One York student describes her experience on the online social news giant
Ernest Reid
Science & Technology Editor
@ernestreid
Michelle Walden, like most women, is used to seeing sexism online.
She recalls when someone posted a question on Reddit.com asking what to get a boyfriend for Christmas. “The first 50 or so responses were some variation of ‘blowjob,’” Walden says. “The internet is helpful like that.”
Reddit is a major social news website, where users submit links or content to be “upvoted” onto the front page or “downvoted” off. It is one of the English-speaking web’s most popular internet communities.
While feminist bloggers around the world have accused the community of being sexist and hateful for several years, “redditors” are now talking about these problems in larger numbers.
The Reddit community has been kinder to Walden, a fourth year graphic design student. With a couple of spare hours, she created a line-art version of Back to the Future’s Doc Brown for Reddit’s “rage comic” community. The drawing made it to the front page. Walden was surprised at its reception.
People offered her commissions to do drawings for birthdays and weddings. She also got an offer to design a logo. Most shockingly, someone tattooed her drawing onto their back.
But as much as she loves Reddit, Walden says its “pretty undeniable” that the community is sexist. “Too much sexism makes it to the front page for that to reflect the average user,” Walden argues.
The problem with sexist comments, she says, is people think they’re being funny, but “it might be a bit funnier if it wasn’t always women who have to take the joke.”
If women are offended, redditors suggest they “don’t take life so seriously.” Walden sarcastically says that’s helpful advice, but it doesn’t change the sexist nature of the content.
Generally, she says, users of Reddit are more likely than other places to recognize when someone is being sexist or bigoted. The only time sexism is truly embraced is when someone is “being clever about it…like an offensive stand-up comedian.”
“I’m never sure how to feel about [the sexist jokes],” Walden admits, “because sometimes you can’t help but find [the jokes] funny.”
While there is a blurry line between humorous and inappropriate, it’s easily crossed on Reddit.
Most people don’t realize Walden is female despite “Michelle” being in her username. It’s helped, she says, by the gender neutrality of internet interaction. Most of the time, gender neutrality means masculinity by default.
On Reddit, she says people like to call each other “sir” a lot: “you, sir, are awesome,” for example. This poses a dilemma for female users: let users continue to refer to them as a male or correct them and face a barrage of sexist comments. Women can’t identify themselves as women without getting an onslaught of sexual innuendo and misogyny.
“Sometimes I just don’t want to deal with it and say nothing,” Walden says. “It’s annoying, but it’s nothing compared to what gamer girls get.”
Walden is hesitant to call the internet misogynistic: “I don’t think the internet hates women, they just like to poke fun and sexualize them.”
She recognizes that internet anonymity transforms men, who would otherwise be perfectly pleasant, into sexists and bigots. Most of the humour and sexualization, Walden believes, “comes from the lonely, woman-less state that the most frequent users of the internet find themselves in.”
Walden recognizes how relatively lucky she’s been. “I kind of wish more people were horribly sexist to me on the internet so I’d have more to say,” she says, half-serious, “but that hasn’t really been the case.”
As someone who’s benefited from and contributed to the Reddit community, Walden has hope for the men on Reddit and on the internet as a whole.
“I’m sure most of them love women and would be happy to have one in their lives but in the meantime, they [have to] use the internet to get their frustration out.”
Sexist and bigoted people are everywhere on the internet, Walden says, and always find your favourite website to hang out online. There are enough of them that women can’t escape them. Until men start to change, Reddit and the internet in general will continue to be an unfair place to be female.
To see Michelle Walden’s illustration, visit imgur.com/gallery/JFYjV
