#Gamergirl

Lissa is sprawled out and halfway under the cream colored comforter on her bed when she hears her phone vibrate. It snaps her back from near-sleep with a jolt, but she just as quickly dismisses the idea of checking it. It’s too late as it is, and she figures whatever it is can wait. If it is an emergency, the person will call, right? Right. That internal semi-debate is over almost as soon as it begins then she settles herself back into the pillows pulling the comforter up higher over her shoulders.

It’s not long before the phone vibrates again. And again. And again. It doesn’t finish that signature buzzbuzz buzzzzz before it starts again. She’s mega-annoyed when she finally sits up in bed and snatches the phone off the nightstand. If it’s Amy, she thinks, pining over some guy she saw at the bar, I swear I will kill her. She swipes the lock screen on her phone and enters in her security code. In her frustration and sleep-state, it takes a couple tries before she enters it correctly while the phone continues its neverending cycle of vibrations. What the fuck is going on? Finally she gets it unlocked and slides the notification menu down. Twitter. Twitter. Over and over and over. She can’t delete one notification before another one pops up. She swipes the notification menu back up to open the Twitter app itself. She doesn’t even have 100 followers on Twitter, so she has no idea what's happening.

Her heart is beating harder with her frustration and a slight sense of panic. Nothing good could come from a blow up like this on her Twitter. She’s read the stories. She knows what women on the Internet have to go through or really anyone on the Internet.

When her feed loads, she touches the icon for her notifications. By now there are dozens of them, but she doesn’t stop to read them yet. She wants to see what started it all.

Oh shiiiiiit, she thinks. She sees it and knows immediately how fucked she is. She tweeted a photo of her GTAOnline character, a woman dressed in a corset and made a snarky comment about how ridiculous it is to think a woman would boost cars in that thing without her tits falling out. She meant it to be funny. I mean, she’s the one that put the corset on her when there were other options. And she tagged it… Of course she did. How stupid could she be.

#gtaonline

#allaboutthecleavage

#sensibleoptionsforcartheft

#gamergirl

#toosexyforyourcar

And that’s all it took. The tweets are still pouring in calling her an idiot, telling her she gave gamers a bad name, demanding she shove her feminism up her twat. The insults come hurtling toward her at light speed.

Cunt.

Bitch.

Psycho.

Fat.

Ugly.

Stupid.
Everything that people will call a woman when they don’t like what that woman says…

She has a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she reads through more. There are people threatening to shove her game controller up her various orifices, to rape her with it, and even to kill her. There are more telling her she should kill herself. Fuck. Her address! Her whole entire fucking address is posted. Photos from her personal Facebook page have been uploaded with comments about her appearance. Photos from Instagram! Even that risqué one she took in the bathtub with the hashtag gamerslut.

And then she sees it… some guy retweeted her address and says he’s exactly 57.4 miles from her house and will be there to burn it to the ground in just over an hour.

Her heart thunders in her chest. Her ears are ringing. In the glow of the phone, the room looks like it’s spinning. She has to make a run for the bathroom barely making it to the toilet before what’s left of her midnight snack is reversing its trajectory.

What do I do now? Do I call the cops? Would they take it seriously? Is it serious?

Am I safe?

______________________________________________________________________________

It’s quite possible that in this scenario, the main character IS fairly safe. She *might* not actually get her house burned down as the threats against people online often end up being empty ones meant to scare a person into silence, but that’s not always the case either. We live in a world where women have been targeted and murdered simply for not wanting to sleep with a man or for being a female in a male dominated industry because, as a lot of men will tell you, no woman could ever be successful in

a field that men love without fucking men to get to the top and those “females” deserve their unethical actions to be exposed, right? Amirite?? We seriously live in a world where a woman who states publicly that she believes in the gender wage gap and wants equal pay will be threatened with rape, where a woman can tweet a smartass comment about a sports game and be threatened with rape. And, unfortunately, this world is one where 98% of rapists never spend time in prison.

How can we guarantee safety for women in that kind of world?

Our society has evolved to a more technologically based one. We live and thrive on social media. We stay buried in our phones. We summarize our lives in 140 neat little characters. We exist in snapshots and tidbits. There’s no denying this change. Yet, there are no ways to protect yourself as an adult when online threats and cyberstalking happen. Most state laws that actually have cyberbullying laws use those laws to instruct public schools to have policies to punish these occurrences for students. Adults have nothing. Elliot Rodgers uploaded his entire manifesto online, but no one would do anything. Rape threats are made every second, but no one has a way to take legal recourse for those threats. Regardless of many people feeling like the government has enough power, that we have enough laws as is, the safety of women, of men, of children is truly at risk when there is no legal statute nor court precedent to protect them allowing assholes to make threats, publish addresses and terrorize others freely without consequence. That freedom only bolsters these bullies increasing the intensity and frequency of their attacks.

