Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/12/9/lena-chen-onlineharassment.html

by ValentineC • 13 years ago

78 110 13 years ago

america.aljazeera.com

mschuster915• 13 years ago

As much as I can't stand a lot of the ultra-extremist feminists out there in the internet, this kind of behaviour (doxxing, cyberhunting) is beyond unacceptable, it's dangerous to society.

Anyone who ever has engaged in "slut shaming" or whatever the current term is for hunting down/doxxing activists, please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself.

And to Google/FB: please, make it possible for victims of doxxing/cyberhunts to contact a real human in your organization who has the authority and ability to track and remove such abusive content.

EliRivers4• 13 years ago

What is an ultra-extreme feminist? Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? What's the difference between social and political equality, and extreme social and political equality? How can two things that are equal be even more equal?

mschuster915• 13 years ago

I'm referring to the kind of people like Alice Schwarzer, who thinks for example that all prostitution is inherently bad for the women and that there cannot be anyone working in prostitution out of his/her own will, or those "womyn" folks who think they have to change the word "woman" because it contains "man"... this is just ridiculous.

Also, by providing just-for-women courses in tech, for example, you're creating an inequality for men at the same time... you can't fight men-focusing with only focusing on women.

seivan• 13 years ago

Those feminists who hate Trans-people. They are the ultra-extreme feminists.

brazzy3• 13 years ago

Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism?

People who don't define it that way. Or people who (as in pretty much any controversity) feel compelled to see everyone who doesn't agree with them as an enemy to be taken down.

gaius3• 13 years ago

Here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray

See her views on general relativity and fluid dynamics (both of which are apparently inherently sexist).

arthurjohn• 13 years ago

Sometimes feminism, as practiced by those who call themselves feminists, is the advocation of social and political equality regarding areas where women are disadvantaged, ignoring and even opposing those areas where men are disadvantaged.

Source: here's[0] the best example I've seen, skip to minute two to see a man get physically prevented from entering a talk about some men's issues. You can also watch the actual event[1] and decide for yourself if it was or was not misogynist. You can also read about Warren Farrell, the speaker, and decide for yourself if he is for or against rape.

I am a feminist by your definition, but I am also concerned with, e.g., statistically more men seem to commit suicide and thought that talk was interesting, so those feminists in the video might say I was a rape apologist.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARHCxAMAO0

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6w1S8yrFz4

AlexC04• 13 years ago

Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders,

I'm afraid that isn't actually given.

That is your working definition, however, over the years there have been numerous "waves" of feminism and numerous often contradictory interpretations of what feminism and, even equality means.

Andrea Dworkin for example identified as a feminist, and is identified by some others as such, yet has written extensively about things that are far from simple equality. (Quite frankly, in some cases, anti male hate-speech)

Erin Pizzey, the founder of UK's first domestic violence shelter for women received bomb and death threats when she realised that equal protection from dv meant men should have shelters too. The self identified feminists who campaigned against her did not have the same definition of equality.

Even online dictionaries disagree with you on the meaning of feminism.

Google define feminism and you'll see that it says that it is the advocation of women's rights with respect to men.

Equality is in the definition, but what it leaves out is the acknoedgement that there are some conditions where women have significant advantage over men.

There are branches of (self proclaimed?) feminism that have different interpretations of that.

There are some branches that blame men for all the worlds woes.

Some that say a woman could never have as much privilege as a man.

The definition of feminism is so diluted as to be virtually meaningless without secondary descriptors.

What 'wave' or type of feminist? Radical? Radical trans exclusionary? Sex positive? Second wave? Third wave?

I'm sorry, I can't accept that "feminism means"

Why what about the campaign "feminism is simply the belief that women are people"?

Yet another definition.

Stienham through Paglia to Hanna Roisin (who recently declared men not equal but obsolete), feminism means a lot of things.

nhaehnle• 13 years ago

It starts out that way. But then it turns out that to achieve equality, you mostly need to improve women's position in society. And then people only remember the second part and forget about the equality thing.

And finally, this happens: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939

stefantalpalaru2• 13 years ago

please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself

Don't joke about that. Peer pressure induced suicide is much more dangerous than "slut shaming".

chris_wot• 13 years ago

I remember when I was an administrator on Wikipedia, many years ago, there was a website called Perverted-Justice (PeeJ, I think). There was some sort of dispute about it, I can't recall what it was about.

