Is the Internet unsafe for women?

Many hail the Internet as the ultimate democratic tool. Everyone has a voice and has access to information and to others they wouldn’t have otherwise.

But many women are finding the Internet an unsafe place and have experienced terrible abuse and threats for stating their opinions.

In the January/February issue of Pacific Standard, Amanda Hess exposes this reality in her article “Women Aren’t Welcome Here.” 

She begins the article by telling about receiving messages from a Twitter account set up, it seemed, for the purpose of making death threats to her.

I cannot recount the entire text here, but the writer says, “I am 36 years old, I did 12 years for ‘manslaughter,’ I killed a woman, like you. … Happy to say we live in the same ­­state. Im (sic) looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head.”

Hess is a journalist who writes about sex (among other things). She dialed 911. The police officer who showed up two hours later didn’t know what Twitter is. But Twitter, for Hess, is where she spends much of her time.

She offers other examples of abusive language and threats but notes that she’s not exceptional. She gives examples of other women writers who have been threatened.

And it’s not just professional writers, she says. “According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center,” she writes, “women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women.”

That survey also reported that 5 percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.”

Another study showed that simply appearing as a woman online can inspire abuse. “In 2006,” Hess writes, “researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.”

While there are laws against cyberstalking, the Internet is global, and law enforcement jurisdiction is local. And the abuse has become so prevalent that women are often told to ignore it.

But this carries a cost, Hess writes. “Threats of rape, death and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services and missed wages.”

Police often tell women who’ve received threats to go offline, but that has costs as well “as the Internet becomes increasingly central to the human experience,” Hess writes.

Another study found that Internet harassment is routinely dismissed as “harmless locker-room talk,” perpetrators as “juvenile pranksters” and victims as “overly sensitive complainers.”

The justice system, Hess says, tends to treat Internet threats as less real and don’t follow up.

She notes that while American police forces are overwhelmingly male, “the technology companies that have created the architecture of the online world are, famously, even more so.”

Hess, understandably, is interested in finding solutions to this problem. It affects her every day.

But all of us need to be aware of this alarming situation and look for ways to make every part of our world, including the Internet, safe for everyone, particularly women. 

Are family issues only women's issues?

One of the conversations going on in our society is a debate about work-life balance: how to balance one’s work life with the responsibilities of parenting. However, the conversation is happening almost exclusively among women. Men remain largely excluded from the debate.

In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, Stephen Marche’s essay “The Masculine Mystique” comments on this exclusion of fathers from debates about balancing work and parenting. He notes that “decisions in heterosexual relationships are made by women and men together,” and “when men aren’t part of the discussion about balancing work and life, outdated assumptions about fatherhood are allowed to go unchallenged.”

Marche challenges a myth perpetuated by Sheryl Sandberg’s popular book Lean In: that talent and hard work can take you to the top. He calls this “pure balderdash, for women and men.” Denmark now has more social mobility than the United States. 

The central conflict right now, Marche writes, is “family versus money.” The Pew Research Center released a study in March called “Modern Parenthood” that found about half of all working parents say it is difficult to balance career and family responsibilities, with “no significant gap in attitudes between mothers and fathers.”

Marche discusses women’s rise to economic dominance within the middle class. While “it is an outrage that the male-female wage gap persists,” he writes, “over the past 10 years, in almost every country in the developed world, it has shrunk.” And “of the 15 fastest-growing job categories in the United States, 13 are dominated by women.”

However, the “top leadership positions remain overwhelmingly filled by men.” According to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap” report, he writes, “women around the world hold a mere 20 percent of powerful political positions. In the United States, the female board-membership rate is 12 percent—a disgrace.”

But Marche calls this a “hollow patriarchy: the edifice is patriarchal, while the majority of its occupants approach egalitarianism.” Nevertheless, men wield power. He notes a paradox: “Masculinity grows less and less powerful while remaining iconic of power. And therefore men are silent. After all, there is nothing less manly than talking about waning manliness.”

A 2008 Pew study asked cohabiting male-female couples, “Who makes the decisions at home?” In 26 percent of households, the man did; in 43 percent, the woman did.

This hollow patriarchy “keeps women from power and confounds male identity,” Marche writes. He notes parenthetically that “the average working-class guy has the strange experience of belonging to a gender that is railed against for having a lock on power, even as he has none of it.”

While enlisting men in the domestic sphere may be a good idea, Marche writes, “the solution is establishing social supports that allow families to function.” Sharing the load of parenting equally doesn’t matter if the load is unbearable. And it will only become bearable when things like paid parental leave and affordable, quality child care become commonplace. In every state, the average annual cost of day care for two children exceeds the average annual rent, he says.

Marche blames men for failing to make themselves heard in this debate. “Where is the chorus of men asking for paternity leave?”

