Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online | Hacker News Reader

Female violinist exposes 10 years of lewd, fetishizing messages from men online

washingtonpost.com

96 pointsjimsojim55 comments

What a terrible experience, yet I'm not surprised to know such things happen. I hope it's theraputic for her to get these out, and if she can turn the intimidation into some financial gains then so be it. Is there a way to discourage the behavior? It's a tough problem.

As an anecdote, I just had a discussion with a female community college professor, PhD, one who had plenty of bench science experience before teaching. We are both born and raised in the US. Without naming specifics here, we both agreed that while US culture has made attempts - and is making attempts - to grow past gender subujation, there are numerous other cultures which aren't even trying.

We noticed the cultural issues regarding women can be very obvious in a US educational environment. As in, for a woman to be in a position of authority, certain cultures behave in ways which do not acknowledge the earned, official status. I believe the phenomenon is real, and is a day-to-day reflection of what the violinist was exposed to in private. Also, it's one thing in person - but the internet allows for all sorts of 'border crossing' and people from all over the world are capable of reaching out and harassing someone, male, female, or otherwise.

In summation, I think US culture is attentive to a lot of 'weak points' that need to be addressed (gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, handicaps), as difficult as they are for a diverse society...while some others are, well, really lacking in this arena. Like I said, I'm not going to name any one particular one or five, because it's not my place - it's up to the members of those cultures to enact their own change.

Great comment, not sure why it was down voted. Cultures outside the US are often surprising.

Thanks, I think the biggest surprise is, well, people in the US assuming other cultures are willing to change (or mentally prepared to change) upon arriving in the US. It's not that simple. Out of sight, out of mind is one thing, but when one-on-one, it's something that takes strength and confidence to address. Not all people are comfortable in the face of intimidation or just flat-out disrespect.

Because it comes off as being slightly smug?

Personally, I feel that downvotes should only be used for comments that do not add anything constructive to a conversation.

I don't see how a downvote contributes constructively to the thread in this situation.

I like that she doesn't censor the 'authors' of the messages. Public shaming might be the only remedy against this creepy shit. But that may very well be naive thinking: if these guys would think they were doing something wrong they would probably have used an alias.

Would be funny if they experience harassment out of being exposed as a harassing person. This seems something that could happen on the internet.

> Would be funny if they experience harassment out of being exposed as a harassing person. This seems something that could happen on the internet.

Yeah, the whole vendetta thing certainly is "funny" /s

That's exactly how people defending "righteous causes" end up being trolls and harassers themselves.

>That's exactly how people defending "righteous causes" end up being trolls and harassers themselves.

When one misuses their abilities to harass/intimidate others, some of their liberty should be taken away, wouldn't you agree?

It's part of human nature. It's the old idea of an eye for an eye (which was originally intended to say if someone takes your eye you can't take MORE then an eye, but has been misrepresented as if someone takes your eye you have the right to take theirs.

Society has to be built on some form of punishment for harmful behavior, the issue is what is that punishment? Should these people go to jail? I don't think so, should they be punished in some way as a method to teach them a lesson.

If they should be taught a lesson, the favorite of most people is, "see this is how it feels." Steal and we'll take something from you, bite and be bitten, hit and be hit, eye for an eye.

The main issue is that this often (IMO) doesn't actually teach what you want. It teaches that if you bit this person they'll bite you but it doesn't address the deeper issue with the original action. Which would require therapy and a support network. All of which is time consuming.

And why would we waste our time on someone who is being punished, lets just throw them in jail because hitting people in public is wrong.

</soapbox>

In the end it's human nature to want to teach a lesson in the least amount of effort to make themselves feel better, and the easiest way to get your bang for your buck it to punish people with the same punishment they received, often times things are more complicated then that.

Sorry I went way overboard, but I've seen this time and time again, and as I have a biting, kicking, hitting 19 month old kid now, I've been looking at how do you address this without becoming a troll and in my case a toddler... I want my kid to grow up not for me to become less mature.

> There's nothing we can do

Yes there is, the first thing would be to not attempt to dismiss it

> "of course there will be some bad apples."

Or to victim blame

> Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something similar?

People facing similar harassment are all women, telling them to hide certainly isnt the answer

(apologies, was supposed to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425590, I cant internet)

Glanced over quickly, some are more crude attempts to "flirt" than to creepy, but I guess that just goes with the status quo given the complaints girls get on dating sites like Okcupid.

