After being offline for most of the day, I was able to catch up on some news. One of the first mesasges I read was Carla Schroder's Open Season on Women. What caught my eye here is that with a title like that, this better be a woman posting the article - a man should not be making such statements. What I read was eye opening.
Carla is pissed off. Period. You can tell by the tone of the post. But in reading the post I do not blame her one iota. It seems the abuse of women on the Internet is much larger than I thought it was. And the abuse includes sexist, violent, and even criminal comments.
What set Carla off? Well, some low life(s?) have threatened the life of Kathy Sierra for being a woman. On the Internet. What loosers. But reading up on this, and the comments from others suggests this is not an isolated incident. Feel free to read Kathy's blog post that brought this attention to the topic. (Warning: This is disturbing to any sane human being)
What I don't understand is WHY a woman blogger is threatening to anyone? What's it matter where an opinion, or piece of news is coming from? How does it impact anyone so badly they feel the need to abuse women online? Are there really men who have so little confidence in themselves they can't fathom a world where they have to compete with women? Do the people making these threats even blog themselves? Is there competition there? Or do these women in someway make their lives miserable by the mere fact of being online? Somehow I don't think so. And that's VERY disturbing because it only leaves us with the idea of men who can abuse women online, for the simple reason that they can.
Abuse is a crime. Every person - man or woman - is entitled to respect. Every person is entitled to be free of abuse. Anyone who does not think so needs to get out of their basements and realize that women constitute half the worlds population. Women are active members of EVERY community. Any man who cannot deal with that is in for a rude awakening when they decide to abuse a woman who can best them in every way. These so called men should be treated like the lepers of old and placed on a remote island where they can quietly die off. (My apologies to anyone suffering from Leprosy for linking you to scum like that.)
This is coming to a head. Something needs to be done. Simple human courtesy should be the NORM, not the exception. But any new rules or policies must be fairly balanced. EVERYONE - woman or man - should be free to live their lives without fear of someone who just doesn't like them.
I've mentioned before where it's odd how you make a comment on one thing, then almost immediately something comes up related to it. In this case, it's the abuse of women. I commented on this in my post about Novell's Mac commercial parodies. This is one topic I am very disappointed to see so soon again.