Even if you can argue the absence of any real threat, the potential for crippling mental health issues stemming from the kind of situation the character in the story faced is very much present, accounted for, and real. Stress, anxiety, depression… even post-traumatic stress disorder has been claimed following an attack. Clinical psychologists have agreed that this is a very real possibility. Given my education in counseling/psychology, I agree. The constant barrage of threats and bullying could most definitely lead to the development of PTSD which involves anxiety, emotional deregulation, emotional intensity, avoidance of triggers, nightmares, insomnia, inability to focus, reckless behavior, hopelessness, intense shame or guilt, and interpersonal problems.

There’s no magic fix that will eliminate this sort of behavior, but if these sorts of things happened face to face, the offending person would be charged with harassment, stalking, or possible even terroristic threats. An evolving, technologically dependent society needs laws that reflect the times. We should already be at this point instead of leaving people with no actual way to legally protect themselves. Many end up fleeing their own homes and hiding out until the blowback dies down.

As a society, we need to demand more be done and stop dismissing these behaviors as empty threats from neckbeards still living with their moms. That may actually be the case, but why are we so willing to risk people’s safety to protect assholes who hide behind a computer screen?

Fuck that. People’s wellbeing should always come before the unhindered freedom to be a dickhead. Period the end.

So, share the stories, demand people listen, and push for more to be done. That push is the only way to get anything done.

____________________________________________________________________

This has been another installment of Sunday Confessions! Be sure to check out the More than Cheese and Beer page for other linkups and the Facebook page for anonymous confessions

The Art of Exposing Douches

As many of you probably already know, I have a second blog that I co-run with Ash from More Than Cheese and Beer called DoucheArt. If you’ve never visited that particular site, in a nutshell, we take messages we receive on dating sites (and reader submissions) that are oversexualized and awful and turn them into kitschy art with a little commentary following the images we post.

This has not always gone over well with male readers. Some comments that we’ve gotten include:

· If you really wanted to help, you could use your time to do so much more.

· Why don’t you just block those guys and not worry about it?

· Isn’t getting revenge on stupid people a little petty?

· Making fun of people who don’t really know any better isn’t productive.

Let me address all those in one big lump. Because they’re all relatively linked and all bullshit.

I’m not sure why the assumption is the only people who send awful messages are stupid, socially inept, and don’t know any better. The facts are that after years of being on dating sites, these messages come from people of all races, ages, socioeconomic classes, intelligence levels, and genders (though from my personal experience, they come from men far more often than women). They aren’t coming from stupid people who don’t understand how to talk to others; they come from people who purposefully send such messages because they have issues. Having issues and not knowing any better are two very different fucking things, and the former doesn’t need to be excused. It needs to be highlighted more often and understood in the dating site context.

See, the thing is…we are trying to help on an issue that far too often goes ignored because so many people feel ashamed and guilty for receiving these kinds of messages over and over again. It can be frustrating, sure, but at the core of it is a very big issue that is ever-present in our society. It’s not about revenge, not in the least. It’s about shining a light on these sorts of messages instead of sweeping it under the rug. It’s about making a statement that this shit is not fucking acceptable, not in the least, and that when a message like this happens, it's evidence of the fucked up views of society manifesting in some asshole with too much time on his hands.

What happens when a man (or woman) sends a message detailing the sorts of things he (or she) would like to do to you without ever having talked to you first is tantamount to sexual assault. It’s not any different at all than a man in a trench coat flashing his flaccid little weewee at old ladies in a grocery store parking lot. That message is sent without respect for the person who reads it and is sent for the thrill of sending it just like the flasher shows off his sad little pecker for the thrill of doing so and not with the idea that it is going to win him a date with double-couponing octogenarians. Blocking the person after the fact is like telling your horrified grandmother to just erase the memory of the tragedy that lived beneath the trench coat AFTER she was flashed. It doesn’t fucking work that way. The damage has already been done.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-v, the criteria for exhibitionistic disorder, one of the paraphilic disorders detailed in the manual, includes the following:

· Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent and intense sexual arousal from the exposure of one’s genitals to an unsuspecting person, as manifested by fantasies, urges, or behaviors.