Kinda cool to see it all at once I guess?

Let me throw this out there too...

I had a conversation with a friend after finding pictures of his girlfriend on OK Cupid. I was like, "Hey either your girlfriend is trying to cheat on you, or someone is stealing her identity." He laughed, and said (paraphrased), "No, she kept complaining about how she didn't feel attractive, so we posted an account there for her to get some more attention. We read the comments together and she gets a confidence boost knowing people find her attractive."

Thanks for posting this. The whole debate needs a lot more counter-perspectives and this is a pretty good one.

Here is another one. http://theslot.jezebel.com/canadians-elect-guy-named-justin-... Just imagine the outcry in the feminist community if the genders were swapped and this had been written by a man about some female politician.

As some others have noted, this will keep on increasing as more people use the internet. As internet proliferation amongst less 'inclusive' societies (yes, even less than HN!)increases, online threat, intimidation and violence against women and minorities will increase.

The 'social media'/internet presumes a certain 'accepting', inherently socially liberal order amongst its users. As more and more people who don't fit that use the internet, there will be greater hate and rudeness and intimidation in the internet, and the happy-go-lucky we-are-all-one destroy-the-borders liberal dream will end. The internet will start reflecting the extremes of our behavior, and it will be ever the scarier for women and minorities.

It'll be interesting to see the evolution, and how it's handled.

I read that (deep) learning algos can decide if a message is positive or negative.

Could they learn if a message is a harassment so we could implement a automatic filter for such things?

-- Edit --

I mean this is really bad and we should get these dudes to stop somehow. But it greatly reduced my anger looking into my inbox, when I stopped seeing spam in there. The spammers did never stop...

Wow, that's a genius idea, you must be a very smart person. Last week I heard on BBC Click that Google has open-sourced their deep learning algorithm, so now even people like me can code AI apps. It's actually such a good idea that I am going to start working on it right away for my personal usage as a userscript to hide negative comments and keep only the positive ones on sites like HN, because too often people respond to my comments with nothing but disdain despite my honest intellectual efforts.

Heh, before my comment gets downvoted to oblivion: the apparently too subtle point was that for the foreseeable future machines will be unable to detect this kind of passive-aggressive comments, and that trolls aren't dumb, they will just (deep) learn to be more subtle in their trolling (and so more damaging).

Yeah even 12-year-olds can put swear words into their online names by using slang, special characters etc. If deep learning can be outwitted by a 12-year-old...

So it was a meta-joke about being passive-aggressive?

That was at the same time an opinion about your idea being bad and the argument as to why.

Okay, then I just don't get it.

That would be a great idea if all messages were not harmful in reality.

Unfortunately, some of those threatening messages are from real world stalkers. Those need to be seen because the message might be the only clue that the person has been targeted.

Such threatening messages must not be automatically deleted, rather seen, saved, and forwarded to the appropriate authorities.

Messaging between people is a complex dynamic system. If stalkers knew their messages never got received, they'd quit sending them (and perhaps stop stalking in that way). Obsessing over the messages in sort of feeding the stalker game.

This is a phenomenon I see a lot on social media honestly.

Go to any tweet of Emma Watson and try to read the replies without cringing. It's sobering enough to never, ever, ever! wish fame on anybody you love, let alone yourself.

The internet is a platform of speech for all with no restriction and it only takes 0.01% of the crazy, batshit or just fanatical people to make it seem like there is no hope for humanity.

I feel bad for her, being a female may make you feel somewhat less secure (I can't speak for woman-kind so I could be way off base), while male stars get the same kind of treatment- they're more likely to feel pretty sure that they can fend off any depraved attack when their body guards are not around.

For people that are not super rich but have a reasonable amount of spotlight, this can be the worst of both worlds.

As is well known, there are lots of people who get some sick pleasure from announcing their vile and chauvinist thoughts.

"Real names" don't seem to help. I would guess that the senders of these type of messages are socially isolated enough to not see any real social consequences of openly harassing people, women in particular.

So, what's the solution? There doesn't seem to be a proportionate response that life more difficult for online tormentors. Further, any legal response would be justifiably difficult to reconcile with freedom of speech.

It's just unacceptable in my mind that the current balance of power is so skewed towards people who harass others online.

The only solution I could think of would be for confirmed cases of online harassment (however you determine something to be confirmed, I don't know) to be sent to the offender's employer, or for something along those lines be a part of background checks/E-Verify.

