Gender, ICTs and the sixteen days
One focus in this year's sixteen days of activism (among the many hundreds the one with the most attractive interface) is on the relationship between communications technologies and violence against women. I haven't taken up the challenge to blog the ICT-VAW link over the days between International Day for the (Ongoing) Elimination of Violence Against Women and Human Rights Day, but I know a Jen who has:
http://www.inthecompanyofwolves.blogspot.com/
See also the site around which this is based:
http://www.takebackthetech.net/
One long discovery of links between things I had never thought connected. No time for more detail - go and discover!
http://www.inthecompanyofwolves.blogspot.com/
See also the site around which this is based:
http://www.takebackthetech.net/
One long discovery of links between things I had never thought connected. No time for more detail - go and discover!
posted by chris at 1:40 AM
5 Comments:
Not sure whether information and communications technology is the baddie here - probably good to get wider access to ICT globally. And how successful would a campaign to restrict content really be? How do you separate ICT as a tool from ICT as propaganda? Go for the humans, I say.
you can argue, with respect to child pornography for example, that having a flourishing online presence for this kind of thing makes it easier to catch people, with credit card details and so on. but how far do you go in entrapping such people? berezovsky may be able to poison litvinenko to get at the kremlin, but how far should he be willing to go?
because there is a supply and demand aspect too - not everyone who gets off on rape, or sexual images of children, will themselves go and commit the necessary crimes, but they will pay for the images, which need to be made. i can believe that the ease of access to such images increases their overall number.
i'm not convinced by the idea that banning rape pornography and other content restrictions risk driving X underground - this shit is already underground, especially the clearly illegal side. the only argument is from a libertarian perspective, on which my view changes day to day (though especially when i am doing research on violence against women and reading this or that report, i can't help finding the absolutist super-fringe freedom of expression arguments indulgent and hard to swallow and articulated by people who know no hardship).
nobody is claiming ICT per se is a bad thing, but it is a tool for people to do bad things, and also a place. part of the point is to get the humans. part of it is to prevent the abuse in the first place. and if you look at the take back the tech website, a lot of it is about ICT as an empowering rather than threatening tool.
that shoulda been www.takebackthetech.net...
Bless you my dear. You made my day. I had been recently regretting starting this whole daily blogathon thing because the daily cyberspace explorations into the way ICTs can be responsible for abuse towards women (and children) began to seem endless. And in some ways worse than that was the discovery - mainly through blogs - that people are not unaware of it, merely indifferent, or, even, supportive of it.
There is indeed a great deal of fear of making a liberal-faux-pas and daring to make a suggestion that some people need to hear the word 'no'. Reasonable and rational libertarians forget that one of the results of a culture where everyone is under the illusion that we are perfectly entitled to whatever we want, whenever we want it, is rape.
However - to understate the point - it's tricky - because censorship and silence have so plagued women as a method of oppression that to utilise the same method against men would be viewed as hypocritical, and a sign of fear.
Having said that, if you'd read what I read yesterday, whilst innocently looking for gender-aware material on Russia, choosing not to don the femi-fascist outfit was almost painfully hard: I won't do him the favour of posting a link to his blog here, but if you have any desire to at all - (if the sun is shining a bit too brightly and you're feeling just a little bit content with the state of the world!) - then I've linked to him on one of my posts...
So, as you can see, I also swing from my tolerant leftie - let's-all-make-noise-together - to the right wing - we-need-to-censor-these-evil-
perpetrators-of-negativity! - on a daily basis!
By the way, incidentally, I did a post dedicated to the specific trafficking of images... basically arguing that there is not a convincing enough difference between the image and its flesh and blood original...
But, more generally, thank you - after yesterday's read I really needed to be reminded that there are people out there who do understand the difference between trying to deconstruct patriarchy and trying to destroy Man.
Muitos amores x
hi jen. i got an unexpectedly good reaction from someone earlier, when i said i thought in many ways people raised in anglo-saxon culture could use a bit of immersion in something even as little-bit foreign as central europe - it reminded me of the first time we met, at that party in north london somewhere, where there was a beach ball and johnno djed. of course, everyone should take any opportinity available to get a different cultural experience for a bit.
on the libertarianism bit - one interim complaint of mine, to forestall making my mind up, is that cartoons (and i'm talking about images which don't even pretend to be of real people) which incite racial hatred (or potentially even 'religious hatred'!) are to be banned, while those inciting rape (or even subordination of women) are legal. i'm not sure they should all be illegal, but any smarmy politician defending a rape cartoon while making no noise about race or religion equivalents is going to make me angry. when did gender disappear as a category in identity politics? was there a time the media decided they couldn't any longer get away with opposing black people's liberation and focused down on discrediting women's claims? i'm asking, because i don't know. i'm sure they could do both, though. they. the PC-gone-mad brigade, the moral-fabric-of-society-ers. the tradition-is-paramount people. fuck them all and their thinly concealed contempt for people saying it's not all peachy.
~
on a totally other note, next time an adult tells you to quit your whining about inter-generational dialogue and youth participation (and you know you do...), tell them thanks for passing you a world of elitist politics, poverty and environmental crisis, pull up your hoodie and do what you can to get asboed.
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