[@TwkLGBTQ] Let’s talk about stereotypes

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Greedy. Indecisive. Promiscuous. Fashionably bi. Gay till graduation. Just a phase. Scared of coming out as “properly” gay. Sexual orientation is irrelevant unless you act on it. There’s a real story behind each of these. A real human being. And for good reasons.
Our media tells us that men find women snogging other women hot, and even more importantly that being found hot by men is the single most important thing a woman should care about. Don’t be surprised when women bow to that pressure and snog other women in bars to attract male attention.
Our culture and media also still tell us (sometimes) that being gay is very very bad. Don’t be surprised when people bow to that pressure and feel safer adopting the bi label.
Oh, and by the way? Some of are polyamorous. Some of us are promiscuous. Some of us are sluts. So what? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a healthy and varied sex life. Equally some of us are in committed, long-term, monogamous relationships; some with people of the same sex, some with people of the opposite sex. That doesn’t make us any less bisexual.
Some of us experiment in college and find the social pressure once we’ve left that safe environment too much to deal with. Some of us meet the love of our lives in college. If they’re of the same sex, that doesn’t mean we’re now “proper gay”. If they’re of the opposite sex, that doesn’t mean we’ve gone straight either.
Hey, you know what? Some of have only ever slept with people on one gender. And not even that makes us any less bisexual. Much like gay people who married someone of the opposite sex to keep appearances aren’t any less gay for it. Much like straight people who’ve never had sex aren’t asexual. A lot of the time sexuality is a question of identity, not always or necessarily action. It still matters, we still experience the world differently to other people, it’s still relevant.
There is a certain temptation to fight all the stereotypes, try to make ourselves look as similar to “normal” people as possible. As damaging as stereotypes are, it is hugely important to remember that behind every stereotype there is a real human story – that is in fact why they are so damaging. Ultimately, denying that some bisexuals are that way is throwing parts of our community under the bus. It’s also a lose-lose proposition. If we try to look more “straight” we will get flak from lesbians and gays. If we try to look more “gay”, we’ll get flak from many straight people. To me, being out and proud, and embracing the diversity within our community is the only sensible way forward.
ETA
Well, that seemed to strike a chord with people. Let me try to catalog at least some of the stereotypes and how people felt about them.
Confused and/or fickle. Strangely not a charge ever leveled at monosexual people who like both blondes and redheads.
Bi men are really gay men in denial, or too cowardly to come out as gay. Bi women do it for the attention. Given how negative that attention can be from both straight and gay people, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Greedy. Promiscuous. Slutty. Which, you know, some bisexuals are that way, and that’s perfectly fine. But some aren’t. Certainly the polyamorous people who commented felt that being bi and being poly were completely independent facets of their personality; and a lot of monogamous bisexuals were deeply annoyed by the fact that people assumed they couldn’t be faithful in relationships.
A number of people had been rejected by potential partners once they’d come out. We briefly touched on whether we “should” come out to potential partners up front – and arrived at the unanimous conclusion that no one was under any obligation to reveal their sexual orientation to anyone.
The slutty stereotype gets even more damaging when people start assuming that just because you’re bi you automatically fancy everyone, or fancy them. “You’re a bi girl? Threesomes!!” Both monogamous and polyamorous people found that one annoying. I’ll come back to that assumption of availability later in the week.
The assumed correlation between the gender of a current partner and sexual orientation also annoyed a lot of people. Particularly because previous or other relationships were dismissed and seen as unimportant (“just a phase”). Someone pointed out that this gets even worse once you have kids in an opposite-sex relationship – any bi identity you might have clung on to until then gets automatically erased.
There was also a sense that the QUILTBAG community didn’t look particularly favourably on bi people (and especially women) in opposite-sex relationships. As @the_eumelia pointed out, it feels ‘[a]s though they’re “abandoning” the community. When really it’s “the community” that abandons them.’
I did love @flyingteacosy’s point about how it wasn’t necessarily the stereotypes themselves that were annoying but how we are measured against them. “Like I’m either Not Like All Those Others, or I’m just a certain way ’cause I’m bi.. not because I’m just me.”
One concept that seemed to spark a lot of ideas and side conversations was the distinction between sexual orientation and romantic orientation. This seemed to ring true for a lot of people who suddenly had the words to better explain how they felt.
An interesting conversation flowed from this around some bisexual women in particular who are sexually attracted to more than one gender but tend to be romantically attracted to men. A couple of women wondered whether this was a socially conditioned response, a reflection that in our heteronormative society it is “easier” to have an opposite-sex relationship. This of course also plays into the stereotype of bi women in opposite-sex relationships somehow abandoning the community. It’s a tough one to unpick, and I love how openly people shared their experiences and views.
Leading on from that, a few people also shared experiences of partners and ex-partners saying they would feel more hurt if the person left them for someone of a different gender. Someone summed this up nicely: “Love is love and heartache is heartache.”
Of course, one person’s evil, hated stereotype is another person’s cherished identity. Some people loved the word fluid in connection with their sexual orientation, others hated it. Some happily embrace and reclaim the word slut, while others try to distance themselves from it. I do love that for the most part we are having remarkably respectful, insightful conversations about subjects that can be incredibly difficult.
And here are a bunch of interesting links people shared:
Something on the different types of love the ancient Greeks recognised.
Another piece on how “bisexual” doesn’t have to mean “binary”.
What about the B in LGBT?
Yes, I really am bisexual, deal with it! (The one with the “I am not 4% lesbian” quote.)
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Next: On being invisible
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[@TWkLGBTQ] Coming out as bisexual

