Tag: harassment

clatterbane:

Reminded again with my tag commentary there of something I’ve been having to think about lately.

I might not be nearly as grouchy about some things by now, if I hadn’t spent over a decade living somewhere that the demographics skew heavily toward one group of people who want to give me problems. With multiple excuses to choose from.

And no, I am really not imagining that. Nor that the atmosphere has gotten more hostile over the past 5 years or so. To the point that my health has been suffering–sometimes very directly, and not just on the really blatant level of Dr. Lazy Pennypinching Racist before. It’s not at all good for my mental health either, on an ongoing basis. And I am still almost hesitant to admit that, thanks to some earlier abuse.

Too often it just feels like being stuck in middle school in a really toxic system 24/7 now, and I really do not have the spoons to get out and deal with it much. It’s just not a good situation.

And there doesn’t seem to be that much I can reasonably do about it right now. Besides remind myself that this is not just me being some kind of terrible person to keep running into shitty behavior. When I have pretty consistently tried to treat other people with some basic respect. It’s really not all on me. And I’m not necessarily in the wrong for letting it get to me after a while. Where have I heard that before? Hmm.

I mean, I recognized something was off when we were in Stockholm and I found myself that impressed at not getting shoved or yelled at on the street even once in the space of almost a week. That should be a normal amount of shoving and yelling (and rude fucking stares from strangers) to encounter out in public. But it impressed me at the time, because it wasn’t my normal day to day expectation–and things have gotten worse since.

Reminded again of Dave Hingsburger’s Enough In Atlanta. I may not have spent much time in Atlanta specifically, but yeah that’s a lot closer to my previous base expectations of (bare minimum) acceptable public behavior.

Maybe when we turned our backs or left the store, or crossed the street, they said or did something unkind. I hope not, but if that did I’m thankful they waited until I was gone. I’m thankful that they recognized that what they were going to say or do would be hurtful and decided to wait on being mean until I was well away.

“Don’t actively cause strangers out in public problems–no seriously wtf is wrong with you?!” is really not too much to expect.

See also: bankuei’s Microaggressions and larger commitments.

The person engaging in microaggressions was unable to stop themselves from attacking and holding themselves in a civil manner even for that period of time. It was urgent and imperative they remind you of their status and yours.

Think about that – they are so fully committed to dehumanizing you, that short period of time, or situation (“We are strangers walking down the street- the default assumption is to LEAVE ME ALONE”) was too much of a burden for them to stop themselves from having to spew shit to remind you of who they are and who they think you are.

Yeah, that’s just not normal behavior, no matter how socially acceptable it seems to be in some settings. Kind of worrying when you realize that you are now expecting to encounter some display(s) of hostility whenever you go out in public.

I really would like to somehow get myself enough healthier so I could reasonably GTFO and hopefully into a less hostile situation. (And not, you know, just roll over and die. Wish that were just hyperbole.) That’s the tricky part right now, of course. And I have been getting more than a little bummed about it lately. But, trying to figure out some kind of feasible strategies here.

Reminded of this one from earlier this year, after a couple of reblogs with commentary touching on abusive behavior, microaggressions, and invalidation. (Plus my tag commentary on one of them.)

Apparently I needed another reminder that objecting to dealing with this kind of behavior is totally reasonable, and it’s not something anyone should just be expected to put up with without complaint.

But, also? If I were just being paranoid about it and imagining all these unpleasant interactions, and looking for microaggressions where none exist? If–as in one example I ran across looking for this post, which really reminded me way too much of middle school–that flying cigarette butt had hit me by accident and those guys were really laughing at something totally unconnected?

You’d think that in that case, I would have just kept imagining hostility on that trip to Stockholm. (Or when I’ve been back home and people were just letting me go about my business like a normal human being, for that matter. Or…) But, I went a whole week without anybody yelling unintelligible stuff out of a car at me, or shooting filthy looks/snickering at me just for walking down the street, or anything else of that nature. It didn’t happen.

If I were really that “oversensitive” and looking for innocuous stuff to complain about, you’d think I’d find plenty wherever I go and in pretty much every situation. That really has not been the case. Ever.

I mean, this is another of those things that existing PTSD and the history of dismissal a lot of us are working from can actively make worse. It can be way too easy to quadruple guess your own perceptions, and not feel like you have much/any room to complain even if you do know deep down that this stuff is just not right and you don’t deserve it.

