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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

As I get older and more aware I see rampant misogyny popping up wherever a woman challenges pretty much anything, and often merely for just existing. For something highly emotional like sports, such a reaction seems perfectly in line with what I see day to day, sadly. It's probably nobody with any power of even making any money off sports, quite the opposite, I'm sure.

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Because clearly, men don't get death threats or get investigated by the FBI when they challenge the football establishment or other sports stars.

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/men-indicted-threat...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337813/Anonymous-ha...

Nor would a man ever get death threads just for the lulz.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/4chan-bullied-the-og-youtub...

It doesn't take a lot. I write a not very popular blog, most of which is posts like "Scala is slow" or "Analyzing conversion rates with Bayes rule", and I've gotten an email or two expressing hope that harm would come to me [1].

[1] "if u get your wish just wait the cops womt protect you when underclas riot and hurt u". This was in response to a moderately popular blog post advocating that you should do a back of the envelope calculation to see if a public policy proposal makes sense ( http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic... ).

No one implied men didn't get death threats, settle down. However, it is true that women are targeted much more (especially when they are challenging mens sports).

There exist many in this world who wish all women were in the exact same position they were in the 50's.

A study in the early 90s found women featured 35 times as much as victims in Canadian news headlines than men. Not a typo.

Yes, this is just one data point, but it's a pretty unambiguous one. And of course, such studies tend to only happen once, as people with feminist agendas tend to ensure they do not get confirmed.

Do you think this might skew your perception of how often people of either gender get harassed?

> A study in the early 90s found women featured 35 times as much as victims in Canadian news headlines than men. Not a typo.

So? This doesn't say anything about actual rates of threats or harassment directed against men or women.

Give a link to said study or go back to /r/theredpill.

You

>However, it is true that women are targeted much more (especially when they are challenging mens sports).

You

>Give a link to said study or go back to /r/theredpill.

Hypocrite.

epistasis was talking about women's experiences and misogyny, sorry that seems to bother you

I think what he was trying to say is that these actions aren't really related to misogyny at all since they are also directed towards men, but general human idiocy.

Exactly. If something happens to both men and women, you need to do a lot more work (i.e., get data) to show misogyny.

All this article gives us evidence for is general nutty sports fan behavior.

> Exactly. If something happens to both men and women, you need to do a lot more work (i.e., get data) to show misogyny.

This isn't really the case. Misogyny can be a part of actions or threats targeted against women even if men have received threats in similar circumstances. The question simply comes down to the content of the threat and how often women receive threats that explicitly call out their gender or use slurs that are intended to be used against women specifically.

I think it is generally agreed upon that white males can say things that others can't say without running into death threats. It is also generally agreed upon that women are more likely to be abused for saying things.

That being said, epistasis's reasoning is still wrong. A kind reading blames the difference on misogyny, suggesting the non-misogynists send death threats to males and females alike. But that would only be true if a large portion of the people that send death threats to females would do so out of misogyny and not out of, e.g., an unconscious perception of women as easier to troll. You may argue the reality of that perception and you may want to change that, but disagreeing with it doesn't make it misogyny. That's just labeling every bit of discriminatory behavior as 'misogyny', which comes down to redefining the term.

Apart from being wrong, I think it is unwise to use language so bluntly. It makes most readers think "well, I'm not a misogynist, so nothing here applies to me", when the real thought should be "yes, interesting, how likely am I to discriminate against women? Can I identify the possibly subtle effects that lead to this discrepancy?".

Death threats and criticism do not construe misogyny whenever they are directed towards a woman, but only when they happen because she is a woman, and wouldn't happen if a man was in an equivalent situation. I'm not convinced that is the case here. According to my observation of the world, football fans tend to be aggressive towards just about everyone (and everything).

Working out whether the threat of violence is because they're a woman, instead of merely referencing gender, is difficult. Hence violence and death threats are typically classed as misogyny if they reference gender, regardless of any causality.

> The person was killed -> violence.

> The woman was killed -> misogyny.

> The man was killed -> misandry.

Makes little sense to me. It's better to default to just "violence".

Isn't it more the challenge of the establishment rather than that she is a woman? Surely the various steps and outcomes in this would have been sadly identical if a man had done the research and published it?

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