· The individual has acted on these sexual urges with a NONCONSENTING person, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

Exhibitionistic disorder is highly associated with antisocial personality disorder which is characterized by complete lack of regard for others, manipulation, criminal behavior, lying, conning, and impulsivity. Psychopathy is a subtype of antisocial personality disorder.

I provide that information to illustrate that getting aroused by showing off your genitals to random people really isn’t all that different from sending unsolicited dick pics (which happens. often. Some people even try to beat the bots and use dick pics AS THEIR PROFILE PICTURE) and it’s not all that different from sending a woman a message detailing all the perverted things you want to do to her. She didn’t ask for that information. She is NONCONSENTING. The person who sends those messages, as with the person who flashes his weewee, has no respect or concern for the person who sees. He (as almost all clinical exhibitionists are male according to prevailing studies) has no regard for what the other person wants or for the other person altogether. It’s a sick motherfucker who gets online and jerks off while sending a quantity of random women perverse messages. And make no mistake—that is exactly what is happening. It’s not about her or about how attractive she is. It’s about getting off because it’s a thrill to send something like that and imagine the woman’s face when she opens the message. It’s a new era of exhibitionistic disorder that needs to be studied for future inclusion in the paraphilic disorders of the DSM.

And when you get right down to it, this is all an extension of rape culture, of the sense of entitlement some men have to do whatever it takes to get off even when the other person has absolutely zero desire to be involved. It’s about the attitude that, for men, women are here for their enjoyment especially their most base pleasures and that we, women, really don’t have much say in the matter. The Internet has made this mode of thinking (and yes, I know, #notallmen) even easier to capitalize on because there are relatively NO consequences for this kind of behavior and plenty of websites that promote and celebrate it.

This isn’t about revenge as has been said to us. It’s not petty. It’s not about making people look like idiots. This is about highlighting a serious issue that is basically treated, as always, as the woman’s responsibility and her fault. I can’t tell you how many times that Ash and I have heard “if you don’t want to deal with that then why are you on those sites?” like we’re ASKING FOR IT just because we want to network outside of our very limited local social circles. We’re asking to be abused because we have a profile on a website that is not designed specifically for fetish behaviors, hookups, or casual sex but for dating and getting to know people? Right… I’m tired of being told to just ignore the messages and block the person because in the end, that dude is sending out dozens more to dozens more women who all have to deal with it themselves. I’m tired of being told to report it (like I don’t) when I know each and every person who gets reported just makes a new profile. I’ve gotten messages from the same guy who always talks about how much he wants to dominate me with his 10 inches from at least half a dozen different profiles over the last few years.

This needs to be treated like the serious issue that it is and while we sometimes write from a humorous point of view on DoucheArt we do maintain that the Internet community needs to be more aggressive about this issue. The scariest part of this is that sexual offenders often escalate in their crimes. A person who starts out as a flasher or as an Internet scumbag who sexually assaults women with his explicit messages may very well end up a repeat sex offender as the thrills of *just* flashing recedes and the person in question needs more and more to achieve the same state of arousal.

And, even when the person is not messaging a detailed list of all the things he wants to do and he sincerely propositions a woman in the first message, it's still that same sense of entitlement that makes him think it's okay to do so. We really don't fucking care if you have a huge dick. We really don't care that you want to suck on our tits. We don't have any desire to meet you for drinks and a little fun because you want to show our clitorises a good time. When you have no respect for us on a dating site, why the fuck would you respect us when we said "no" in person? And by then it's too late, isn't it?

So, are there really bigger issues I could tackle or more important ones or more than I can do on my “silly” little blog? I suppose we could always do more and strive to be better, but I’m quite proud of what we’re trying to do here and will continue despite the naysayers.

This is another Sunday of Confessions with More than Cheese and Beer (link above). Please feel free to check out all the other submissions and see all the tales of revenge that should follow. Oh and Please feel free to check out this funny older post of mine involving the time my son got revenge on our cat here.

Cultural Misogyny

Rejection has been a theme over the past week for good reason. Elliot Rodgers felt the need to gun down 6

people before turning the gun on himself because he was so often rejected by the opposite sex that he found it to be unfair and needed to punish those he thought were responsible for his unhappiness. He was rejected so often he became miserable, full of hate, and violent and decided the only way to right these wrongs was to take lives—to make people pay.

That’s tragic. It truly is. But, when it all comes down to it, rejection is not the real reason Rodgers committed the atrocious acts he did.