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Coming out as bi is an interesting experience. You think you have to keep coming out as lesbian or gay? Try being bi, in any type of relationship! The first person I came out to was my then long-term boyfriend. And interestingly, I didn’t use the identity word (I’m bi), I used action words (I would sleep with women/I am attracted to this woman). I started dropping enough hints around my highschool friends that they figured it out. I think the first person to actually apply the bi label to me out loud was one of my friends. I certainly really struggled to say “I am bisexual” for a very long time. But I implied it heavily enough that my uni friends knew.
Coming out in the workplace, when I’ve been with my current – opposite-sex – partner for longer than I’ve been with my employer, is a whole other bundle of fun. Best reaction: “Why are you in the LGBT network? You’re not L, G, or…” – from straight and gay colleagues. Even though I was heavily involved with the internal running of our LGBT network, for years I wouldn’t actually speak about it outside the network. I was worried I would confuse people and detract from the network’s main messages with my issues which I perceived as fairly minor and unimportant.
In some ways I needed to be given permission to speak. Things that did that for me: talking to bi friends who listened and shared their own experiences – and I realised they were similar; the Bisexuality report; ending up leading the the LGBT network when my colleague left the company; the Stonewall Leadership Programme. I remember the first time I stood up in front of a bunch of straight colleagues who knew me as “Mili who’s been with Paul forever” and talked about LGBT issues; and the awkward conversations I had with them over dinner afterwards. These days I start conference speeches with “My name is Mili and I’m the only bisexual in the village”. But it’s been a journey.
Last year I realised that not being out to my family was beginning to have a very significant negative impact on my relationship with them. I was very public about being bi all over the Internet, at work, and with my friends, but not with my parents. (Note: this only works if your parents don’t speak English.) As more of my charity work and parts of my day job started to revolve around LGBT rights, there were huge chunks of my life I couldn’t talk to my family about. At Christmas, I came out to my Mum. I’m still not sure how I feel about how she reacted – that one’s still work in progress.
ETA
A few common themes on coming out as bisexual from the discussion on Twitter…
Having to remind people incessantly. Having to tell them again and again.
Having our identities questioned, particularly if we are in “straight” relationships.
Referring to past relationships rather than to identity.
“The stigma of ‘bi’ is different to the stigma of ‘gay’.”
Feeling like coming out as bi is just making unnecessary fuss.
Not hiding but not going out of your way to “inform” people.
Fear for your safety.
Coming out as a political act.
Other people’s reactions vary hugely.
The boyfriend who forgot.
The hug.
The snarky biphobic and homophobic comments.
The friends who walk away.
The people who tell you it’s irrelevant.
The mind-reading mothers.
A lot of people saw coming out to family as especially difficult.
“It’s just left unsaid and it’s been so long, it would be weird to do it now.”
“I was raised not to hide important things, but I’m almost 23. How do I explain this now?”
Sometimes one parent is more difficult to tell than the other.
Do keep sharing your stories, either in the comments here or on Twitter.
Previous: Let’s talk about labels
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[@TWkLGBTQ] Let’s talk about labels