However, my online identity and a lot of other admins were accused of paedophillia. When I had pointed out that I had severely curtailed a number of people from the then "Boy Love" article (ew), they retracted it from my username.

It's very, very easy to destroy someone's reputation online. But if you get caught doing so, I hope you get everything you sow!

VMG• 13 years ago

I think that's why it is important to own the search results for your real name, and the domain names.

FireBeyond• 13 years ago

Even to this day, if you go to that site from Wikipedia, they insert a page header warning you that WP is a “pedophile safe haven”...

mikecane2• 13 years ago

This article ties in with the recent Block change on Twitter. See all that vile material posted? Now imagine having that tweeted to you on a daily basis from multiple fake accounts. This is why the change to Block mattered. Because of vile driven sociopaths of the type displayed in that article.

mschuster915• 13 years ago

You as the victim can't see the stuff any more. May help your psyche, but it doesn't stop other twitterers or Google indexing the stuff.

kaoD2• 13 years ago

IIRC Google does not index Twitter.

JumpCrisscross• 13 years ago

A lawsuit was always an option. Websites aren't liable for what their users do, but it’s possible to subpoena for the identity of your online harasser and haul him or her into court on civil charges like defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress. But Chen and Hamm didn’t want to spend more time, money or energy on the problem. They just wanted it to go away.

A lawsuit is precisely how you make it "go away". Yes, the police should have pursued the criminal complaint, but lacking official action private action should be taken.

mschuster915• 13 years ago

The internet is relentless, and as soon as you hit foreign jurisdictions, you're bound to fail. Governments, the MAFIAA and dozens other organizations have tried and failed for over a decade to shut down TPB - do you really think a mere human stands the chance to ever stop the Internet from trolling her?!

scotty792• 13 years ago

Who's harrasing her and her associates and defenders is probably single semi-skilled no-life. You don't need courts. You need a single decent hacker to dox the guy, order him some weed on silkroad successor and call the cops on him.

Daniel_Newby• 13 years ago

This is not a well-funded industry with an engineering staff, it is a single lunatic. Subpoena a list of IP addresses from hosting companies, then subpoena the ISPs responsible for those addresses, then have the local police put the kibosh on the lunatics. Yes, it is possible that the lunatic uses a cloaked Internet connection and has flawless op-sec, but the odds are that he is just another raving schizo who can barely remember to pay the electric bill.

danso2• 13 years ago

So doing a Google search for the subject's former boyfriend (the one wrongly accused of rape, just by association with her), this Blogger post still lies as the third highest

http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-patrick-...

It strikes me as pretty obvious link-abuse, the kind that I thought Google's algorithm would squash, but apparently not. It's good practice to own your own name and domain...but in his case, the victim's own Harvard bio page is ranked lower than this one-use blog

betterunix4• 13 years ago

"It's good practice to own your own name and domain"

Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large, established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this.

The real problem here is that people still think that if they see something written down, it must be true. People might as well be reading The Weekly World News, though the kind of harassment described here would be well below the standards of WWN.

danso2• 13 years ago

You're absolutely spot on...the problem is that we often don't have time or motivation to challenge what we see...which is why headline-writing can so easily color opinions of an entire article body. Even in this case, even when I knew this blog post was part of a smear campaign, some reflex in me instinctively mused, "Hmm, maybe this guy is bad...look at all the words devoted to him".

Now imagine any given employer or background-checker seeing this, without the context of the OP...what are the chances that they'll be skeptical of the smear campaign?

But because as humans, we have limited time/energy/patience...computers and sound algorithms really are one of our best allies in rooting this kind of thing out. I'm just surprised that Google's ranker hadn't already flagged this...It's a single-post blog with a circle-jerk of links to other single-use blogs, with the kind of keyword stuffing that was common in the AltaVista days...and I'm pretty sure the text is verbatim from other such smear sites. Isn't that enough penalty to take the site down from the top of the SERPs?

lazyjones• 13 years ago

Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large, established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this.