Meanwhile, the society sees parenting as a women’s issue. The U.S. Census Bureau, when it refers to child care, "considers mothers the 'designated parent,' even when both parents are in the home," Sandberg writes. “When mothers care for their children, it’s ‘parenting,’ but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a ‘child-care arrangement.’ ”

Marche concludes, “As long as family issues are miscast as women’s issues, they will be dismissed as the pleadings of one interest group among many.”

The echoes of history in our lives

Colum McCann, whose novel Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award, engages us once again with a multinarrative work that is more ambitious, if not quite as marvelous as his previous novel. Nevertheless, it is an arresting, lyrical work that is well worth reading and savoring.

TransAtlantic (Random House, 2013, $27, 304 pages), his sixth novel, mixes historical figures with fictional characters over several centuries, all with a connection to Ireland and the United States. It distills the reverberations of history in our lives.

He begins in Newfoundland in 1919, when two aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown, prepare to make the first nonstop flight across the Altantic, to Ireland. McCann captures their love of flying and their strong connection to each other: “… they have long ago mapped their minds onto each other’s movements: every twitch a way of speaking, the absence of voice a presence of body.” They both see the point of flight being “to get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.”

The next chapter is set in 1845-46 in Dublin, where Frederick Douglass has arrived on his international lecture tour after publishing his narrative of growing up in slavery. He finds welcome and sympathy for abolition but also encounters widespread famine among the Irish people.

The third chapter, set in 1998, follows Senator George Mitchell as he works on bringing bitter sides in Ireland together for peace talks. After an agreement is reached, Mitchell understands that peace will only come if enough people want it. “Generations of mothers will understand this,” he muses.

Halfway through the novel, McCann switches from stories of historical figures to fictional stories of women who had some connection to Alcock, Brown, Douglass and Mitchell. This is where the novel comes alive.

McCann opens Book Two with a vivid description of Lily Duggan tending to wounded soldiers on a Civil War battlefield. Lily, who was a maid in the house where Frederick Douglass was staying in Dublin, is a widowed mother who has followed her young son when he enlists. After he dies, she remarks on “this fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers.”

Lily later marries and has five sons and one daughter, Emily, who is the subject of the second chapter in Book Two. She, a writer, and her daughter, Lottie, a photographer, report on the flight of Alcock and Brown in 1919. In 1929, they travel to Ireland to visit Brown (Alcock has died).

Brown confesses that he failed to mail a letter written years earlier by Lily that Emily had given him to carry on his transatlantic flight. This letter, unopened, becomes a symbol in the novel for the history that lives within us, even if unacknowledged.

The third chapter in Book Two belongs to Lottie, who has married, has a daughter and a grandson, and loves to play tennis. Back in Chapter Three, she was the elderly woman in a wheelchair who played tennis and told Senator Mitchell he had an “awful backhand.” Now, in 1978, she visits her daughter and son-in-law at their cottage on a lake, where a tragedy soon occurs.

Finally, in Book Three, we are with Hannah, Lottie’s daughter, now alone with her dog in 2011. About to lose her cottage to the creditors, she tries to find a buyer for the unopened letter she has inherited. Despite the implausibility of such a letter remaining unopened for 92 years, we as readers want to know what it says. One of its sentences sums up the theme of this absorbing novel: “We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.”

Even if not quite the feat of Let the Great World Spin, a rare gem, TransAtlantic is really good. McCann has a deft touch with language, whether describing a beach “penciled by a series of soft sand ripples” or capturing the diction of the Irish: “Sure the two of us are deaf anyway.”

What moves the narrative, finally, is the voice of women, those whose lives run parallel, in the shadows, beside the historical figures we think move history. We learn that “the ordinary people own [history] now.”

When Hannah opens that letter she realizes a lesson this book teaches: “What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there’s mystery in the obvious, too.”

Women confront gender-based violence

The linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence and maternal mortality claim one woman every 90 seconds, according to a four-hour documentary film shown on PBS stations in October and available online at pbs.org/halfthesky. On the other hand, it is women and girls who are doing the most to change such human-rights abuses across the globe.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is inspired by the book of the same name by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who are New York Times reporters.

The film visits 10 countries and follows Kristof and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde as it tells the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals.

Kristof and WuDunn, who lived in China and reported on events there, became aware that China aborted 39,000 female fetuses in one year, and no one was reporting this. Their focus on human-rights abuses against women grew from there and led to their book.

In the film, Kristof and Mendes visit Sierra Leone, a country recovering from a civil war that ended in 2002. However, the incidences of rape that increased during the war continued afterward, reinforced by a culture where shame falls on the survivor rather than the perpetrator and where laws fail to prosecute rapists.

