Behind Every Bullied Woman Is a Man Yelling About Free Speech

[Gormy Cuss]

Behind Every Bullied Woman Is a Man Yelling About Free Speech

Erin Gloria Ryan

http://jezebel.com/behind-every-bullied-woman-is-a-man-yelling-about-free-1629502544

Sunday's massive leak of photos of nude celebrities — including Jennifer Lawrence and Aubrey Plaza — spiraled out of 4Chan and Reddit, two web communities that fancy themselves promoters of free speech and privacy. Ostensibly, free speech and privacy are good things. But lately, those rights are so often invoked in defending the actions of men trying to intimidate and humiliate women that I'm starting to think we've conflated "free speech" with "freedom to bully without consequences..."

Their hypocrisy would be hilarious if it didn't actually hurt people. In 2012, Adrian Chen of our sister site Gawker exposed the identity of Reddit user Violentacrez, a 49-year-old Texas man named Michael Brutsch who had become a Reddit darling after founding (among other things) sub forums that gleefully posted "creepshots" of women taken without their knowledge or consent. In retaliation for the horrifying breach of every Reddit user's internet god-given right to privacy, moderators of most of the largest subforums agreed to stop linking to articles from any sites in the Gawker Media family — this one included. Because privacy is just that important to them.

And so, after naked images of female (and some collateral males who happened to be in the same shot as a naked female) celebrities began being distributed online by thirsty bitcoin whores, one would think that if Reddit had any moral consistency in its leadership, it would, as vanguards of privacy and brave soldiers against doxxing, instruct its moderators to scrub links to the images from its servers and ban users that continually broke the rules.

Nope! For awhile on Sunday, all of the top 10 stories on Reddit were links to images of naked female celebrities obtained without their consent. Today, subscribers to r/TheFappening are gleefully screenshotting news coverage of the leak, linking to the image gallery with abandon. According to The Daily Dot, Reddit theoretically has a policy that should apply to this, but for whatever reason (boners), admins aren't enforcing it.

Yeah, sometimes the free speech yelling is done by women who are bullying them but it's usually men.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. " ... intimidate and humiliate women ... "

This can be done in such a myriad of ways.

The snide, condescending, offensive, dismissive approach is so often used. It is so rude.

Immediately, when a man comes offensively into a conversation with a tone of superiority, automatically one is forced into a defensive type of reply.

This is just not conducive to effective means of discussion/debate/conversation.

No exchange of ideas, policies, protocols are allowed because the man has assumed the offending role of The Winner by making the first comment offensive simultaneously dismissing any reply as being antagonistic.

I have watched this happen over and over again.

It becomes futile to continue trying to converse because the result is always the same when the very first comment takes the offensive/dismissive tone.

[PVnRT]

2. A relevant xkcd comic...

http://xkcd.com/1357/

[Gormy Cuss]

3. Perfect! n/t

[redruddyred]

4. I dunno,

there are plenty of internet communities where the mods could accurately be referred to as "assholes" themselves.