It's not only anonymous harrassers causing problems - for example, I've had a few magazines (2 mainstream owned by the same outlet and 1 industry magazine) in my country campaign against my name recently, after our company pointed out illegal price fixing in the industry. Now the top google (and bing) results for my name are 2-3 such articles in magazines with otherwise decent reputation, previously my personal web page, facebook page (with 0 friends 0 comments), old university web pages and various old programming projects were the rop results. How do I "clear my name" other than being more active on the web, using my own name (I haven't bothered to blog or post stuff online for various reasons, one of them is that my personal life doesn't belong there), or hiring SEO experts to push more neutral content to the top? I guess I'll just sit it out ...

michaelochurch5• 13 years ago

Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article.

Kathy Sierra was attacked for being female. She did nothing that would cause people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting, unprovoked, and utterly wrong.

Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way, but it is. There are reasons why adults keep their sex lives private (and non-adults, regardless of chronological age, shouldn't be having sex).

I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point, and the men involved in the revenge porn clearly belong in jail. Anyway, she's been in a long-term relationship (with Hamm) for years, and she's clearly trying to better herself and recover from the mess she made of her college years (and the additional mess others worked to make of her life). And the last thing a person with an obvious biological mental illness needs is for a bunch of cowardly, anonymous, asswipes on the Internet to make it worse by tearing her down.

Where the anger rightfully belongs is on a culture, not on specific people or a gender. The Sex and the City fake feminism (it's actually one of the least feminist TV shows out there) is horrifying, but people like Chen should be left alone to work out their problems in as much peace as they can have.

This is a strange topic because I know exactly where that male anger comes from. The culture of casual sex (in high schools, colleges, and some professional circles) has broken down respect between the genders. It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them. It's a hideous culture based on social status and acquisitiveness ("Game") and it's left a large number of people (men and women both) unable to form mature relationships.

Most male misogynists are in what I would call the Misogyny Loop. (There's probably a Misandry Loop for heterosexual women.) Because they have negative and false beliefs about women (i.e. "all women are whores who fall for Game") they end up meeting and dating only damaged women, and the sampling confirms their incorrect (and, from our perspective, socially unacceptable) beliefs.

The real enemy, though, is a specific culture created by the worst of men and the worst of women. Sex and the City feminism is based on lowering moral standards for women (i.e. women should be able to behave like the worst 5% of men without consequence) when the real goal should be to raise moral standards for men.

I want to make it clear that I have no sympathy whatsoever for the 1% of men who engage in cyberstalking and doxxing. I do feel slightly bad for the 39% who have been led astray into casual misogyny by a fucked-up and perverted culture. (But I feel much worse for non-participating, innocent women like Kathy Sierra.)

marquis2• 13 years ago

she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't.

You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.

She was studying sociology and gender theory. As a woman I appreciate it when other woman have the courage to write about their lives in public, it enriches our own understanding of ourselves. If we all kept to ourselves there would be less information, especially for young woman whose lives are complicated (like young men).

Anyone has a right to keep a blog about anything she wants, using her real name, and not be attacked for it. The issue here is that people are posting vitriol about others, on sites where there is no allowance for rebuttal.

I just read a book about the Victorian-era, where it was fairly common to complain in the local newspaper about someone else, and the ethics of the papers allowed the attackee to issue a rebuttal in the same issue.

selmnoo3• 13 years ago

You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.

No, he didn't. I have a daughter who I instruct to dress in a way that covers most of her body. This does not mean that I am justifying rapes that happen because some lustful men are aroused by scantily-clad women, it simply means I observed and recognized the reality of the situation, and realized that dressing in a certain way reduces the chance of an incident. The fact that there are men out there who are unable to control their urges is a separate thing (that we of course should be talking about as a society). Likewise, michaelochurch made an observation on what is a good strategy to reduce the chances of being hurt. He explicitly went on to mention that he wishes the reality of things weren't this way.

michaelochurch5• 13 years ago

You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.

No. I think she was immature and probably mentally ill. Biological mental illness deserves compassion and treatment, not vitriol from anonymous cowards.

I'm not saying that the attacks on her were justified. I'm saying they were predictable.

I live in Baltimore. I'm in a nice neighborhood. Two miles north of me? Dangerous urban decay. I should be able to walk around at 3:30 am in any part of the city-- any part of the world, really-- without fearing physical harm. But that's not the world we live in, now is it?

no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.