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I use bi to mean “same and not same” – I am not attracted to “men and women” but to people regardless of gender. This includes genderqueer and non-binary. I first noticed I was attracted to women as well as men aged maybe 12 or 13. I had no idea genderqueer/non-binary people even existed then. Heck, I had very little idea LGB people existed then.
By about 16 or 17 I was comfortable enough to adopt the bi label for myself (at least in my head though not necessarily out loud). I’ve identified as bi for half my life – so in some ways I’m quite attached to the label. At the same time I realise that it can come across as exclusive of people on the genderqueer spectrum. And “bi as in same and not same” is a hell of a mouthful.
I do feel deeply uncomfortable with pansexual as a label. Some of that is a fair amount of internalised oppression/slut shaming. Some of that is that there’s not even a P in QUILTBAG. We’ve done a lot of work educating people about what bisexuality means – and heck, we’re still not even nearly where we need to be with that. Starting from scratch on pan just seems terrifying. I do like the approach of using pan with people who will know what it means and bi with everyone else as an interim solution.
On a typographical note, it’s bisexual, not bi-sexual.
ETA
Fascinating discussions over on Twitter about this. Let me try to sum up.
People use all sorts of labels for themselves, sometimes even apparently contradictory ones. @the_eumelia said she identified as bi, lesbian and gay and especially queer because of the stories and the contexts associated with each. Someone identified as “sexual”. Someone else said they used queer but found people just took that to mean “gay”. We also talked about bisexuality as an attraction to more than one gender vs an indifference to gender. Several people mentioned the way that the labels they use for themselves and the way they think of their own sexuality have changed over the years.
Someone who identified as gay felt they were in the minority in today’s discussion – which to an extent was the point; I am trying to raise the profile and visibility of parts of the QUILTBAG community beyond lesbian and gay. Most weeks those parts of the community will feel in the minority.
Three in-depth discussions struck me in particular: There was a sizeable contingent advocating against the use of labels. Many of those tweets were variations on the theme of “Can’t we just be ‘people’?” I saw a couple of good counter-arguments to this. Using “people” can very easily lead to erasure of minorities like QUILTBAG people – it’s easy to assume that there is a default for people, and that default does tend to be straight, white, cis and male in our culture. Using labels is a way to differentiate ourselves and call attention to the fact that we exist, we are different and we have different needs. And not only do QUILTBAG people in general have different needs, but as @the_eumelia pointed out, each letter in that alphabet soup has different needs.
I also liked the distinction between “label” and “identity” that @GeoffreyBrent made:

I distinguish between “labels” (how we describe self to others) vs “identity” (how we see self) so there are labels I am comfortable using, for convenience in communication, without *identifying* w/ them as such.

The second discussion that went into quite a lot of depth was the distinction or otherwise between bisexual and pansexual. There was a clear sense of discomfort expressed by quite a few people with the pansexual label, not dissimilar to what I described above. It almost feels self-excluding.
@LauraTea linked to this article by Julia Serano on how “bisexual” does not reinforce the gender binary. Interestingly, while I completely agree that it doesn’t, I find very little in that article actually matches my own experience of my sexual orientation. Julia talks a lot about male and female “bodies” whereas I am attracted to people as much as I am to bodies (yes, those are different); also, I have a huge thing for androgyny which doesn’t seem to fit in this framework. Of course the beauty of all this is that we can all choose how we identify and that does not detract from anyone else’s self-identification or experience of their sexuality.
I found this article on the differences and similarities between bi and pan which @the_eumelia linked to incredibly compelling. It argues that bisexual as a label has its political roots in sexual orientation politics whereas pansexual is more concerned with gender. There is a huge overlap between the two and they aren’t actually mutually exclusive. All of this makes an instinctive kind of sense to me.
The third, briefer, discussion was around “living up” to your chosen labels. A few people expressed fears of not being “queer enough” or “bi enough” or “gay enough”. I thought @1nineeight3 put this beautifully:

I guess that is the problem arising from labels. When you give yourself a label, you somehow expect yourself to go through certain experiences. And when that does not materialise, you question yourself and feel guilty because it’s as if you’re using the label “wrongly” or not justifying yourself thru that label.

