathsome (speaking as a woman and 'feminist/humanist' who isn't interested in elevating any gender upon another).

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=article_tea

http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/05/28/it-w...

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#39

Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article. Kathy Sierra was attacked for being female . She did nothing that would cause people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting, unprovoked, and utterly wrong. Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog calle…

Nice victim blaming you got going there. Always the same bullshit on HN. Like clockwork.

Re: Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

#40

As much as I can't stand a lot of the ultra-extremist feminists out there in the internet, this kind of behaviour (doxxing, cyberhunting) is beyond unacceptable, it's dangerous to society. Anyone who ever has engaged in "slut shaming" or whatever the current term is for hunting down/doxxing activists, please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself. And to Google/FB: please, make it possible for victims of doxxing/cyberhunt…

> please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself

Don't joke about that. Peer pressure induced suicide is much more dangerous than "slut shaming".

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