You're right, it does seem like the status quo heavily favors abusers and maligns the abused. I'm sure there are several flaws with my idea. I just can't think of much else that could change anything without being extraordinarily invasive or punitive.

The comments I've seen on social media surrounding this article have to be some of the worst ever, even for internet comments.

I don't have any public presence, and yet I get creepy messages as well. I suspect the volume, ~100 creepy messages per anum, owes to being more visible.

A few of these messages sound aggressive, but most of them seem like lonely dudes without outlets. Maybe they think they are the first to compliment the lady.

And, although I'm sure I'll catch flak for saying this; there are in fact women who get off on all these things[0]. They make up a large part of the population. I'm not sure about the strategy, but the demographic for these messages exists.

[0]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsm.12734/abstrac...

This looks like a publicity stunt.

If you selectively present anything you could possibly present in a negative light and do so without context, you can make anything look bad.

If one were to look at the ratio of such messages to praise and neutral messages, that would probably paint a very different picture.

Just numerically one can see that 1000 messages over 10 years is only 3 negative messages per day, and someone famous might get hundreds, meaning the negative ones are a few percent...

It's a bit like collecting all the [dead] comments on HN, presenting them all at once and then claiming that HN is a terrible community.

Have you read any of the messages she got? Hard to see how many of those were taken out of context.

I guess getting 3 of those messages a day that she got (over 10 years) is acceptable? What's the cutoff for being acceptable here so I know when I should take her seriously.

What about the ones that seem like threats? What about the ones from the person that was arrested for stalking another woman? When do those count?

What ... what? How many messages per day from some random person saying they want to fuck you until it becomes unacceptable?

Title should read "female violinist".

She may be a violinist but she tweets like a sailor. https://twitter.com/mia_matsumiya

why is that relevant

it's not. but it's also not relevant that she is a violinist.

There's nothing we can do. Her music reached hundreds of thousands of people, of course there will be some bad apples. As more and more people start using the internet, this is only going to increase. There's going to be 3.5 billion people on the internet soon, nobody can stop that tide.

Celebrities have solved this problem by moving a step away from the population by using publicists and assistants to communicate. Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something similar? Or work under a pseudonym?

>> Perhaps people facing consistent harassment like this should try something similar? Or work under a pseudonym?

Perhaps we need to get rid of pseudonyms. A lot of this behavior would stop if people had to be identifiable. Although that doesn't seem to stop them all - you see some real names and email addresses in there.

Then post your name and address.

>> Then post your name and address.

I almost do. You should be able to locate my real world postal address inside of 10 minutes. Probably 5.

I'm not saying there should be no anonymity online. I think the default should be identifiable, and sites and services can strip that info and provide locally anonymous environments. That way you can't get anonymous attacks unless you're participating in those places. It's easy to strip ID, but hard to verify it if it's not built-in.

So you would require all online activity be done through "identity verifiers" such as Facebook? You have probably seen how many issues Facebook's Real Name policy has caused, and that doesn't even come close that level.

No. I would have at least a secure subnet that uses a slice of IPv6 address space to geolocate - encode lat/long/alt. As one example. So now if you know where a packet came from, you can walk your ass over there and knock on the door. I say a slice of the space because things mobile wouldn't work. There are issue of course, you need to be able to support multiple carriers among other things. But nobody is even trying to solve the problems around this, and they won't because nobody from corporations to government agencies wants it to exist.

IP addresses are not people and WiFi isn't always secure.

http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=cracking_wpa

No. Look, anonymity is a wonderful thing.

Candide, The Silence Dogood Letters, even The Mill on the Floss wouldn't have been written had the authors had to use their real names. Way too many examples to count. Hard to imagine the Revolutionary war getting as much support state-side as quickly as it did without Common Sense, which was published anonymously. So you can probably say, "Without anonymity you wouldn't be in America."

Whatever the problem, the solution should just about never be "get rid of freedom." Having some sort of NSA-approved sign-on for the internet (AKA Facebook) would be horrible. Read 1984, or Fahrenheit 451, or any other book against authoritarianism. First you make a list, then you analyze, then you start crossing people off it...

I kind of miss the days when there was general agreement that only idiots would do anything online under their real name.

I think what changed is that it got really, really lucrative to market oneself online—see also: using github and social accounts in the hiring process—even at the low end of reward for Internet activity, the pressure is real. There's now a clash between how the Internet works, which has not changed, and economic incentives, which have.

