“There are no girls on the internet”
“There are no girls on the internet” is one of the “rules of the internet” of the olden times. It was a tongue-in-cheek saying that meant two things. The first interpretation is that women don’t hang out on online forums because only loser guys do that. This obviously wasn’t totally true, but it felt true because of the second interpretation: gender doesn’t really exist on the internet, or at least it didn’t back then. Someone posting on IRC or 4Chan could be male, female, black, white, or any combination or race or gender, but you wouldn’t know that. Your post just existed in a void, completely separate from your social identity. While sexism and racism existed, someone wouldn’t be discriminated against on those grounds, because on the internet there are no girls. Only people.
People who brought up their gender were accused of being attention seekers who couldn’t get by on their own merits. This was probably just a shitty excuse to justify harassment (ie tits or gtfo), but there might have been some truth to the idea that your gender and race have no effect on the legitimacy of your opinion.
Today on the internet, a the “rule” “there are no girls on the internet” is completely done away with. Not only is the social makeup of the internet much more diverse today, all of the major networking sites have profiles on which you can proudly display your gender, race, sexuality, etc.
I only just now came to realize this difference as I was reading some threads that posted statements like “as a gay man” or “as a girl who...”. These kinds of statements used to attract ridicule, but are now accepted as the norm.
I’m not sure if this is an improvement or not. I do think it’s an improvement that harassment is no longer tolerated, but I struggle with the concept that it’s okay to that someone’s race/gender/etc can legitimize a claim, but it is not okay to think that it could deligitimize someone’s claim.
Again, I want to add a disclaimer that I do not think it is or ever was good to harass people, or to discriminate based on identity. I just want to start a conversation about how the internet has changed in this respect, and whether or not online discourse has been hurt by this change.
A few years ago I created an account on reddit that was completely gender-neutral. I'm a guy in real life, but I liked the idea that I could be agender on the internet. I was just a name. I didn't reveal any personal information.
In one of the threads I posted in, an argument grew to be pretty heated, and I sided with one of the other commenters who was openly female. The argument grew big enough that it got linked elsewhere and received much, much more attention than it should have.
And guess what? I got a ton of shit, incommensurate with the magnitude of my comments, from people who assumed I was a woman. I got nasty responses, abusive PMs, even a few inappropriate pictures. And let me clarify: there was nothing in my post nor in my post history that at all identified me as a woman. I simply defended one.
It was really eye-opening. A year prior, my sister had the same thing happen to her. She posted an innocent reaction gif with a girl in it, and it hit the front page. Because it had "mrw" in the title, people assumed she was a woman (correctly this time) and responded equally terribly. She had told me about this when it happened, but I didn't really understand just how invasive and demeaning it was. I didn't have a sense of what it actually felt like until I had my own experience with it. I texted her later that day, after clearing out my poisonous inbox for the nth time, to apologize. Up to that point I had always supported reddit over her with weak, "a few bad apples"-type reasoning. I now knew how wrong I was. She told me, with a sense of solidarity, I had "committed the crime of being a woman on the internet." Sounds a bit different if the rule is phrased like that.
And what she said really highlighted the true issue for me. The problem wasn't that there were a few bad apples. The problem was a funny truism for the in-crowd, "there are no girls on the internet", was really a giant "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" sign outside their clubhouse. For people on the inside, everything was fine and dandy. They were having a grand old time! In fact, that's what made it so bad when a girl showed up! We were having such fun until one of them came along and ruined everything!
But it's ultimately illusory. If you're outside the clubhouse, you see it for what it is: it's not an agender utopia, but an explicitly gendered coterie of commenters that sees itself as the norm. What has changed is that people have started demanding their space in the clubhouse too, and they've been trying to take down the demeaning sign.
I think of it this way, if the beauty of the internet is that we can separate ourselves from gender using fake names, then we cannot make it one-sided. Freedom from gender also has to mean freedom from being gendered as well. It means freedom from having someone else's gender-based baggage thrown upon you. It's not that we all make a pact to be silent about what we really are--it's that when someone does mention what they really are, we pay it the same amount of mind as we would any other piece of disclosure. If I say I'm a teacher people barely go "hmm, interesting," but if I say I'm gay, suddenly the responses escalate in tone. By making the feedback for that kind of disclosure far greater in impact than any other, we do the opposite of agendering or anonymizing our community: we deeply entrench values relative to identity, but in a one-sided, negative way.