So if this is you, take heart: you’re far from the only one feeling like this!
Edited some time later to add more awesome things people sent me
@DRMacIver wrote something on labels, some of which I quite like. @Drcabl3 has promised a full rebuttal.
He also shared the Genderbread Person model.
@Drcabl3 wrote up something on queer as a label, and coming out or not coming out as such.
Next: Coming out as bisexual
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[@TWkLGBTQ] Start here

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This post is actually written in December 2013 but deliberately backdated. The intention is to provide an umbrella post for my work curating @TWkLGBTQ to be used for reference.
Post 1: Let’s talk about labels. Discusses bisexual vs pansexual, whether “bisexual” is exclusionary to non-binary people, interalised slut shaming with regards to the word “pansexual”, the usefulness or otherwise of labels and the pressure to live up to your chosen label.
Post 2: Coming out as bisexual. What is says on the box. The challenges of coming out as bi, and how biphobia, bi invisibility and bi erasure exacerbate them. Personal experiences coming out to friends, colleagues and family.
Post 3: Let’s talk about stereotypes. Greedy. Indecisive. Promiscuous. Fashionably bi. Gay till graduation. Just a phase. Scared of coming out as “properly” gay. Additional discussion of sexual vs romantic orientation.
Post 4: On being invisible. Discussion of bi invisibility, bi erasure, the fact that their committed by gay and straight people alike, and the damage they can cause.
Post 5: Fictionally Bi. Discussion of bisexual representation in fiction, including a lot of recommendations of characters and works.
Post 6: Awesomely Bi. Discussion of bisexual rolemodels and the frequent absence thereof. List of indivduals bisexual people found inspiring.
Post 7: The privilege of passing, the burden of invisibility. The flip side of bi invisibility is assumed heterosexual privilege. This is often the answer to why we flaunt our sexuality.
Post 8: Bi at work. Discussion of challenges bisexual people face in the workplace.
Post 9: You’re bi? Threesomes! Discussion of the assumption of availability that is an intrinsic part of biphobia, the appropriation of our sexualities, and the disproportionate negative effects on bi women.
Post 10: Intersectionality. Discussion of how sexuality can intersect with other axes of oppression, e.g. gender or race.
Post 11: Domestic abuse in the LGBT community. Discussion of the different forms of domestic violence and abuse within the LGBT community and Broken Rainbow, the only national charity to provide support to LGBT people experiencing domestic abuse in the UK.
Post 12: Bisexuals and gender. Discussion of the differential impact of biphobia based on gender and gender identity as well as the interaction between sexuality and gender presentation.
Post 13: What I learned from Curating @TWkLGBTQ. Long and rambling post about both the process of being a curator and the content of the discussions we had.

Heads-up: I’ll be talking about bisexuality *a lot* next week

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From about 5pm UK time on Sunday, I’ll be running the @TWkLGBTQ rotation curation account for a week. Which means I’ll be talking about bisexuality a lot. I’ll be using this blog to post snippets that are longer than 140 characters but probably still shorter than my normal blog posts, all around my experience of being bisexual and some challenges bisexuals in general face in today’s world. If you’re not on Twitter (Why not?!), feel free to engage with them in the comments here. But by all means also come by and check out the discussion on Twitter. This should be fun.
Now excuse me while I go an freak out about only having 48 hours to prep this.

