Re: Internet Defamation as Profit Center, by Ann Bartow
Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2013 9:29 pm
Ann Bartow, Internet Defamation as Profit Center: The Monetization of Online Harassment wrote:Feminist author Jessica Valenti described one appalling instance in which her breasts became the subject of a series of critical blog posts by a blogger apparently determined to use Jessica’s body to drive up her own readership:Last year I had my own run-in with online sexism when I was invited to a lunch meeting with Bill Clinton, along with a handful of other bloggers. After the meeting, a group photo of the attendees with Clinton was posted on several websites, and it wasn’t long before comments about my appearance (“Who’s the intern?”; “I do like Gray Shirt’s three-quarter pose.”) started popping up.
One website, run by [University of Wisconsin School of Law faculty member] and occasional New York Times columnist Ann Althouse, devoted an entire article to how I was “posing” so as to “make [my] breasts as obvious as possible”. The post, titled “Let’s take a closer look at those breasts,” ended up with over 500 comments. Most were about my body, my perceived whorishness, and how I couldn’t possibly be a good feminist because I had the gall to show up to a meeting with my breasts in tow. One commenter even created a limerick about me giving oral sex. Althouse herself said that I should have “worn a beret . . . a blue dress would have been good too.” All this on the basis of a photograph of me in a crew-neck sweater from Gap.
I won’t even get into the hundreds of other blogs and websites that linked to the “controversy.” It was, without doubt, the most humiliating experience of my life—all because I dared be photographed with a political figure. [99]
Valenti’s breasts unexpectedly became a topic of conversation that embarrassed her, which, as she noted, led to negative commentary about various aspects of her person in many different Internet contexts. Rather than apologize for the discomfort she caused by exploiting her breasts, Althouse’s indignant response to Valenti was, in part, as follows:I still maintain that it was absolutely justified to mock that photograph. Distort what I was really saying there all you want, but the fact remains: Cozying up to Bill Clinton is not something a feminist should be doing. You have never responded to what I was really writing about. You have instead chosen to attack me, and you’re doing it again, and you and your friends have leveraged what was a minor satirical blog post for your advantage. You’re exploiting it again and going through the whole routine of trying to ruin my reputation again. It’s an ugly way you’ve chosen to try to build a career as a feminist writer.
I’d love to see you take some responsibility for what you’ve done instead of whining that everyone’s talking about your breasts. I don’t give a damn about your breasts. What I care about is the way feminists sold out feminism to bolster the fortunes of the Democratic Party. But you will never talk about that, because you don’t have anything to say there. So it’s on and on about breasts, breasts, breasts, please don’t talk about my breasts. [100]
Then she featured derogatory, sometimes sexualized comments from her readers such as: “Valenti continues to milk her sagging ‘breast controversy’ for all its worth,” [101] egging on her readers to spew a long thread of aggressively rude comments. She also vehemently asserted that she, rather than Valenti, was the person who had been victimized. [102]
Even a feminist legal theory conference can provide blog fodder for someone willing and, maybe even eager, to expose professional colleagues to ridicule by strangers. When Ann Althouse “live blogged” [103] a conference called “Working From the World Up: Equality’s Future,” celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, [104] the tone of her posts inspired misogynistic mockery in the comments threads at her eponymous blog. [105] Some of the people at the conference found this fairly alarming. [106]