Dear detractors who try to comment on my site before being evilly censored by my mighty powers,
I am sick, like many other radfem bloggers, no doubt, of being told I’m ‘censoring’ someone when I refuse to publish their inane/ insulting/ pointless comments on my blog. I have discussed the true meaning of censorship here, and defined it as an action of the powerful against the powerless, rather than as not being allowed to vomit nonsense in a radfem safeplace.
But I’d like to add a bit more to this: It is not a virtue to allow abusive commentators on one’s blog. You heard me. Allowing those who insult, deride, revile and abuse space on one’s blog without explicitly condemning their actions is tantamount to condoning them. Not everyone deserves to ‘have their say’, because the abusive MRAs who comment on feminist blogs and are ‘censored’, always have their say. It is their victims who don’t. Not every viewpoint is worth publishing.
You do not have the right to impose yourself in my space, even if you truly believe you are standing up to the Big Feminist Meanie by countering with a point she has heard and dismissed many, many times. You can’t come here with a oneliner which takes no account of what I have carefully written and argued, expressing your sentiment as though it were true, and expect me to coddle you. I am not Speaker’s Corner.
If you come here to assert your rights to women’s bodies, you will not be published. I don’t care about your speech- it is not more important than the rights of women to freedom and bodily integrity. If your speech silences that of others who deserve and need to speak more, you’ll have to take it elsewhere, to other places in which allowing abusers space is deemed to be a sign of the blogger’s great integrity- and that’s not here. If I allow abusive, snide, cruel speech on my site, it creates an atmosphere in which it is harder for those with less power, for survivors of abuse, to speak, just as pornography contributes to an atmosphere of misogyny in which violence towards women is normalised and tolerated.
I can’t stop you from speaking nonsense- no-one can. I also can’t stop you from being cruel and misogynistic. But I can stop you from exploiting me and my readers, and I shall. If you’re trying to post nasty comments on my site, you’re wasting my time, and my time is precious- clearly much more so than yours. Demanding space on my blog means you are asserting that my time is yours, and my space is yours. Neither are yours.
Not much love
Laurelin Rain
Yes. When there is a 50-50 percent representation of women in all forms of power, we can consider that the world has finally become natural. Until then, we are dealing with the artifice of patriarchy undermining the principle of democratic rights.
We must oppose this artificial limitation of our power with everything we have.
Comment by Jennifer Cascadia — September 21, 2007 @ 2:04 am
Well said
Comment by metalsunflower — September 21, 2007 @ 9:42 am
Well said. A few years ago as I was searching for woman-friendly sites, I came upon a few that had been taken over entirely by hateful men. The women who owned the sites had been badgered into thinking that if they banned these guys they would be ‘big bad mean feminists’, and so ended up not even being able to speak in their own spaces. Any woman who showed up with an interest in women or feminism was immediately attacked and the boys attempted to show the women how stupid they were.
Pathetic.
Comment by Asha — September 21, 2007 @ 2:20 pm
Bravo!
Comment by dreamy5 — September 21, 2007 @ 4:50 pm
I used to be an editor. I used to wade in the slush pile-the unsolicited manuscripts. (This is why I’ll never be an editor again.)
We didn’t publish ANY of the three feet of drivel we received in a week-BECAUSE IT WAS DRIVEL!
The only act of censorship involved would have been if we went to each submitter-of-drivel’s home, and beat them with a tyre iron.
Which we did not do.
Comment by Star Dragon — September 21, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
Damn right.
There is nothing in feminism which requires feminists to give a platform to woman-haters, MRAs and pornsters. On the other hand patriarchy has been telling women that we should lie down and let the misogynists walk all over us for, oh, millenia now. Time for a change.
Comment by delphyne — September 21, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
Yeah. Too dammed right. A man’s perceived right to talk over us, in our own space no less! Demanding to permeate our boundaries, whether it’s occupying one and a half seats on the tube with open legs or insisting that their words be heard. Fuck that noise.
Comment by sparklematrix — September 22, 2007 @ 8:16 am
yea, i agree that moderating and banning is the way forward. those wankers have no right.
Comment by aulelia — September 22, 2007 @ 11:36 am
How ridiculous. Should I let anyone who demanded it into my home? You knock on my door I don’t even answer if I don’t feel like it (Comments Off) or if I do answer (Comments On) it’s because I’m expecting people I like, who have a standing invitation to my place, and if they bring a new friend, ok. But just anyone off the street? That would be really dumb. Worse would be letting them in after they’d tried to kick the door down, swearing and spitting invective and demanding you turn on the porn channel. Because you so want people like that in your living room. Right.
Comment by Sis — September 24, 2007 @ 7:25 am
Equally ludicrous is to approve the comments of people who seem to live to stalk and attack you all over the internet, lie about you, in some cases, attempt to harm you directly, yet somehow think it’s fine to walk into your living room (nods to Sis) with their muddy boots on and leave footprints all over the place for you to clean up.
We all have our own reasons for blogging, but no feminist blogger I know blogs because she wants to duke it out day in, day out, with anti-feminists, men’s rights types, assholes of any kind or people with axes to grind. It’s interesting how enraged people get when they are spammed, though, as though they have some entitlement to muddy your floors, as though we don’t have a right to say “no” and back it up.