I can agree with this.

arrrg• 13 years ago

Nice victim blaming you got going there. Always the same bullshit on HN. Like clockwork.

vezzy-fnord5• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but she is partly at fault. What she essentially did was maintain a diary with all the raw details of her private life, only she did everything in public view. That's naive. She did not warrant what actually happened to her, but it was doubtlessly naive.

smtddr• 13 years ago

>Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but

Is the same as...

>I'm Not Saying She Deserved To Be Raped, But...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/17/joseph-dibenedetto-...

anu_gupta3• 13 years ago

Excellent display of sympathy for the "39% [of men] who have been led astray into casual misogyny". Those poor weak lambs, unable to think for themselves.

Anyway, congratulations on reaching the upper tiers of the HN victim blaming elite. Achievement unlocked and all that.

aestra• 13 years ago

She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way, but it is.

If you replace "she" with "he" then there's no issues there. No target.

Please don't engage in this "she shouldn't have done that" bullshit. Its cause of assholes like you that when women get sexually assaulted they don't come forward. They don't want to be told they deserved it. That's what you just did, if you know it or not. They don't want to be the ones on trial for falling out of line of social ideals of female, because thats what happens.

gaius3• 13 years ago

On the contrary, if you saw a male blogger write that, you would think "asshole". There is simply is no way to boast about your wealth and popularity, regardless of gender or orientation, without coming across as obnoxious.

sneak3• 13 years ago

Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself.

Please don't be an asshole to people on HN.

RexRollman• 13 years ago

I strongly disagree with the OP but if that is how they feel, they have a right to state it.

yxhuvud• 13 years ago

I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point

At exactly what point would someone deserve that? To me, the entire concept is entirely alien and I consider anyone that consider such behaviour tolerable at any point at all a big ass-hole that isn't fit for society.

tptacek10• 13 years ago

It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them.

Lots of big words, but always the same adolescent logic: "the culture" somehow prevents male nerds from dating. So it's no surprise that they abuse women.

How is it that so many of us manage to actually grow up? Most of the male nerds I know today have families. It's because there is no such thing as an "alpha" or an "omega". Those are concepts are invented and reinvented in different contexts to let people off the hook for their own thoughts and actions. It's not about taking personal responsibility for... what, being on the same Internet as a person who wrote a sex blog? --- no, it's that they're omegas victimized by a culture that promotes Game.

Horseshit.

The problem as I see it is much simpler. Variance in human cognitive ability ensures that there will always be people damaged enough to harm others purely out of blind, undirected malice. The Internet (a) creates an affordance that makes harassing women the simplest way to do that and (b) amplifies them. You don't need a conspiracy theory about "Game" and "alphas" and "omegas" to understand what's happening; people that used to spend their lives living in their grandparents basement torturing animals for fun now spend that time doing something else online.

What I don't understand is the urge others have to rationalize their behavior.

napoleond2• 13 years ago

I didn't read that the same way you did. I don't think GP was using "culture" as an excuse for anyone's behaviour; rather I read it as a suggestion that maybe in addition to personal culpability, there are cultural problems in place which perpetuate/encourage/condone bad behaviour. Doesn't sound like horseshit to me, at least not in the obvious sense which you seem to suggest. (FWIW, I might also forego the "alpha/omega" labels, but that's a small nit to pick.)

The last part of your comment almost seems orthogonal to that; "whether or not there is a problematic culture in place, there are also crazy people alive, and the internet gives them a platform".

tomp2• 13 years ago

If you read the comment carefully again, its author is not excusing this kind of behaviour, but simply saying that he/she understands where this kind of behaviour is coming from.

vidarh6• 13 years ago

I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point

At what point does it become ok? I hope this is just careless wording.

the mess she made of her college years

Really? She made the mess?

a person with an obvious biological mental illness

Obvious to whom? Are you a trained psychologist? It is certainly not obvious to me.

Goladus• 13 years ago

Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article.

I don't have a problem with them being mentioned together, although their cases are certainly different in substantial ways. While Chen courted attention, from what I can tell she did not specifically attempt to court controversy and profit from internet rage (though I could be wrong).