Quacks like a duck

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I am an atheist. I diligently tick “no religion” on my census form, and I have a lot of time for large chunks of the British Humanist Association’s work, particularly when it comes to issues such as faith schools, bishops in the House of Lords, and assisted dying.
Where I have been struggling recently, though, is with the BHA’s attempts to get recognition for Humanist weddings into the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. I already struggle with the fact that certain (but by far not all) religions have the privilege of having their wedding ceremonies recognised by the state. I come from a culture of far stricter separation of church and state, where you’re welcome to have a religious wedding ceremony, but you have to have a civil one too for it to be legal.
It bothers me somewhat that my friends of most Christian denominations can have one, religious, ceremony while my Pagan friends have to go to the registry office as well as have their handfasting. There is a clear inequality here which we should probably look to resolve one way or another (and to be honest I don’t hugely mind which way). What bothers me slightly more, though, is that Humanism is suddenly trying to walk and quack like a duck.
Abolishing religious privilege is one thing, but it’s not like non-religious people can’t marry in this country – that horse bolted when we allowed the Catholics to marry. In fact, by virtue of having an established church, pretty much anyone has the option to have a civil ceremony or get married in the Church of England. So given that marriage is a legal contract which is already open to people from any and no religion through civil marriage, what exactly is the BHA trying to achieve by demanding the same privileged status for Humanism as some other religions already have?
Of course atheists, agnostics and Humanists have a desire to mark important life events – births, deaths, marriages – with some kind of ceremony. I love the BHA’s idea of Humanist baby naming ceremonies, and I would certainly consider having a Humanist celebrant conduct my funeral. As there is no legal contract involved, neither of these occasions are served in any way by the state. With marriages though, we have a reasonably good existing system in place that’s administered by the state. I would much rather see the BHA’s energy aimed at securing proper separation of church and state than trying to jostle with other religions for a privileged position.

[Elsewhere] Monetise This: The World of Kindle

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So Amazon has decided to boldly go where… quite a few people have tried to go before actually, in its recent move to try to monetise the creative talent (or otherwise) of the fanfiction community. If you hang around fandom long enough, you realise that roughly every seven years someone pops up who thinks there’s a pot of gold at the end of the fandom rainbow, with this most recent effort very likely prompted by the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy which started life as a piece of Twilight fanfiction.
Read more at ORGZine.