And there are unfortunately more than a few grown adults around who are counting on these dynamics, yeah :/ Tying back in with the commentary that got me thinking, and also very much relevant to a lot of lateral aggression.

karynchaotic:

if you see someone active on social media or something, and you message them, and they don’t reply, they don’t have to. just because they are awake and alive does not mean they have to engage with you whenever you want them to. you are not entitled to someone else’s time. 

in the past, an abuser would see me post online and then hound me on aim until i answered. i felt like i had to hide. they also lived in my building and would pound on my door if they saw me online and i wasn’t responding to them. i had to completely ditch a screenname, lie about having skype, and turn off my phone to hide. if i saw they were online i couldn’t post on facebook or interact with anyone without them demanding to interact with me. the only legitimate excuse not to talk to them was being asleep. in their eyes, if i were really their friend, i would always want to engage no matter what, even if i had a migraine or work to do or wasn’t feeling very social. it didn’t matter. 

please do not do this. if someone doesn’t write you back, don’t guilt them about where they are or what they’re doing. if you see someone posting on tumblr or facebook and they aren’t signed into aim or google or skype or whatever, that’s their business. if they are signed on but don’t write you back, it’s okay. sometimes people can’t talk to everyone all the time every time. some people can only talk to one person at a time without getting overloaded. some people are signed on in case someone needs to contact them with something important and not to be social. they’re not always hiding from you, and you shouldn’t make them feel like they HAVE to hide from you.

this is probably jumbled and i’m probably missing a lot here, but pressuring people to always be available to you every hour of the day and always answer the phone or text or chat or pm or whatever…if you require that of someone, you might need to take a step back.

Reminder: There are also actual reasons that some of us may have serious trouble responding to messages at all. And it’s unlikely to be about you unless you are acting like that.

I really don’t want to come across as some kind of antisocial asshole, but notifications popping up still freak me out every time. It goes way beyond “I don’t like IMs”. Seeing that it’s from someone I would want to talk to if I weren’t having a PTSD reaction doesn’t actually make it easier to respond, unfortunately.

No worries for anyone who hasn’t been aware of the problem. I’m still not entirely comfortable talking about it. And I feel bad about just leaving people hanging.

(To add to the OP’s excellent points.)

Racism in Denmark

thisiseverydayracism:

I live in Copenhagen, Denmark, and my parents are from Korea. The other day I went to the mall and I was just leaving a clothing store that is next to this beauty salon, and two employees from there were giving samples of some sort of soap(? and they saw me so, one of them started yelling at me NI HAO NI HAO CHING CHONG CHANG THIS FOR YOU THIS FOR YOU and then they both pointed at me and laughed. I ignored them. Then, when I went home, I contacted the company’s customer service, and talked to the manager of the store, he apologized to me and offered to send me free products. I declined the offer because I didn’t wanna have anything to remind me of what happened. However, the guy said that the two employees had been fined and that he warned them that any other misbehaviour would result in both of them losing their jobs. I am honestly just tired of people harassing me with Ni Hao, I’M NOT EVEN CHINESE, AND I WAS BORN IN EUROPE. I SPEAK 5 LANGUAGES AND CHINESE IS NOT ONE OF THEM. At least, ask me if i’m Chinese before saying Ni Hao. Even if I was, it’s not okay to just assume someone’s ethnicity by the way they look. 

[Submit your experiences here]

cartnsncreal:

Very brave woman. Racism has no place anywhere in the world. You know that this problem is even worse in America. Black people must unite so that we can say that we are a single force that will not allow such a relationship from white people.

#ProtectBlackWomen  #Racism

I Found HanAssholeSolo’s anti-Semitic Posts. Then, the Death Threats Started. – POLITICO Magazine

tenaciouscreeper:

jewish-privilege:

My reporting on the Stars of David meme quickly went viral. At this moment it’s been shared more than 14,000 times by the likes of CNN’s own Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who’s had his own run-ins with the president as of late. In the past, when a post or story of mine has garnered that much attention, I’ve always dealt with the inevitable criticism and harassment that follows. Sure enough, it wasn’t far behind.

Before the hour was up, I was receiving messages from the usual customers: anonymous accounts with Pepe avatars and bios declaring themselves “ethnonationalists” and “white identitarians.” Despite my Southern Baptist upbringing, they assumed I was Jewish because I’d uncovered anti-Semitism, and so the threats and memes predictably featured pictures of Adolf Hitler, scenes from the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic garbage. I was peppered with the usual slurs and insults before a user calling his or herself “Pepe’s Imam” told me: “There’s a civil war coming, leftist. Memes are the least of your problems.”

…I learned last year the best strategy is to be open about this kind of stuff and expose it however possible. On my Twitter feed I prepared screenshots of the offending rhetoric while critics accused me of lying. The left is the violent group, they told me while linking to stories about clashes with antifascist groups. In the same thread, as they claimed I’d made the whole thing up, the anti-Semitic materials and threats were piling up.

Things didn’t slow down.

The Daily Stormer, the most popular Neo-Nazi publication in America, set its sights on me and declared my agenda as “Jewish.”