My problem is with bringing up Anita Sarkesiaan, who trolled lowest-common-denominator male videogamers on purpose to get publicity, sympathy and funding for her kickstarter project and has the audacity to claim in a TED(x) talk that it was all because she was a woman.

riggins• 13 years ago

all I have to say is this is horrible.

Maybe this is a case were law enforcement hasn't caught up with technology.

stefantalpalaru2• 13 years ago

[...] self-medication with alcohol, recovery from an eating disorder and crushing desire to be liked. All standard stuff for a college student.

Really? That's what passes for "standard" in a prestigious (and probably very expensive) Ivy League school?

sneak3• 13 years ago

This is standard in almost every American environment where people 15-25 hang out.

Confusion8• 13 years ago

I think the main problem here is not that people are harassing her. The main problem is the fact that it is possible for people to be harassed in this way. There are a number of things that the people around someone have to believe for that to be possible. Beliefs that I would say are simply wrong.

My main belief here is: if you care about preventing the personal misery of people like Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra, you should not try to prevent this type of harassment with judicial or technical means. You should try to change the beliefs of people so this kind of harassment is simply not possible, which automatically results in this kind of harassment not being perpetrated (because it is pointless).

Here are some of the beliefs that are necessary ingredients for this kind of harassment to be possible:

* people are not adapted to living in a small world, where your actions can become known to, and commented on by, a vast amount of people. Given you are living in such a world, you should internalize the fact that it shouldn't matter one bit what a few random internet commentators say or think about you.

You happen to have drawn some attention and as a result not only the one lunatic in your direct environment has noticed you, but another hundred of the thousands of lunatics out there have noticed you and are vocal about that. But they are just random unknown people. They think you are a slut? Why do you care? More importantly and much more relevant to solving this: why do your friends care?

* so a reasonable concern is of course: what is the actual impact of the beliefs and statements of these unknown people on your direct environment? How many of the people you should reasonably care about have noticed? How many of those people seriously wonder whether these random people are right?

If they have noticed: people adjusted to this world wouldn't believe anything J. Random person says. They would ignore it as one set of implausible datapoints in the overload of information available these days. If anyone believes it: good to know, those people are not fit to be friends or colleagues. Someone thinks you're a slut because some random people on the internet are saying so? What kind of gullible numskull is that person? A person maladjusted to this small world.

* suppose some facts are undeniable. These are pictures of you naked. Why is that a problem? Having seen someone naked or having been seen naked should not change the way you behave towards each other. That's allowing yourself to be victimized by the puritanical standards that have become a strong factor in Western civilization over the past fifteen hundred years. If someone cares about it being possible to see you naked on the internet, then that person is at fault, not you.

* suppose some facts are really scandalous. Let's say it's evidence of a crime, but it was too long ago to prosecute. It still shouldn't matter. You aren't a few photographs or letters and anyone who believes otherwise is, again, not worth the air in his lungs. I don't care if you murdered someone thirty years ago: if you've been a decent person ever since and I have no reason to suppose you would commit such a transgression again, then I should assume you will be a decent person now.

So, tl;dr: the reason it is possible for people to be harassed in this way is because too many people care too much about opinions of random others, care too much about what other people do and commit the fundamental attribution error. Solve that and the problem goes away.

tptacek10• 13 years ago

Yes. If only the victims would change, everything would be OK. Silly victims.

Confusion8• 13 years ago

No, primarily the people around the victim need to change. Which means beliefs in general, of everyone, need to change. That the victim would then also change is a bonus, which wouldn't even be needed anymore.

acqq• 13 years ago

Mr Confusion, please write here your real name, let somebody make all top Google results to your name link to always new brutal lies about you, then explain us all how you can not care too much about the opinions of random others.

For the start, I'd like to know what would happen if people start down-voting your posts here, would you delete some? Would you close the account? You see, it's easier, you haven't provided your real name.

Confusion8• 13 years ago

Nobody would bother to make the top search result point to new brutal lies if my friends and potential employers wouldn't care about the top search result. Which they wouldn't if they would care less about what some random persons on the other side of the world believe. Which they should if they would properly internalize how the world works these days.

I practice what I preach. I'm constantly advocating being wary of information found on the internet. I advocate not caring about what random people think. However, this way of achieving change takes a lot of time. It doesn't prevent a new incident tomorrow or next year. But maybe in 10 years.

Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

Related Stories