Comment by womensspace — September 25, 2007 @ 5:06 pm
Absofuckinglutely.
This post is a beautiful thing.
Thank you, Laurelin, for writing out exactly what I’ve wanted to say so many times in regards to this issue.
Allowing misogynists to spread their disease in women-centered spaces is only extending their privilege to a forum that is trying to dismantle it. Period.
*APPLAUSE*
Comment by CJ — September 25, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
How typical of “men’s rights” activists to not be able to grasp the concept of not being welcome somewhere. Because unlike the rest of us, all their lives there’s been no place that’s off-limits to them, and they can’t possibly understand when suddenly, a tiny portion of the Internet — not even the whole world — is off limits to them. Their indignation only proves their privilege.
Also, why are they accusing us of censorship? After all, these are the people who attacked and took down feminist blogs and threatened and intimidated women bloggers. I can’t believe that after everything these shit biscuits have done they still have the nerve to complain about being censored.
Comment by mekhit — September 26, 2007 @ 7:26 am
You are so right to take this brave stand. They want to put fear in our hearts. There is so little space where Survivors can be open with their views and emoyions. When abusers and or pro-porners choose to control how we are allow to speak, this is a way of silencing. It is mental violence.
On an aside, I have just listen to a radio programme about the damage that is done to school children by internet bullying. Some of children had committed suicide, many had done some form of self-harm. So,internet bullying is not a victimless crime.
Comment by Rebecca — September 26, 2007 @ 10:59 am
Sparklematrix – “A man’s perceived right to talk over us, in our own space no less! Demanding to permeate our boundaries, whether it’s occupying one and a half seats on the tube with open legs or insisting that their words be heard.”
I laughed so hard when I read this
Although I doubt I will convince the trolls, intimidation and enforcement *make* censorship. By deleting or declining to publish a comment on your site, you are not endangering a troll’s life or livelihood (which true censorship enforced by oppressive regimes do – that a person can be harassed, jailed or even killed for their words). In that way, I consider some trolls, especially the organized trolling campaigns to be censorship – when they threaten to out people or issue death threats, they are intimidating feminist bloggers because of our words.
Comment by L.M. — September 27, 2007 @ 1:31 am
“How typical of “men’s rights” activists to not be able to grasp the concept of not being welcome somewhere. Because unlike the rest of us, all their lives there’s been no place that’s off-limits to them, and they can’t possibly understand when suddenly, a tiny portion of the Internet — not even the whole world — is off limits to them. Their indignation only proves their privilege.”
Mekhit, I love you for saying this – it’s so beautifully put, and I think that’s the crux of the matter – they just can’t get over the fact that there is somewhere they are not allowed to go.
I have only been running a feminist blog for just over a month, and I have been quite shocked by the levels of hatred and visciousness displayed by some of the anti-feminist people out there (I say people because unfortunately some of them are women.)
I mean, fair enough, have a different point of view, but I don’t understand where the hatred comes from, I really don’t. I takes so much energy to hate someone. Are we that threatening to them?
Comment by Debs — September 27, 2007 @ 12:18 pm
What MRAs/ trolls don’t realize is that not respecting our wishes in a lot of cases demonstrates their inability to grasp the word ‘no.’ Now, that’s not a concept I’d want to flash around on a feminist blog, would you? They do it all the frickin’ time, though.
Comment by ginmar — September 29, 2007 @ 10:15 am
Great policy. In fact, I stole parts of it for my own
Comment by Fannie — October 1, 2007 @ 7:28 pm
Thank you.
Comment by Z — October 9, 2007 @ 11:39 pm
Amen! I’m just a lurker here, but finally got up the courage to post.
I never understood why people just don’t get (or don’t want to get, which is much more likely) that it is not their God-given right to post anything completely off-topic in a forum or blog, let alone something insulting or belligerent. Or rather, that they can post, but you can decide not to let it clutter up the discussion.
If it were a real-life conversation, and somebody said something unvelievably rude or stupid, you might well angrily take them to task, or you might walk away and continue the conversation elsewhere- in short, you can choose to ingore them. In a blog, the equivalent is not posting up an inane comment or deleting it. It’s vital in order to not derail a conversation.
Besides, wouldn’t it only be censorship if you were a government, not a bunch of people who don’t stricly speaking hold any power? Deleting a comment is not stopping that view from being aired- the poster is free to air ther views, however barbaric, on any other site they choose. They just don’t have the right to demand it goes on yours.
What they don’t realise is that you can easily disagree on a feminist blog, as long as you treat those you disagree with as people with a right to an opinion. But of course, if they did that, they wouln’t be such privileged misogynists.
I knew that I had to abide by any forum’s/blog’s rules even in my tender time as a noob, so I’m guessing that a lot of it is not ignorance, but unwillingness to accept that they just don’t matter here. Being a woman in this society taught me to be careful how or where I express an opionion (it’s lamentable that we should still have to deal with bieng silenced), whereas it taught them that no matter how little they know, or how irrelevant their post, they must have a right ot say what they like, where they like.
Anyway, great blog. I look forward to reading the rest of it.
Comment by anne onne — October 30, 2007 @ 8:47 pm
Hello!
I think this try.
Comment by Floroskop — March 19, 2008 @ 12:25 pm