I think this is an important point. Women (or people perceived to be women) might get attacked under the justification that they are "attention seeking," but I feel like it's much more likely that they simply mentioned something offhand or supported a particular viewpoint or person.
When the assumption is that there are "no girls on the internet," even a generic indicator that someone might be a woman becomes a big glaring flag that "this person is unusual." It grabs people's attention... and perhaps some people then decide that this attention-grabbing is intentional, rather than simply a byproduct of their unconscious assumptions.
Hey, IRC days were not that long ago... crap... I am getting old.
I live by that rule, I never assume gender/sex/race and I read all comments neutrally. That might be a hold over from me growing up in "the olden days of the internet", but I have always looked at it as a good thing. I do not allow my inner monologue to sway the way I read comments, I do not assume the identity of the writer and I take them at face value.
Personally, I have always looked at that rule as a good thing.
While I feel similarly, I think the rule can easily be backed by bigots who use it to mean "by default, everyone on the internet is like me". They don't want you to bring up race, gender, sexuality. They don't want to hear that, compared to their mental image of the internet, it is more diverse than expected.
Would you mind elaborating as to why that is necessarily a bad thing? I’m no psychologist, but I would guess that most people, even when reading a book, assume the gender and race of an unspecified person being like their own, unless told otherwise.
Also, how does this practice hurt online discussion? Racists assume everyone is white, and then treat everyone like they’re white. That obviously isn’t a good practice in the real world, but how would this be bad on the internet?
I'd say this is not necessarily true. I'm not a guy, but in the days of IRC and webforums I'm pretty sure my brain defaulted to "this person behind the text is male" more often than not. It wasn't a conscious decision, and I could easily update that assumption (usually without even noticing), but it was just a general... feeling, one no doubt created from the cultural idea that there are "no girls on the internet" and that (white) male is society's default.
One possible reason this would be bad: Racists who know/assume you are white write racist things because they think people will agree with them, which fosters a racist atmosphere in a community. That's unwelcoming (to put it mildly).
Probably most of the time no harm is done to anyone (although the close-minded person could be considered a harm to themselves).
But if someone starts off a discussion with the inclusion of their gender for context, maybe instead of a discussion these people shut down the entire thread. They claim that gender should have no meaning on the internet and so the OP has some motive for mentioning their gender.
This is really important to bear in mind, well-said. I do some work on a wiki whose topic (Elder Scrolls) happens to attract a crowd of predominantly white men, often teenagers. Now, offensive conduct isn't as much of a problem in a small community like that as it is on somewhere like Reddit. However, when such issues are brought to light, a portion of the userbase has a tendency to shut down any discussion of race/gender/sexuality on the grounds that it's "getting too personal" or similar, even though the personal nature of these issues is often the thing that should be discussed the most.
Maybe they just want to read information about a video game they happen to like without getting too personal with the people they discuss it with? I've been a part of a great many forums in my online history, and the only time I've heard anyone say anything is getting too personal is when they really just want to stick to the topic at hand. For instance, on a watch forum, not many people are interested in your pregnancy. They want to talk about watches.
I was more referring to moments of harassment (and analysis of discriminatory themes in games, too), not general off-topic discussion. It's one thing to become upset over a user steering the topic of conversation into something personal and irrelevant, but it's another to bring up facets of life that are important to the matter at hand. In a thread about forms of racism in Skyrim, for instance, someone coming from a disadvantaged background could offer insight about this theme without derailing it (in fact, this additional perspective could very well help develop it further). What I find problematic is that useful, high-quality discussions like this are often obstructed by people who would rather not consider those kinds of perspectives at all.
Exactly, I play videogames to get away from real life. I don't give a fuck what gender/race/whatever you are, all I care about is how you play and I'm not interested in having that stuff crammed down my throat.
So do people who aren't you. So when I encounter Yet Another Example Of Sexist Tropes In Gaming, that's not getting away from real life, that's real life forcing itself into my funtime hobby. Why shouldn't I be allowed to vent about it?