Kristof and Mendes talk with the director of a rape crisis center, who says they’ve seen 9,000 survivors in eight years, and 26 percent of these were under 12 years old. She shows them a 3-year-old who had been raped.

Kristof and Mendes talk with a 14-year-old who says she was raped by her “uncle,” who is a pastor. Others have also said he attacked them. They go with the police, who arrest the man. They talk with him, and he denies the charge.

In the end, he is released, and the girl’s father expels her and her mother from his home because she brought shame on the family.

The lesson is that rape is unfortunate but forgivable, while being raped is punishable. Less than 1 percent of the rapes reported to authorities are prosecuted.

Next, Kristof and Ryan visit Cambodia and meet the amazing Somaly, who runs an organization that rescues girls from brothels. Somaly, who speaks four languages, was taken from her village at age 10 or 11 and sold to a brothel at age 12 and brutalized. Later she escaped and now helps girls in similar  circumstances.

While the problem can feel overwhelming, she says, “everyone can do something.” The most important tool in fighting sex trafficking and other gender-based violence is education.

The film next visits Vietnam, where the organization Room to Read helps girls gain access to good education. One girl bikes 17 miles to her school.

In many poor families across the world, girls are kept at home to work, while boys are more likely to receive education beyond the fifth grade. One Vietnamese father, whose wife had died, sacrifices in order for his daughter to attend school.

The film notes that schools are often a safe haven, that education is transformative. It’s also a great investment in a community because “when you educate a girl, you educate a village.”

This documentary is both hard to watch and inspiring. It presents a huge problem long ignored by most of us, yet it offers hope. The film is definitely worth seeing. 

Forgiveness in strange places

Good fiction often takes us into worlds completely foreign to us and makes them familiar. It even creates characters we may on first sight think we have nothing in common with and makes them feel human, sympathetic.

 

Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel is one such work. The subject of We Sinners is a family, two parents and nine children. The Rovaniemis belong to a conservative church—a Lutheran revival movement called Laestadianism—in modern-day Michigan. The church forbids dancing, drinking, TV and other common practices in our culture. But its central belief, repeated several times in the novel, is that believers are forgiven in Jesus’ blood when they repent.

Pylväinen tells the story from the point of view of the various members of the family. We witness the struggle of each person with other family members and with their faith. Some hold onto the faith; others reject it; some fall somewhere in between.

Pylväinen uses telling details to show these struggles. For example, Warren, the father, reflects on the family’s constant struggle with poverty: “It was daily things, it was money, it was when he stopped at a gas station and the kids all chanted, ‘Get a treat, get a treat,’ and when he came out with chips they grabbed for them like starving people.”

Tiina, the second oldest child, is the first in the family to leave the faith, yet “she felt no thrills of liberation.” Her becoming an unbeliever is like a conversion, yet she can’t quite fill the emptiness. After she cheats on her boyfriend, she feels “she was no good in both the church’s world and in the world she had chosen.” For her, “it wasn’t about the sinning at all, it was what you did about the sinning, and she had no means of forgiveness about her.”

In spite of how oppressive the church feels to many of the children, it’s difficult to leave it behind. When Julia, the fourth youngest, who has left, returns for a visit, she sleeps in a bed with her younger sister and experiences “the old childhood security of many people asleep in one place, the uncomplicated comfort of someone in her bed who was not her lover.”

Not everyone leaves. Brita, the oldest, marries a man in the church and has numerous children (four and counting). Nels, the oldest boy, goes to college and takes up drinking and going to parties in pursuit of Bernie, a girl outside the faith. But no matter how often he breaks the rules, forgiveness is available at church, and eventually he marries a girl in the church and settles down.

Pylväinen uses irony in this interplay of belief and unbelief. Nels’ roommate, Clayton, is his conscience as Nels breaks the rules. But later, Clayton takes up drinking and ends up with Bernie.

Uppu, the youngest, befriends a new student, Jonas Chan, a shy Asian-American, at her high school. Jonas goes to her church out of courtesy and discovers a faith different from the one his parents had left. “Unlike his family’s old church, no one said they loved Jesus, no one was overemotional, and God was less a personal friend than someone spoken of quietly, as if in fear of disturbing Him.” As Jonas becomes more and more interested in the church and then becomes a believer, Uppu can’t stand it and leaves.

The final chapter goes back to 1847, to Finland, where we encounter Laestadius, the founder of the church. What became in many ways a group that imprisons people in its conservative, sometimes harsh ways began as a revival that liberated people from some harsh cultural practices that were particularly oppressive to women.

In We Sinners, Pylväinen deftly explores this dance between between oppression and liberation, between belief and unbelief, and shows the gray areas. These are not polarities but gradations of human experience. We all move in and out of various communities and belief systems, searching for love and acceptance. Often we search for forgiveness. This novel shows that sometimes it’s found in strange places.