Musings on the Internet

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So @drcabl3 asked the other day if the structures of the internet (TCP/IP, http, physical layer, etc.) were inherently patriarchal. This is what I ended up writing about that.
I suspect this is a question you can answer either way based on your definition of terms. I’m also not convinced that it’s a testable hypothesis. Is the Gherkin phallic? Hell yes. Would female architects free of millennia-long oppression design yonic buildings? Pass. So as a first answer, I’m going to go with mu.
I’m not a fan of attaching inherent moral value to scientific concepts and technologies. Is nuclear fusion evil because of Mutually Assured Destruction or good because that massive fusion reactor in the sky keeps us alive? Or possibly even evil because the massive fusion reactor keeps us a live and we as a species are a blight on the face of the earth? Mu. In much the same way I’m not convinced that a data exchange protocol can be inherently patriarchal.
Now, our use of technologies, and the social structures we build around them can be patriarchal. Technologies can be used to perpetuate unearned privilege for one group while oppressing others. With the internet, I’d argue that’s not been the case so far. I’m biased and Evegny Morozov will almost certainly tell you I’m wrong but I’m inclined to believe that the Internet and the Web have enabled a much greater plurality of views to be much more visible in our society. They have enabled oppressed groups to bridge the chasms of geography, organise, and start making their voices heard. Yes, of course there are forces acting against that in the form of state and other censorship and surveillance, but by and large, so far I’d say oppressed groups have done rather well out of the internet.
Having said that, I see three challenges with how we’ve structured the technology and how we are using it that could in the end lead to perpetuating oppression.
1. Ownership structures: One of the things that worries me the most is that our entire communications infrastructure that we use for all this wonderful political activity – from the undersea cables to applications like Twitter – is in the hands of private companies. With the exception of a couple of community-run efforts of varying quality and independence (Wikipedia, Mozilla, Dreamwidth, the Archive of Our Own), our entire infrastructure is subject to the whims of the invisible hand. If Twitter decides there’s money to be made in suppressing political discourse, or folds because there’s not enough money to be made from our updates about sandwiches, we lose a huge amount of investment we’ve put into it in terms of community building, and we lose access to an absolutely vital piece of infrastructure. If BT decides to throttle the bandwidth of people downloading documents from WikiLeaks (or for that matter people who think Julian Assange should stand trial for rape in Sweden), we might be free to switch ISPs; if the consortia running the undersea cables decide to do the same, we’re rather more screwed. I have two partial answers to this challenge – one for the capital-intensive infrastructure like undersea cables and hardware and one for applications and platforms. Net neutrality, ideally enshrined in law and international treaties, is absolutely vital when it comes to the former. Supporting community-run platforms like Dreamwidth and identi.ca and putting in place the right governance structures around those has to be one of the ways we approach the latter.
2. State control: This is of course the Evgeny Morozov side of the argument; that as well as presenting us with unprecedented opportunities, digital technology gives enormous amounts of power to the state. Surveillance has never been so easy – permanently attached to our mobile phones, we carry our very own digital spies in our pockets. Put a little pressure on Google and see search results related to, say, student protests or rape culture disappear from its pages. And yes, some people would notice, and a few would know how to get around that, but the jury’s out on whether those would be enough to form a critical mass and inform the rest. This is where digital rights campaigning is vital. You all know the organisations I’m going to direct you to next: the Open Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EDRi. They’re absolutely vital in setting the boundaries for what the state can and cannot do in a digital world, and we need to support them and remain vigilant on that front.
3. Who has the skills/access? And how do we define access? The technology and telecomms industry, as well as certain online spaces, continue to be notoriously male-dominated. Yes, we are making some progress in fixing that, but we are also experiencing significant backlash. Hardware manufacturers still see women as decoration. Anita Sarkeesian dared to imply that she might have an opinion about the representation of women in video games. Only 14 women applied to study Computing Science at Oxford last year (and the success rate for women was less than half that for men). What all of these illustrate is that women are still not quite equal on the internet – either in terms of technology or in terms of the perceived validity of their opinions and experiences. There are two things we’ve got to do in this area. The first is address the massive problem technology as a sector has in attracting and retaining female talent. That’s not a problem with TCP/IP. It’s a problem with our education system and media which continue to send the message that what is valued in a girl is pretty passivity, not smart activity; and it’s a problem with our technology industry which takes every opportunity it can to snub women as both consumers and potential employees. The second is that we need to admit to ourselves that if women and other minorities are repeatedly and deliberately silenced and dismissed by abusive trolls, we have a massive free speech issue in our community. It doesn’t matter if it’s the state doing the censoring, or Facebook, or the trolls who tell women they deserve to be raped or killed – the effect is the same. That’s not a problem with TCP/IP either – it’s a problem with people. Access is not just about having the skills, the hardware and the internet connection. Access is also about feeling safe to speak out. And it’s our responsibility to enable that.
Science and technology don’t have intrinsic moral values. I find they rarely take sides. It’s people that do, and it’s people we need to work with to address that.
drcabl3 has since written a response to this arguing that technology has moral and ideological values attached to it. I owe him a reply.