I interpreted the above comments to refer to off-topic mentions of gender/diversity/whatever. Your example is relevant to the game, and if it isn't hijacking an existing thread then whatever, I can scroll past it if I don't want to deal with it or dip in and agree that yeah it'd be nice to be able to play as a woman who doesn't dress like a slut.
But when I'm debating the merits of holy vs disc for 3v3 arenas, it's really not the place to chime in and go off on a tangent about the stereotype of only women playing healers and how I'm a horrible person for [insert convoluted argument here].
That's what I mean by "crammed down my throat." And yes, that example actually happened, although it was in a guild chat rather than a forum thread. I was talking about builds with a guildie and someone joked that I was violating the stereotype by being a guy who's really into healing. Someone else ripped into them, ranting incoherent nonsense about sexism and how they were a horrible person blah blah blah. Nobody was being offensive in the slightest and that incident led to the guild instituting a "keep politics out of guild chat" rule.
On the other side, there's people who bring real life into the game in all sorts of ways. There's the stereotypical person who (I've never met anyone like this) blames their race/gender for every bad thing that happens to them. That's not related to the game at all. Neither is the football game last night, or the latest celebrity gossip about who slept with who, and so on.
My tolerance for how much real life is injected into the game is inversely proportional to how hostile and forced it is. Someone starting a thread about sexist issues in the game, no big deal. Someone threadjacking and ranting about stuff, yeah, keep the social media mobs in real life please.
tl;dr: Your example is relevant to the game and it doesn't sound like you would bring it up on unrelated threads. My problem is with people who drag that stuff into everything, no matter how tangential and irrelevant it is.
That sucks. But that's really not what comes to mind when people scoff about how women should keep their identities out of gaming (but men don't have to).
I've met people like this, but they were never women or people of color. Just saying.
I was thinking of forums, since OP was talking about Ye Olden Dayes of the internet, but since we're talking modern gaming, should I bring up how women can't speak in voice chat without having to worry about getting harassed for it? It's perfectly okay for someone with a voice that sounds male to talk as much as they want, but if you have a woman's voice, then screw you, you're an attention whore.
Isn't it? It seems to me that most people who say stuff like that (asides from the actual sexists) are taking their stance because they've experienced something similar to me.
Yeah, it was just a hypothetical. I don't think people like that are representative at all. Every group has its fringe crazies.
I don't do this and I've left guilds after joining and hearing it happen... it's really sleazy and creepy and while I could shrug it off, I'm playing the game to put at least some of the mask aside, you know? So bringing it up to me on our hypothetical gaming forum doesn't really do much. Like, what do you want me to do? I don't join in that crap and I stay away from people who do. If you're having trouble with it, find a guild who has a more up to date view, don't take out your frustration on people who aren't related to the problem. I'm here to play games, not join the crusade.
Again, though, if it's coming up naturally and is on topic I don't care. If the is thread titled "Tits or GTFO: Issues in Voice Chat" it's obvious what I'm getting into. Besides, something like that is directly related to the game. It's no different from complaining about that one guild who doxxes or that other guild who trolls Trump supporters in chat all day. The core issue isn't really about gender, if that makes sense. A game should be about leaving your real self behind. About getting away from all the stupid shit in the real world. So yeah, I don't like it when people shit on women and I don't like it when women rip my head off for not being one of them. It's not my problem; I don't support it. When I see it elsewhere I usually just sigh and scroll past it. I could scroll past the ads too -- but instead, I get an adblocker.
I wish I could get a "real life" blocker. There's a reason every good guild I've been in has had a no religion and no politics in guild chat rule.
I still prefer anonymous and pseudonymous forums to anything else, because that makes it better, and I feel like people are more honest when they aren't risking linking their pseudonym to their real life identity. This rule is one of the best things about the early days of the internet, you never knew who you are talking about, but you really got to know people. Probably because the internet was a hobby that people used to go to in their free time to have a good time, and not your whole life. Also modern social websites transitioned from assuming the pseudonym to making everything about you - people are increasingly egocentric on the internet thanks to how algorithms work on social media, and that is what makes people more depressed.
I agree entirely. I feel like I got to know people a lot better in the older days of the internet.
It’s not easy to treat comments as coming from the void on a platform like Twitter though. Every tweet is interpreted through your profile, which for most people is a picture of their face.