For everyone who has replied to my original post about the CNN Stars of David meme and the correlation between antisemitism and hatred of “the media” with some version of “well CNN is terrible and President Trump has a Jewish daughter and Jews in his administration so he can’t possibly be an antisemite” as though my post and point was solely about CNN and President Trump (spoiler alert, those were illustrations of a greater issue and you should learn to read a full post instead of cherry picking discrete parts to, unsuccessfully, disprove the entire post). Read Jared Yates Sexton’s full piece at Politico.

I’d like to add that HanAssholeSolo has a history of doxxing women, too. He’s also part of a group that’s been doxxing anyone who works for CNN. This is what all the Pepe types do, they doxx anyone they don’t like to police their speech and silence them. CNN is very, very likely aware of this, too, which is how we know who HanAssholeSolo is and what kind of person he is in the first place.

I Found HanAssholeSolo’s anti-Semitic Posts. Then, the Death Threats Started. – POLITICO Magazine

karawatermelon:

deuslock:

but-call-me-kat:

Sorry to break the news, but you did not report the person behind that blog. Instead, you reported me. And I am still suffering the consequences.

I did not run that blog. Yes, they used my image. All my pictures from Facebook and Instagram, my statuses, even the captions. And then interspersed them with animal abuse images, fantasies about beastiality, other fucking disgusting sentiments.

You people found my Facebook, where I listed my wildlife rescue group. You didn’t think, for a moment, that it was odd that none of these abuse fantasies appeared on Facebook. A girl who was apparently willing to put her face, her location, the names of her family her local fucking vet clinic on her zoophilic Tumblr page, strangely had none of these thoughts on a just-as-public Facebook page.

Not one single person thought, “This is a bit odd, maybe I should reach out to this person just to confirm that it’s them.”

You people, high on some fantastical idea of justice, called the authorities. And I did not even know about the existence of the blog until the RSPCA showed up on my doorstep one night.

THEY, thankfully, had the sense to believe me. As soon as they showed me the page and I broke down in tears, they got the idea. So they told me to go to the police. The police palmed me off to ACORN (a cybercrime body) who dismissed the case because “nobody in the images was under the age of 18.”

Meanwhile, Tumblr had taken the page down, only for it to resurface again last year.

I then pursued a civil case. Emailed lawyers in my local city. They advised me only to take it to Tumblr, who shut down the page a second time. No further action was taken.

I never received another call from wildlife rescue because I was unable to prove that I did not run this disgusting blog. Wildlife is my biggest passion in the world and I may never work in that industry until I can clear my name.

So I messaged this page – report-a-predator. They told me to prove it – fair enough. So I sent them EVERYTHING. The screenshots, my emails to ACORN and SAPOL and Tumblr and the lawyers. They did not respond. I emailed them again, begging them to clear my name. They did not respond.

I am furious. I am fucking enraged that this post even still exists on their page, because the actions of this so-called “justice group” has directly impacted the life of an innocent person and they will do nothing to acknowledge it. Not even respond to a simple email. Not even take down the incriminating post.

I know my blog is tiny, I know nobody follows it, I know this will probably never be seen. But I am not going to be silent.

If you’re ever caught up in a whirlwind of pseudo-justice, maybe check the facts first.

Oh, look, another example of callous culture ruining people’s fucking lives.

Okay, adding to this to stop more misinformation: the report-a-predator page HAS at this point worked with but-call-me-kat in an effort to resolve the issue. It doesn’t seem to be perfect, but according to Report’s post they have been in contact and there isn’t anything more she had asked them to do.

Maybe a better step to take now would be to turn your financial/physical/positive support to but-call-me-kat’s wildlife rescue operations than hounding everyone involved in this mess.

Source: kat-the-dog-trainer

We need to talk about Diane Abbott. Now. (EXPLICIT CONTENT)

iandsharman:

Dianne Abbott is literally the only politician to have ever responded to me on Twitter. I honestly have nothing but the utmost respect for her and the news of her illness greatly saddens me. Unfortunately, but somewhat inevitably, a huge number of people used that news today as another excuse to direct a torrent of abuse at her.

I saw, and retweeted, Jack Monroe’s thread on Twitter earlier, and I’m so glad it has been collected together in this blog post. Whatever you think of her politics, Diane Abbott deserves your respect and admiration.

We need to talk about Diane Abbott. Now. (EXPLICIT CONTENT)

goingtobed:

Unfriendly, in your face reminder that there are straight trans people and they do not have to tell you they’re trans in order to be included in the community. See a “het couple” at pride?? Shut the fuck up about it. They could be bi, pan, trans, etc etc.

Asking someone to disclose if they’re trans is rude as fuck. Don’t do it. You are NOT entitled to know someone’s sexual orientation or assigned at birth gender.