Disclaimer that is for some reason necessary on any comment like this: no, of course I don't think harassment is OK.

I agree there's a push to have a public persona online.

My perspective... you have a "work" account (LinkedIn, GitHub, Dribbble), and you have your personal accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), and you draw a clear line.

If you want to Tweet with the public, set up a public Twitter that is only for professional photos, and comments. And block out everyone except your friends from the private account.

Is it more work to have public and personal profiles? Sure. But so is putting on a condom. And by the same logic, if you can't be bothered to take the extra time, maybe you should rethink the activity.

Compare the second part you say to the following:

>IF I come and creep you out, stalk you, threaten harm to you and your family, maybe you should just change name and location, and go live in a different state.

Pre-empting the 'but this is internet, just stop looking at it', argument:

Essentially, how is it different from "if X group of people doesn't want to be harassed, they should just avoid their harassers, and not go to where they are". Replace the "X" with women, or persons of any race.

I totally get where you're coming from, I don't like what I suggested either. But it is reality. We would be ignorant to say "Shouldn't people just stop harassing?". People won't stop harassing. You can educate and PSA the hell out of the issue. It will not stop. You can lessen it, but it won't stop; welcome to Humanity.

Like I said, celebrities have been dealing with this for decades. It's only become an issue now because "commoners" are much more capable of reaching fame than ever before. Nobody shed any tears for the hundreds of actors and actresses who have been harassed over the years. "That's fame, deal with it" they said.

>IF I come and creep you out, stalk you, threaten harm to you and your family, maybe you should just change name and location, and go live in a different state.

I would alter that to say "maybe you should contact the police".

Yupp. As many, including Brianna Wu, have done. Then what? The harasser could be a 21 year old man in Siberia, covering himself up with multiple layers of anonymity.

I'm suggesting that the attackers will keep attacking until you leave the platform, or just shut up, and so they will have won. The means to police harassment is not yet where we expect it to be. Why should those that are being attacked be on the lookout? As many in this forum feel, if the governmental authorities shouldn't have the abilities to shut you up, why should randos on the internet? (I would argue they can, and often are both one and the same)

Imagine suggesting to Cory Doctorow that he should work under a pseudonym because the British government doesn't like what he's saying. My argument is: what you're saying is equivalent to that.

I'm not going to pretend I have answer, but I'm just going to repeat what I said; that celebrities have been trying to solve this problem for a long time. They hire security, have security installed in their homes, etc. etc.

Plugging our ears and saying "LALALA the bad guys need to stop being bad" won't solve anything. Because yes, people will hide behind proxies.

You don't need to leave the platform. You don't need to move states. But you do need to do something. You can't just sit around waiting for someone to come to your rescue.

You know, the kinds of comments you have repeatedly made in this discussion helps create an atmosphere where creeps feel okay about doing shitty things and everyone looks the other way and says "Boys will be boys."

I get that you think you are just being pragmatic, but since you do not have an actual solution to offer, the best thing you can do is at least not help promote an atmosphere where folks think it is normal and okay for men to behave this way. Choosing to not put out the fire with gasoline is a constructive choice if you have no real solution to offer. It at least burns slower that way.

Or perhaps creeps could try stop being creeps.

Yeah totally. And murders should stop being murders. And rapists should stop being rapists. So easy!

I wasn't quite ready to go with 'creeps should be removed from society for the good of the rest of us', but ok.

Look so many things wrong with this.

1) The guys.

2) There is nobody there to verify the guys. I mean... nobody is making sure the person who posted those pics are the actual people, so now, "Oh hey that looks like my neighbor, Joe." But we don't know if it was Joe, or someone pretending to be Joe, or who just looks like Joe, or someone who hacked Joe's account as a prank. And why this is important... lives get ruined on these sorts of accusations.

3) The message it sends that "all guys" are just pervert sex monsters who want to rape cute online girls. If not "all guys" most, or many... anyway the point is really just that this woman set up a highly public profile, and we have no idea what percentage of guys who looked at it were douchebags. I'm guessing it's sub 1%.

So look, anecdotally, some guys on the internet are douchebags. Sure, no question. But is this the right way to combat it? Meh. Not really.

SOLUTION for reducing the number of comments like these. After midnight add a drunk captcha to the forms. "You must do math to proceed." Or, "You must use proper spelling and grammar to send messages to someone you don't know."

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