We’ve all been rejected at one time or another and many of us handle it well or somewhat well. But to dismiss this case as one where a mentally ill man couldn’t handle rejection completely ignores the underlying cultural issues at work that have been creating an antagonistic environment for women throughout history that continues, obviously, to plague us today. So, at face value, it may seem like this is a story about a lone mad man who couldn’t stand rejection and ultimately and tragically reacted with violence, but once you take a closer look at things, you being to see the sense of entitlement at work—an attitude that women can tell you is all too common in so many men with whom we have contact.

Rodgers said he wanted to kill women for never finding him attractive enough to fuck him and for ruining his

time at college. He wanted them to sleep with him but the fact that these women slept with other people made them sluts. It’s the double-edged sword issue that women have been facing for ages. If we’re sexually active, we’re sluts, but if we won’t sleep with someone, we’re prudes. It’s this cultural idea that we’re not in full ownership of our own bodies. Being in control of ourselves, doing what we want with who we want is such a foreign fucking concept that instead of being “allowed” to do what we want without commentary and with the same respect given to men in the same situations, we have people constantly policing our bodies and telling us what we should be doing with them.

To add to that, we’re expected to dole out sex to men who want to sex us without giving any thought to whether or not we’re attracted to the men in question.

No seriously. Think about it. Think about every fucking time you’ve heard the “friendzone” or heard a guy complaining that “nice” guys finish last…

In every single instance, if you really think about it, you have a man complaining that a female friend of his whom he attempted to hook up with through falsified niceties and friendship strategies had no interest in fucking or dating him. In essence, he cannot handle the fact that this person only thought of him as a friend (oh the fucking horror of actually being a friend to a woman) and was not sexually attracted to him. It is not a simple case of lack of attraction, it is now the fault of all women everywhere because we only want to fuck assholes who act like jerks and lie to us to try to get in our panties because we’re bitches.

But, wait…if this guy was putting on a bullshit act to be our friend just to try to get in our panties isn’t he the

asshole who lied to us? And we didn’t sleep with *him* so.... Kinda blows that theory right out of the water. It’s not seen that way though. All across media platforms the guy gets the girl. The hero gets his babe. The hook up always happens. In books. In television. In movies. Women are objects to be pursued not persons to be respected and certainly not people with whom to be platonic friends. Ultimately, we will come around, right, guys? We’ll jump on that dick before the end of the movie if you just push and push and push until we see the error of our ways. No means negotiate. “Let’s be friends” is a death sentence, and when it happens, it’s a reason to be angered and prove your manhood through namecalling and threats or through actual violence.

Or if you’re like my stalker, just keep on texting and tracking a girl down for going on 12 years even though she consistently ignores you. She’s bound to come around at some point.

Rejection sucks. It never feels great. There’s always a sting to it. But, the difference in feeling rejected and what Elliot Rodgers’ and many, many other men feel and believe is the idea that they’re somehow owed a woman’s affections--that the world owes it to them to bestow upon them the woman they want no matter how that particular woman feels about them. Rejection then turns into injustice and that attitude becomes wholly dangerous as we saw this past week and have seen numerous times before unfortunately.

The strong urge I have to add a not all men disclaimer in this piece to avoid the same bullshit I’ve experienced while talking about this on Facebook just goes to show how bad it’s gotten, too. We’re living in this world where women are consistently objectified and seen as conquests, where men feel justified in lashing out when a woman is not interested in being their plaything, and where seemingly decent guys feel the need to put their defenses up and scream and shout “not me” every time a woman attempts to share her experiences.

It has to stop. Women need to be heard so we can finally start addressing the misogynistic culture that

shapes people like Elliot Rodgers into murderers. We shouldn’t have to sleep with a man out of fear of being slaughtered or raped for saying no. We shouldn’t have to be afraid to go on a date or be approached by a man in a fucking parking lot. We shouldn’t have men trying to shut us up when we want to share what we’ve gone through and what other women go through. I was told before I wrote this that men don’t have it easy and that blaming certain actions on culture doesn’t address that. But, no one has an easy life. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to be a series of challenges and obstacles that help you grow. The problem right now is that we live in a culture where on top of the experiences we all have in life that challenge us to be stronger, women of all races and ages and sexual orientations face these unique-to-us situations that make life harder and scarier than it has to be and, at every turn, bringing about awareness on this issue gets shut down.

And that’s fine. I’ll just get louder.

Who’s with me?

This has been part of Sunday Confessions with More Than Cheese and Beer. The prompt was rejection. Check out hers and the rest of the contributors' posts! It's always fun to see how each person takes and interprets their posts.