I feel confident that Twitter’s vitriol would decrease drastically if profiles were less personal, but that’s not at all what the website was designed for.
I do not now, nor will I ever use Twitter.
But yes, the rule applies more towards IRC and Messageboards and less so to social media.
That is a distinction we do not make anymore, I do not consider Tildes (and Reddit) to be the same thing as mainstream social media.
Facebook has that requirement. All it has done is put marginalized people at risk.
Also, it's not going to stop right-wing pundits whose entire personal brand is based on being ignorant shitcunts.
You obviously haven't read enough Bastard Operator from Hell. The internet is fine. It's the damned users that are the problem.
Yep.
I've occasionally been stuck with that role. I'd rather clean toilets.
Quora is a great example of the double edge sword aspect.
Say someone asks a question about Gamergate, or some other hot-button topic. Then you reply using your real name, in a way that might upset someone. What’s next.. Swatting? I feel like there are many other topics that might get better answers if people were allowed some anonymity. However, I do understand that real names are mostly a benefit on Quora.
That feels like its right but in reality it doesn't seem to work. It seems like the majority of people are ok with saying horrible things with their real name attached and don't think about the consequences until after something goes wrong.
That's true, if we assume that only women have a gender, while men are just the default state of being. A guy could talk about guy things all day long and no one would call him an attention seeker.
A girl could talk about girl things without mentioning they're a girl, too. One of the reasons I was inspired to make this post is that I saw on the infamous "science based 100% dragon MMO" reddit post that at the time "I am a girl" was used twice as much on reddit as "I am a guy". Apparently that's changed now, with "I am a guy" bringing 3x the results as "I am a girl".
But then again, what would you call "guy things"? I don't see why any topic should be assumed to only be discussed by one gender.
Guys could mention their girlfriends or wives without repercussion -- a mention of a boyfriend was assumed to come from a girl. Of course, in this way a woman with a girlfriend could "pass" as male, but why should she have to?
Guys went around calling each other "dude" or "my man" without comment. Likewise, the default pronoun used to refer to somebody else in a conversation was "he". If a woman wanted to correct these assumptions, she'd be accused of "attention seeking". A man did not have the same issues, because nobody would go around calling him "girl" or "she".
In health-related forums (yes, the internet isn't just for anime and video games), (cis) men could talk about whatever issues they had, but one single mention of a period or a breast cancer diagnosis? Boom, you're admitting to being a girl on the internet, you're an attention whore.
There's this common stereotype of women posing with products they've bought in photos just to get attention, but guys do the exact same thing and nobody calls them out on it.
Plus, like... usernames? The perception of someone named something like ZeldaGirl92 might be "trying to draw attention to being a girl", but nobody would think twice about someone named PrinceOfGames or FinalFantasyDude.
(I'm using the past tense for these examples but it's still this way in a lot of places, e.g. many subreddits.)
I feel the same way. The mainstream internet has just been going to crap. In my search for better places to retreat to, I found myself going to really quiet 4chan boards (like obscure /trash/ threads). Something about the anonymous board format is appealing, in the absence of the abhorrent racism and sexism that is rampant on that website.
I think it's more accurate to say that many people from the old (pre-2010) internet believed that your gender and race shouldn't have any bearing on the legitimacy of your opinion. This position was easier to justify when the internet was something more-or-less separate from real life, but has two major flaws:
Reminds me of this... from Phrack
Source: http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
EDIT: Thank you @pseudolobster for the help with the formatting. Much improved!
You might want to take another crack at that formatting. ;)
No go. I gave it a shot and it just got worse. Sorry! Click the link to see it in all it's glory.
Try this: https://hastebin.com/mojejanoja
What I did: Open in a text editor that supports find-and-replace using escape sequences. Find and replace all "\n" (enter) with " \n ". ie: Put four spaces at the beginning of each line, and two at the end.
Another thing you could do is wrap the whole block of text in
<pre></pre>tags.Edited. Thank you! Very nice.
Oof, that was pretty edgy. But I like the point made there, and can definitely relate to it. For a while it felt like everyone on the internet was just here for fun; nobody was here to cause drama.
I suppose that is just the natural way of hobbies. Once they catch mainstream, the “unwashed masses” come in and demand everything be watered down to cater towards the least common denominator of people.
