Fark Bans Misogyny and Maybe, Just Maybe, We Can Now Read the Comments

Drew Curtis - photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

On August 18, Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com, an online link-aggregation community that was a precursor to the more widely known and used Reddit, announced that the site would be "adding misogyny to Fark moderator guidelines." In his message to users, which has since received thousands of comments, Curtis said, "if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women." One glance at this post on the now defunked subreddit "hotrapestories," where users repost stories from subreddits that serve as support groups for survivors of sexual assault, provides a small snapshot of the sort of behavior Curtis alluded to in his comments. He then got more specific and listed out some of the content that Fark mods will now be deleting from the site. They include "rape jokes," "calling women as a group 'whores' or 'sluts' or similar demeaning terminology," and "jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it."


While the majority of people reporting on the news have been incredibly supportive of the announcement, like Nina Bahadur of The Huffington Post and s.e. smith of xojane, there are those, such as Amanda Hess of Slate, who combine their support with a certain amount of skepticism, wondering whether policing misogyny, especially on a site like Fark, is even possible. As Hess points out in her piece,

"telling members of an anonymous Internet message board to stop hating women is, unfortunately, a monumental ask.  But instructing posters to refrain from pushing the boundaries of acceptable human discourse...is an irresistible provocation.  The gray area between vile offensiveness and dark humor is where Fark's commenter community thrives."  

The community, it seems, is partially built upon a foundation of oftentimes offensive one-upmanship that has made the site feel unwelcome to some women. But in many ways, being female and safely moving around the Internet can resemble a particularly difficult level of Frogger. As Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post points out, much of what makes this announcement so noteable "relates to a core ethos of Internet communities:  the idea that moderation, particularly on divisive issues, is akin to censorship  -- and that censorship is the bane of the transparent, social Web." The policy, she continues, is less a minor change in the rules of one relatively small website, and more a statement on Internet culture writ large.

The really interesting question here is less whether Fark can enforce these new guidelines and more whether it should. In 2011, Anil Dash wrote a post that makes the argument that, contrary to the seemingly ubiquitous statement on websites that "we are not responsible for the content of our comments," webmasters are in fact under a moral obligation to control the tenor of conversation on their sites. While it is true that the online world can be a hateful and horrible place, it does not have to be the web-based version of the Wild West. Ignoring persistently cruel behavior because, well, it's the Internet, is, in many ways, counter-productive. By turning a blind eye to abuse, many webmasters are creating a safe environment for cruelty while at the same time one where those seeking support, amusement, or an exchange of ideas feel stifled and threatened. Free speech for the mean-spirited does not necessarily translate into free speech for everyone. Take, for example, Zelda Williams' recent departure from Twitter as a result of the harassment she endured following the tragic death of her father. The comments and images she received were so cruel, that her use of a popular social networking site was made completely unbearable. Her freedoms of speech and of expression were hindered and nothing was done about it. She is by no means alone in her experience. In 2013, a well-known Canadian feminist blogger went into hiding after being doxxed and then sent dozens of death threats by the men's rights group Equality Canada. This is the extreme result of what an entirely open Internet culture can foster and shows that what happens on the Internet does not always stay on the Internet.

It will be interesting to see in the coming months what kind of effect, if any, these new commenting policies have on the bro-culture over at Fark. Given the comment thread that resulted from Amanda Hess' article, it seems as though Fark mods will be fighting an uphill battle, but a worthwhile one.  And perhaps down the line, other sites like Reddit and Gawker, as well as social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, will follow suit and curb the online abuse that so many people face.  Because, honestly, while of course we have the right to say hateful things to strangers for no good reason other than our own amusement, why should that environment be fostered and protected while those who feel a moral obligation to kindness and respect are sent running offline?

Fark Bans Misogyny From its Forums, Proves It's Possible [Huffington Post]
Fark Bans Misogyny in Comments, Setting a New Precedent for Bro-Culture Websites [xojane]
Fark Wants to Ban Misogyny.  Is That Even Possible? [Slate]
This is What Happens When You Try to 'Ban Misogyny' from a Major Website [The Washington Post]

Bringing Women's Work and Women's History to Life: A Conversation with Novelist Kathy Leonard Czepiel

     
     When they had closed the door behind them, the aunt handed Ida the baby for the first time. He weighed barely more than a bowl of bread dough. Ida tried not to show her surprise. She laid the bundle on the bed and unwrapped the infant from his blanket. Indeed, there was almost nothing to him...
     "Please, you may sit here," Ida said to the aunt, gesturing to the edge of the bed, and the woman sat primly, fingering her skirt as she watched Ida carry the baby to the rocker in the corner.
     "There, there, love," Ida said as she loosened her undergarments to release her breasts, already dripping at the sound of the baby's cry...
     The baby lay beside her that night, and Ida slept lightly, waking often to see that he was breathing. What had seemed a manageable challenge that afternoon haunted her in the night hours, when worries lay their ceiling low over her. He must nurse some more, he must gain weight at once. What if he were to perish in her care? At the slightest whimper, she pulled him close, and he suckled briefly before falling again into his own fitful sleep.
                     --Kathy Leonard Czepiel, A Violet Season

The spontaneous, embodied response to an infant's call. The drowsy, sometimes exhausting, intimacy of night-time nursing. The watchfulness and worry over a child's breathing and growing and living. For many women who have nursed a child, these vivid details evoke recollections of our own complex experiences.

