During the first week of this semester, my dad overheard me explaining
the blogging assignment for this course to my mom. Unsurprisingly, he quipped, “I’m glad I’m
paying for you to go to school so you can learn how to blog.”
Why? Why is this a substandard assignment in his eyes? Perhaps he sees blogging as inherently feminine? This certainly sounds like a belief he would
buy into. Why, then, does this warrant condescension from him? Some good came out of this exchange, though: It reminded me of how a lot of women receive criticism for how they choose to
use the Internet.
For pretty much the entirety of the time I’ve spent active online, I have quietly observed many instances of gender bias within different forms of online media. This bias has sort of set standards for who is "allowed" to create, view, share, analyze, and enjoy certain types of media online.
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And how do you feel about Pinterest yourself?
Would you use it?
What sort of person do you see using Pinterest?
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Now, how about Reddit?
However, are any assumptions we make about the
demographics just us being biased? And do we end up stereotyping people who use
certain sites because of biases we have? For example, Tumblr is often seen as
the home to the vapid, basic white girls who only reblog aesthetic pictures as
well as the angry, "Feminazi," social justice warriors. Reddit, from
the stereotypical Tumblr user's perspective, could be full of 30-year-old males
who still live at home with their parents or narcissistic, feminist-hating
Trump supporters. While obviously those are not the entire demographics of each
website, it's concerning how many people I've actually encountered— online and
offline— who buy into these sorts of stereotypes. And while, yes, the pew research center's demographics for users on Reddit
skew mostly male, they also prove to be quite liberal in their politics rather
than conservative. My experience in talking to other women about Reddit has been
that they both don't use it and see it as a male-dominated, usually
misogynistic platform. Most of these women use sites such as Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Tumblr is an interesting site to look at, because although I've
only ever heard people call it a blog site for teen girls, it is actually quite
evenly split between male and female.1 However, I have
ended up witnessing more unwarranted criticism and hate for Tumblr and its users more so than Reddit. Is
this because of the higher ratio of female users? Is it because the platform itself is designed in a more feminine, blog-style format?
And what of the many online platforms available to choose from does my dad choose to participate on? Sports forums. Despite all the similarities between blogs and discussion boards, one is held in higher regard depending on the person. Why?
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1. Please note that these reports do not include nonbinary identities.
I'm so sorry about what your dad said to you, and I feel like I can really relate to that feeling. My dad told me that he didn't see the point in us (my sisters and I) going to college when we could just work as waitresses and make decent money off tips.
ReplyDeleteYour post is really interesting to me because I, too, spend a lot of time online, although I don't do it on social media. I play online games, like World of Warcraft, for example, and what you said about there being standards for who is 'allowed' to enjoy certain types of media really struck me as true, not because it should be, but because there are no standards for better behavior.
I've been playing World of Warcraft for 12 years, and I wouldn't keep playing it if it wasn't a wonderful game filled with wonderful people and exciting adventures, but there is a highly vocal subset of the community that has zero tolerance for anything other than cis-straight white men above the age of 14.
For the most part, if you leave these people alone (ignore them and move on) they won't bother you directly, but given the structure of the game, how it encourages many players to come together and work towards a common goal, that isn't always possible. You'll end up in a group with some of them and speak over voice chat, and they'll shoot out a comment along the lines of "Oh we have a girl in here? No wonder we're failing." Or, "Wow, a girl player who isn't completely incompetent."
These kinds of messages send a very clear signal about not only who is allowed to play and enjoy the game, but who is allowed to be good at the game. And even if you manage to avoid these kinds of players all together, their message seeps out into the general population and skews perceptions. I play exclusively female characters in World of Warcraft, but when I join groups or help other players out, I'm overwhelmingly assumed to be male. In fact, there has never been a single instance where I've performed well and anyone has assumed that I'm actually female. "Thanks man," they say. "Great tanking bro," they tell me.
Conversely, if I'm having an off day, if I'm not doing so well for whatever reason, people are more likely to assume that I actually am female in real life. "This bitch can't tank, kick her out of the group." they'll say, and far worse things.
Where am I going with this? What's my point? I suppose it would simply be this; gender bias isn't limited to seeing some online activities as 'feminine' versus seeing other, similar activities as 'masculine' and therefore one is better than the other. Even when you have an instance of men and women playing the exact same game, at the exact same skill level, doing the exact same things and doing them equally well, women and female players are still considered to be inferior to men.
Ouch, it can be frustrating having to kind of parse through how much you want to accept versus how much is just out of their time and how they can't cope with how things are and/or should be accepted.
ReplyDeleteI feel like how the website tries to display itself also adds to the situation. Tumblr is great for keeping up with your common interests outside of its stereotypical qualities you talk about, since it does have just about everything you can find on the internet like any place. It lets you be fairly specific to a topic you like, but be broad in that topic, a very specific way of branching into a lot of what you like, or getting into an entirely new trend.
Reddit is vast and focused on one line of post for consistent response, not having to reblog or personal message someone to make responses in a single post, which ends up keeping you bound to one post for much longer than just sharing someones post on your blog.
and of course, if something tends to work some way, websites will always prefer to perpetuate their way of running something, unless their fixing bugs or improving their system.
That way the website was first laid out, opened the groundwork for the need of the very first few people who made their habits on the site, in which the site works to again, perpetuate those habits and upkeep how its been defined.