Today's Whatever Wednesday Post focuses on issues that are extremely important to both the BB and the WW: Women's rights and Activism. Through Facebook friends and family, we were introduced to two disturbing articles that show us just how much work is left to do with Civil Rights issues. The first article is about how women are targeted and unsafe on the internet, and the victim blaming that goes along with it. The second is about revenge porn--a very scary trend that devalues women and even makes them the target of rape and death threats. They are both VERY important articles and we would love for our readers to look at them.
After reading the first article, the BB and the WW were reminded of what kinds of things they did before starting this blog. We looked into other fat acceptance blogs and what other women had faced when starting up. We specifically looked at the comments sections from other readers and were disturbed by what we found: readers telling the bloggers that they were fat, ugly bitches, readers preaching to the bloggers about made-up statistics, etc.
However, what we want to point out in relation to this article is the fact that we even felt the need to look in the first place. The internet is NOT a safe place for anyone trying to challenge social norms, especially when those people are women.
What is so important about these articles is that they show, with real-world examples, research, experiments, and even FBI cases and investigations, just how far this problem goes and just how much victims are blamed for their "carelessness" on the internet.
A huge excuse used in rape culture, for example, is "don't dress so provocatively."
On the internet this translates into "Don't post such provocative selfies."
Victim blaming is used to make women and others believe that the threats and violence that happen to them are their fault. This even eventually leads to silencing women by telling them to remove their online identities to remove the problem, instead of going to the source and telling the person making the threats that they are in the wrong, and that they will be punished.
When these threats are made online, women often also feel threatened in the material world and feel the need to make sacrifices in that sphere. The first article cites many of these kinds of sacrifices, like switching apartments, spending time and money on pursuing these attackers, or not going outside alone.
The disproportionate nature of these sacrifices is incredible. While there is a woman who is suffering both on and offline and feeling unsafe in both spheres, her attacker could be someone like the computer programmer mentioned in the first article, who simply likes to get people riled up. So the attacker who likes to get people riled up can turn on his computer and go on with his life, but the attacked shuts off her computer, phone, tablet, etc. and still feels unsafe.
While we have not yet experienced this kind of backlash so far (the most we've gotten is slight criticism from a place of privilege), we are aware that it will probably happen at some point. We will continue to blog about our experiences.
What we have to say is important---feminism intersects with so many other identities, from queer identities, to fat identities, to class and social position--that we feel as fat feminists we will not subject ourselves to silencing. Instead, we will continue to be activists and allies and blog about the truth. To further express this creed, we'd like to leave you with a couple John Green quote (We would die if he read and liked our blog someday!) from his co-written book (with David Levithan) Will Grayson, Will Grayson:
"If you don't say the honest thing, it never becomes true" (Green and Levithan 256).
"Love and truth [are] tied together...they make each other possible" (Green and Levithan 128).
No comments:
Post a Comment