According to author Kathy Leonard Czepiel, "historical fiction is at its best when it turns us back on ourselves, when something that happened in 1898 resonates with us today" (Guest blog post, The True Book Addict). In her acclaimed debut novel set on a Hudson Valley violet farm at the close of the 19th century, Czepiel excels at drawing a vibrant picture of women's work -- whether it be picking violets or doing the weekly laundry or nursing a baby -- that reverberates in the present.

A Violet Season tells the heart-rending and thought-provoking story of Ida Fletcher and her daughter, Alice, as they confront each other and the devastating restrictions faced by women in their cultural and historical context. For Ida, the practice of nursing extends beyond her own children to encompass a form of female labor that has become far less common since the dissemination of infant formulas and bottle-feeding technologies. Ida turns to wet nursing to supplement her family's income as she and her husband struggle to retain their share of the family farm. At sixteen, Alice must leave school so that she, too, can work for her family's sustenance. I had the opportunity to ask Kathy about the inspiration behind her story and how she brought this history to life in a way that feels relevant to readers today.

Kathy, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley, became interested in writing about wet nursing because the profession, much like violet farming, has all but disappeared in the United States.  She noted that the few prior novels about wet nurses tended to take a sexualized approach. "I wanted to write more seriously and truthfully about what nursing a baby is like, and to explore what is must have been like for a woman to nurse someone else's baby for a living," she explained. "For example, would she be able to treat it as 'just a job,' or would she 'bond' to some extend with the infant she was feeding?" Of the many topics she researched for the book, Kathy found wet nursing to be the easiest because she was able to draw on her own experience nursing her children.

In depicting Ida's experience, Kathy did not shy away from describing the physical and emotional challenges of nursing. "I was a little bit wary of making breastfeeding seem like too much hard work because I'm well aware that many women find the idea daunting and choose to bottle feed their babies instead. I didn't want to contribute to their reluctance," Kathy acknowledged. "At the same time, I felt I had to be honest; nursing a baby is hard work, and it's especially difficult if you are expected to be carrying on other work--paid or unpaid--at the same time, as Ida is."

Through characters like Mrs. Schreiber "who had seven grown children and never seemed surprised by anything," the novel also demonstrates the invaluable support that other people can lend a nursing mother. "Women do need support in order to be successful at breastfeeding and many of them are in circumstances not unlike Ida's: no close family or friends nearby, an unsupportive spouse," Kathy shared. "I went back to work full-time 13 weeks after my first baby was born, and it was really tough to keep breastfeeding after that. I managed only because I had support in all the right places: my husband, my daycare provider, and my colleagues." Kathy feels strongly that breastfeeding is not just a women's issue. "In this country, and I would imagine globally as well, most of the education about breastfeeding is aimed at women," she observed, "but it sure would be helpful to extend that education more to men."

I asked Kathy if she believes that historical fiction like A Violet Season can contribute to conversations about women's contemporary realities in a world in which so many continue to face back-breaking labor, the unrelenting demands of caring for family members, and the constraints of economic and family systems that offer them limited options. While she was writing, Kathy stated, her priority was to tell a good story. However, in visiting book groups and talking with readers, she has come to see how pertinent the story feels to many women.

"Even I am surprised at how powerfully some women readers identify with the struggles Ida and her daughter, Alice, faced in the novel," she commented. "Our struggles [in the US] today are often different physically (readers often comment on the labor involved in doing the laundry in 1898 and say that they have a newfound appreciation for their washing machines!) but in many ways they are similar emotionally (feeling trapped in a situation, being controlled by someone with more power, and so on), and I think that's what strikes a chord with readers."

Historical fiction can also help illuminate what has not changed for women and communities across the globe. "The novel also deals with prostitution and the sex trade," Kathy noted, "and sometimes readers say things like 'wasn't it terrible back then.' But these things are still going on today, I tell them, and not just in the developing world....We have a long way to go in terms of educating the world about the global sex trade and what we can do to stop it." Creative writing like Kathy's novel may be among the vivid sparks that bring the emotional and physical realities of female labor to life in a manner that shapes our thinking about women's lives past and present.

About Kathy Leonard Czepiel: Kathy Leonard Czepiel is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endownment for the Arts and teaches writing at Quinnipiac University. Her short fiction has been published in numerous journals. For more information, please see her website.  A Violet Season was selected as one of the 100 best fiction books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews.