thene | (no subject)

Yonmei on the harassment of women on the internet and

synecdochic's role in that harassment:

Then I got another email from LJ Abuse to say that they couldn’t investigate the offensive cartoons because my journal was suspended. I wrote back to point out that they’d suspended my journal, and they could un-suspend it – not permanently, obviously, but for long enough to check out these ugly cartoons, track whoever had posted them, and do whatever was legally required / required by their TOS to the people responsible.

I got a personal email from Denise Paolucci, the head of LJ Abuse then, now the founder of Dreamwidth, to let me know that they weren’t going to do that unless I changed the default icon which they’d suspended my journal for.

...

The online abuse was horrifying – I don’t think I’ve ever experienced another such tirade of sexual hate that went on and on and on, at least not since I left high school. But almost worse than this, was the realisation that to the people who were supposed to keep Livejournal a safe place to blog, didn’t care. They cared profoundly about the public obscenity of an exposed nipple, but a woman receiving gross sexual abuse was just… not important. Not worth defending. The perpetrators of icons depicting women breastfeeding were worth tracking down and getting rid of: the perpetrators of a drawing indicating that I should be killed in a grossly unpleasant way which even now I can’t bring myself to describe more accurately, should be let continue.

I’ve never joined Dreamwidth. I don’t know how far Denise Paolucci was directly responsible for how LJ Abuse treated me and the perpetrators, or how far she was only following orders: I’m never likely to know. But I find I cannot forgive her even for “only following orders”. The actual perpetrators of the abuse are well beyond that – I understand why other people feel they can forgive Denise for what she did during her tenure as head of LJ Abuse, it’s just that I can’t.