The 2016 ruined the internet, in my opinion. The decline started long before then, but it was definitely accelerated by non-Twitter/facebook social media constantly being mentioned in the news.
Can't tell if you're serious or not. It's edgy in the "I'm 14 and this is deep" kind of way. But it was meant with earnest and sincerity when it was written - and for those who read it at the time it still holds some meaning.
At it's onset, the web was truly a place devoid of such markers as race and gender and one didn't make assumptions about others in that regard. So that's why I posted it, the "rules of the internet" are sort of a more practical, more cynical version.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Many fault Eternal September as the beginning of the end. But that was long, long ago.
Oh man, blast from the past, I haven't seen anyone link Phrack in a very long time.
2600 is still selling issues. The old web is alive and well.
There are some topics that actually benefit from knowing the user's gender or race too.
If somebody posts about how their neighborhood is alright and totally not racist and they're happy to be there, it's going to be interpreted as different things depending on their race. If they're non-white, then people would likely give them more credibility because they likely actually know what racism looks and feels like. But if they're white, do they really know what racism looks like?
Just like a heterosexual cis man posting about how everything on the internet is perfectly equal, because everything is catered to him and he doesn't see the discrepancies. The default pronoun is 'he', people assume that he has a dick and that he likes to stick it in vaginas. If he mentions being lonely without mentioning what gender or sexuality he is, he'll get responses about picking up a woman as a man. But if a woman were looking for advice, she'd have to specify that she's a woman and into dudes, because otherwise she'd get responses that assume she's a man.
The internet is not genderless or raceless.
Gender always existed on the internet. People use the internet, and (most) people have a gender. Even if people don't explicitly mention their gender online, it has informed the experiences they've had and the way they interact with the world.
Gender also comes up a lot more than people seem to think. As @zaluzianskya wrote in one of their comments, (straight) guys gender themselves offhandedly on the internet all the time, but because male is often considered the default it's not remarked upon in the same way. All those things, like mentioning a girlfriend, can gender someone as male (at least if you hold another common assumption- that the person is straight).
So... to avoid sexism, you'd have to be careful to never let on that you were a girl. Delete every mention of a boyfriend before you sent a message (if you were straight), hide your more "girly" hobbies, never post a picture of yourself, never argue in favor of something seen as "girly" or a women's issue, never defend someone known to be a woman. You'd just have to live with the threat of sexism hanging over you if you dared to let it slip that you weren't a dude.
I'm curious about why you struggle with this idea. If I was discussing discipline in the classroom and a teacher joined the conversation, I'd listen to their opinion more closely because they have direct experience with the issue. And if several teachers told me something I said was wrong or wouldn't work, I'd defer to their judgement because I've never taught in a classroom. Sure I might go research it to learn more, but experience means something.
Why isn't that also the case for discussions involving things like race, gender, and sexuality?
The internet was never a place assumed to be gender nuetral. The second interpretation is a later rationalization to defend the misogyny of 4chan.
When people on 4chan talked about "tfw no gf" or posted on the weightlifting forum, or made comments about themselves and others most of them were clearly gendered. I have never in my life seen somebody say "dick or gtfo."
The idea that we assume people to be genderless and colorless on the internet is a false idea (most people assume others to be like the dominant group) and a not really beneficial one at that.
People's histories inform their experiences. Even if everybody on the internet were perfectly rational (ha), it's impossible to discuss ideas you haven't been exposed to. And more than that, the power of first hand experiences is incredibly useful in forming opinions. Debates about disadvantaged groups should here from those groups. It's easy to make "rational" decisions about the merit of an argument when you never have to see the consequences from the other side. I am extremely glad the internet exposes me to new ideas and experiences from new people and my experience online would be significantly worse if I didn't get to hear from people who say they are female, black, lgbt, or whatever.
A third part was that if they state that they're a girl, creeps would demand tits or gtfo.
#2 is related to the adage of on the internet, nobody knows that you're a dog.
It's that level of anonymity that both can comfort because there is no detail provided to someone who wishes to attack, yet also bears no consequence for those that do attack.
Another interpretation that I commenly encountered the phrase was when someone was saying they were chatting up a woman online they were actually getting catfished (before the term existed) by a man.