Another Rape In Cyberspace
November 2007 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Gamer Soap
- Gaming in the Media: Fallen Guitar Heroes
- Market to Me: Using sex to sell
- Gamer vs Gamer: The Virtue of Reality?
Interviews
- Industry Interview: Shelly Mazzanoble [Author, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress]
Articles
- Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Into the Tavern, Part II
Author: Samara Hayley Steele
- Sims vs. Playboy: Sex and Relationships in the Dark Ages of Video Games
Author: Cherie Thomason
- Another Rape In Cyberspace
Author: Pat Miller
- Immaculate Reception
Author: Latoya Peterson
In this ongoing series, Samara shares her experiences as a female LARPer in a male-dominated LARP Organization.
Cherie discusses the portrayal of sex in console video games.
The trauma of a sexual assault is not limited to physical hurt. Pat discusses the violation of virtual bodies as analogous to that of real bodies, and wonders how it can be stopped.
Latoya discusses the lack of sex in mainstream video games and critiques the interplay between hyper-sexualized characters and their chaste actions.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
Odds 'n Ends
Women’s bodies are a fairly popular target of violence. Rape and sexual assault occur with depressing frequency, both as individual acts of violence and as weapons of war. Dominant conceptions of beauty, propagated through the popular media, put both women and men in places that pressure women to inflict violence against their own bodies in the form of excessive dieting, exercise, plastic surgery and eating disorders. Spousal abuse is not only a common phenomenon, it is also recognized as overwhelmingly something that a man does to a woman. There is nothing on a woman’s body that has not been targeted by a deeply patriarchal system in order to subdue her, submit her, and leave her vulnerable. Sex used against the female body is quite possibly the most effective weapon of our time.
The rape of virtual bodies
Readers of this magazine are no doubt familiar with the idea that violence does not have to be purely physical to target the body. The trauma of rape is not easily reducible to the physical remnants of the act - tears in the vaginal walls or perhaps the cuts and bruises from an attempt to resist - but rather (if only to scratch the surface!) the reminder that to be gendered female is to be weak and vulnerable and unable to control by whom, and when, and how your body is accessed. The idea of violence as something that is not necessarily immediately physical, however, takes an interesting turn once we make our own first forays into the internet, and we begin to project our bodies across MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and so on. In some ways, it feels empowering to be able to carve out our own place on the internet, whether it is a blog or a podcast or a Facebook page or what-have-you, and take comfort in the agency we can exercise over our own (virtual) selves. But we are also sometimes reminded of how that is vulnerable too, that our internet spaces are exposed and accessible to people just like our physical bodies are.
Enter “Applemilk1988″, also known as Emily, a fairly recent YouTube sensation who has, among other things, made it on YouTube’s internally-tracked Most Viewed and Most Subscribed list. Over 14,000 people subscribe to her video-blog, which generally chronicles a day in the life of a nineteen-year-old white girl with a penchant for Japanese anything and everything. She sings in a few episodes, she teaches “Pretty Intense” Japanese lessons, and she made a splash rather recently for selling off her beloved Mew Limited Edition Nintendo DS for $1500 to raise money for a trip to Japan. I imagine it is not tremendously surprising that an attractive young girl with a thing for anime, video games and webcam exhibitionism has drawn attention from certain places on the internet, especially considering the ever-present image of young male video gamers and anime fans as chronically ignored and undesirable to young women.
Now, I’ll be honest: judging from her videos, Emily is not the kind of person I try to surround myself with. Her “Pretty Intense” Japanese lessons smack of condescension and arrogance, and much of her other material speaks to an immature compulsion to attract others’ attention. Frankly, I’m glad I’m not the kind of person who her video-blog appeals to. But I am hardly the type to go out of my way to tell people on the internet that I don’t like them, and after seeing what the 4chan (an anonymous internet messageboard) “Internet Hate Machine” did to her, it seems like I’m in the minority.
Only days after embarking on her trip to Japan, the password to her YouTube account was “phished” and made available to the public on 4chan, and within hours every single internet space she occupied was saturated with a lot of sexually violent material. Logged threads reveal attempts to drain her phone cards, fake communication with her boyfriend designed to disrupt their relationship, leak confidential Instant Messenger conversations about sexually transmitted infections, and inform (falsely) all of her fans that she committed suicide. Other threads yield megabytes of data and hours of creative effort spent by other members of the anonymous internet lynch mob, who were creating fake pornographic images by placing Emily’s face on naked female bodies with constant reference to raping her “at full force in her vagina, mouth, and ass”. 4chan’s Japanese equivalents over at another forum, 2ch, appeared to join in. Someone even went out of their way to illustrate a comic that depicted brutally raping Emily in vicious detail. The message is clear: women who attract attention in digital spaces are forever vulnerable to the unwanted attention of a legion of educated, talented, privileged young men who will inflict sexual violence upon their bodies wherever they can gain access.
Understanding the impact of virtual actions on real people
“But it’s not real”, people cry. I hope at the least that the men - possibly dozens or hundreds or even thousands - who joined in what amounts to a cyberspace gangrape have convinced themselves of this, for the alternative - that they fully understood the implications of their actions and joined in anyway - is too frightening for me to comprehend. I am sure (just like I am sure that virtually everything I write elsewhere will get one commenter telling me racism ended in the 1960’s) that these men do not see the injury that they have inflicted, upon Emily and upon women, because they live out their daily lives in a world where the injury they inflict does not count unless it leaves a mark, and the women they hurt simply need to toughen up like fathers teach their sons, without a thought for how they themselves would feel if they saw their own daughters’ images manipulated into sex without their consent.
What we need to acknowledge is that this kind of thing is real, that we use our personal spaces across the internet as extensions of our selves, and that we become personally invested in them. But we also need to acknowledge that while anyone on the internet could potentially be a target of anonymous malice and injury, it manifests against women as highly gendered and sexualized. We’ve seen sexual harassment occur whenever a distinctly female voice appears on a teamspeak server. Now we’ve seen the tools of gender oppression and sexual violence made available, democratized and accessible to a veritable army of men who do not know the hurt they cause, and, perhaps, do not know any other way to act towards women. Now, now more than ever, bodies are more than physical and violence is more than physical.
I could not begin to answer the question “why do men do this?” any more than I could answer the question, “why do men rape?”, so I can’t really end this article with a satisfying explanation for exactly what is going on and why and how to stop it. (Sorry.) I will say, however, that I would love to see the online feminist and feminist-friendly communities begin to develop for ourselves the structures needed to support the victims of gendered violence as it occurs online, and perhaps channel resources into developing our own ways to support, educate, and prevent this kind of thing as best we can.
