Fear itself

Source: Jezebel: John Oliver’s Internet Misogyny Rant is Satisfying As Hell

Next week on Manfeels Park... (10)

Good Work Mo, always a fan. Citation is always needed if your going to spout stuff like that.although the crime stats in NZ (the country I live in ergo most familiar with) suggest that males are more likely to be victims of serious assault there is no reason to believe there are swarms of death threats to Males floating around the internet. there is a difference between a shut up troll commemet and a “I Know where you live and what school your kids go to” kind of thing

Oh, how’s this for a citation: According to the Rape Crisis Center in Medina and the Summit Counties (in the US), 1 in 6 women have been assaulted, compared to 1 in 33 men.
Of what I’ve seen, women are far more likely to be harassed on the Internet, doxxed, and given death and rape threats. I’ve even heard it said that ‘the Internet men use is not the same Internet that women use.’

true that

The classic sexist program is: women are valuable property, to be owned and controlled; men are dangerous rivals, to be defeated and destroyed. Neither free or secure. For freedom and security for all, what is needed is unity – that is, love. But love is both too vulgar and too sublime a topic for polite conversation.

Citations (Fear of Crime Paradox):

http://socant.chass.ncsu.edu/documents/Smith_3.pdf

http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/4/608.abstract

http://www.academia.edu/1750368/Fear_of_Crime_and_Personal_Vulnerability_Examining_Self_Rated_Health

http://etd.fcla.edu/CF/CFE0001622/Truman_Jennifer_L_200705_MAST.pdf

Or just do a google search for “Fear Crime Paradox”. Or Google Scholar. Many of the hits will start of with “the well established paradox that ..” or words to that effect. With lots more references. So really, this is not exactly controversial.

Citation (Male celebrities receive more threats):

http://demos.co.uk/press_releases/demosmalecelebritiesreceivemoreabuseontwitterthanwomen

Citation (Misogynistic language use same for men and women):

http://www.demos.co.uk/files/MISOGYNY_ON_TWITTER.pdf?1399567516

You’re welcome! 🙂

I haven’t studied these at length yet as that’s my research assistant (ie: wife)’s job, but I can’t help but notice that wordlist doesn’t have ‘rape’ or any variation thereof on it. Their method in general suggests that their definition of ‘offensive’ or ‘threatening’ was casual at best. So unless you can produce some more citations (preferably peer reviewed) for men recieving more abuse than women on Twitter, I’m gonna go ahead an ignore that one. 🙂

…And not only does your citation for men and women using misogynistic language NOT actually say that (it says they use ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ almost as much in a sexist way and makes no mention of ‘rape’), that whole study says absolutely nothing about who the tweets are directed at EXCEPT where it says they’re mostly directed at women when women make them. Unless we are to assume that in the men’s case their abuse is mostly directed at men (that seems like an odd extrapolation given this is about misogyny…) we must surely assume that _their_ abuse is mostly directed at women too? Meaning that the data set you’ve used to cite men recieving as much abuse as women, which omits a word not present in the other Twitter study by the same think tank (and which, let’s remember, only looked at celebrities anyway), is directly contradicted by the findings of this one. Indeed, it states in its preface:

“…researchers from the University of Maryland set up a host of fake online accounts and then sent these into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames received an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages per day, whereas masculine names received 3.7.”

As to your Fear Crime Paradox studies, the comic isn’t explicit in referencing that aspect as in need of citation, though I guess it could be seen as implied (comics are not a perfect communication medium). I haven’t looked at your links (Portal 2 won’t play itself), but I seem to remember from Criminology 1B that the reason women fear crime more is generally accepted (is it not?) to be due to their fear of sexual assault (which between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4 of them will suffer at some point in their lives) casting a long ‘shadow’, and due to being socialised to think of themselves as weak and extra assault-able. In the wider context I don’t think that particularly steps on the point of this website.

Sorry, I try to avoid commenting on here and I will be trying not to do so again, but I can’t resist bad data.

Some analysis:

@Mo As paradoctor wrote: citations were asked for, citations were provided. How to interpret those cited studies is a completely separate issue from whether they exist or not. The “citation needed” seemed to imply that such citations do not exist. They do, the “Fear of Crime Paradix” is an extremely well-established and -researched problem, and though I am not sure anyone has solved it yet, it’s existence is not seriously doubted.

Thanks for linking to the Pew study, I was looking for that one, because it is actually very detailed and nuanced. It does contain the following: “Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one of the elements of online harassment”. And the study goes on “Women were more likely than men to find their most recent experience with online harassment extremely or very upsetting”. Which matches the panel text “women fear internet harassment more even though, again, men are far more likely to experience it” pretty closely. Except the “far” part, because the distribution was actually pretty close.

Of course, part of the discrepancy is that the type of harassment is different: harassers hit people where they perceive they can hurt. As men generally are less concerned about their physical safety (see the Fear of Crime Paradox) that’s not where they hit men, they embarrass men instead. As women are generally more fearful about physical safety, that’s where verbal harassers aim.

The TIME article is so ridiculous that it’s not worth criticizing.

Sure, look, I’m not going to argue the toss with this; I think I made it pretty clear what my issues with the Demos reports are in particular with how they were interpreted, and also that I’m already well-acquainted with the FOCP. The point is not that no such citation exists but that without one in this situation the listener was in no position to judge for themselves whether said sources were legitimate or whether the speaker was twisting the facts for his own agenda – which, a cursory look over the studies shows, I’d say he was. Ergo: ‘citation needed’ – the inference you drew from that was your own. This is one of the many imbalances in internet debate. Women generally find that they can’t say ANYTHING without evidence being demanded of them, without being told that if a study doesn’t back-up their claims those claims are invalid and irrelevent, even when they’re speaking from sometimes daily personal experience. Yet men are happy to throw around claims such as those above that are both exaggerated and, I would argue (though I’m not going to because I’ve already argued enough about it), pretty dubious when you look at his interpretation of the data, and they frequently expect to be taken on good faith.

Um, Mo? These are indeed citations. You asked for them, you got them. It’s plain statistical fact; women and the elderly are in fact less at risk from crime, yet fear it more.

Interpretation of this plain statistical fact is not so plain. Perhaps we could say that men and the young are less afraid of crime than they ought to be. Since the elderly are involved in the paradox, it’s not purely a gender issue.

You cite online harassment and rape speech. This is indeed tragic and barbarous. Fortunately, rape itself has been on the decline since the early 90s. In fact violent crime in all categories have been declining during that time; yet the police (at least in the States) are tenser than ever; so the crime-fear paradox involves the entire American political system.

Why the crime-fear paradox? In the case of American police, the explanation is simple; there is not enough crime to justify the crime control, so the police rationally fear cutbacks; to justify their fancy new military equipment, they have to find crime, or create crime, or commit it themselves. Therefore Ferguson.

Why crime-fear for women and the elderly? Perhaps as a sublimation of other, more rational, fears. (Of the danger, pain, expense and commitments of pregnancy, for women; of the approach of death, for the elderly. Perhaps.)

But ultimately the blame rests with glitches in the human mind; specifically the mind’s poor intuition for statistical risk, and our attention to spectacular rare events over common dull events. Thus we fear terrorists more than lightning strikes, and murder more than car crashes, though the latter are more common.