ORGcon – world collisions in practice

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So on Saturday I spoke at ORGcon about worlds colliding; about issues in digital rights that are grey areas; where I have skin in the game on both sides of the debate. I argued that we all have such issues – issues where being a digital rights campaigner doesn’t sit quite comfortably with something else in our lives; and that those are the issues where we are in a unique position to really make a difference. I also challenged the digital rights community to become more diverse and more inclusive, because that would bring in more people who ask difficult questions on things that to us sometimes seem a no-brainer and who can help us find solutions that work.
What I didn’t say in my talk is that sometimes, when your worlds collide, it feels very much like you’re fighting a war on two fronts. Yes, you can see both sides of the debate, you can see the potential for pragmatism and compromise, but the more entrenched arguments from both sides can sometimes really wear you down.
Less than an hour after my ORGcon talk, I found my worlds colliding quite spectacularly. Prompted by a question from the audience, closing keynote speaker John Perry Barlow referred to the rape allegations against Julian Assange as “ungentlemanly conduct”. Faced with that, I found myself unable to remain in the room and walked out in protest. One other person challenged Barlow on the remark but their comment went unanswered; several others walked out.
This should go without saying, but in my experience unfortunately it doesn’t: I don’t know whether Julian Assange is guilty of rape and sexual assault. That is for a Swedish court to determine. What I object to is the gross trivialisation of allegations of rape in any context, not just in the Assange case: comments like “It wasn’t rape rape”, “Oh, but she was totally asking for it”, and in yesterday’s case “ungentlemanly conduct” and “He upset two women”. “Upset” and “is alleged to have sexually assaulted and raped” are different things.
Come on guys, do I really have to explain again the endemic nature of violence against women in our society? Do I have to tell you again that one in two women in the UK has experienced rape, sexual assault, domestic violence or stalking? Do I really have to explain the effect persistent trivialisation of the kind we heard from John Perry Barlow has on women’s ability to report and deal with such violence; on our efforts to put a stop to gender-based violence? Really?
When a high-profile speaker at an event I’m attending makes that kind of comment and it goes unchallenged, here’s what I hear. I hear that this is a community that doesn’t value women. I hear that should I ever have a problem in that community, my complaints are likely to be trivialised and dismissed. I hear that I am not welcome.
Which, you may note, is the exact opposite of what I challenged the digital rights community to do.
John Perry Barlow did not go unchallenged. Enough of us – men and women – walked out, tweeted in disgust, or in the case of one person for whom I have boundless admiration, challenged him in the room, that it should be clear that he does not speak for the digital rights community in general. All these people have my deep gratitude and deserve yours too. Within a couple of hours of the incident, the Open Rights Group issued a statement saying it “does not agree with or endorse statements made at ORGCon diminishing the charges against Assange” and that it “supports due process”.
If you are part of the digital rights community and want to do your bit in making it welcoming and inclusive, speaking up about such incidents is a damn good start. If you’re looking in from the outside, wondering if we’re the kind of community you might want to join, know this: No community is perfect, and neither are we. But there are enough of us who will have your back, who are prepared to make you feel welcome, and who are determined to ensure that the digital rights community is as welcoming, diverse and inclusive as possible.
I am one of those people. If you have any concerns, drop me a line, find me at the next event, get in touch.

When Worlds Collide – my talk from yesterday’s ORGcon

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Below is the text of my talk from ORGcon. Some of you may know that worlds did end up colliding, and I’ll write about that later, but for now I wanted to let this stand on its own. It comes with a trigger warning for discussion of violence against women.
I’ve been in digital rights – one way or another – since the late 90s. I came to the field through 3 things

  • Free software, which I continue to use and passionately support for ideological as well as practical reasons
  • Piracy – which I have more or less stopped committing as I have found other ways to engage with culture and artists
  • And fanfiction – which I do still occasionally commit.

What these have in common is that they’re, broadly speaking, intellectual property issues. And intellectual property issues for me are a complete no-brainer – I know exactly where I stand on them, which is firmly on the side of users. (Hold the rotten tomatoes.) We, the users, have the right to run a piece of software; we have the right to access the source code and change it as we wish, etc. We have the right to format-shift our music collection rather than buy everything again the next time technology changes, and we have the right to access, remix and transform our culture. Simples. (I said hold the rotten tomatoes.)
It is probably worth noting at this point that the sum total of my own cultural and creative output is a meandering political blog and some rather dubious fanfiction. Hardly anything I’m going to make a living from by insisting no one copy or distribute it without paying me.
If, on the other hand, you’re a musician sitting in this audience with that rotten tomato, or an author, and you’ve been listening to labels and publishers tell you how the Internet is killing music/publishing for the last 15 years, it’s not really simples, is it? Because even if you firmly believe that we should not be disconnecting people from the internet for file sharing; even if you firmly believe that copyright should not be abused to justify censorship and surveillance; even if you firmly believe that artists and rightsholders should not be suing fans into oblivion – even then you still want to make a living out of your art and hard work. And suddenly, unlike me with the corporate day job, your worlds start colliding. You have skin in the game on both sides of this debate, and things start getting a bit hairy.
Which is not only perfectly fine – it is to be encouraged. So what I want to talk to you about today are some more examples of issues where worlds collide – for me personally and for digital rights activists in general. I want to talk to you about the grey areas where things stop being a no-brainer and start getting really difficult. And I want to talk to you about how, the harder you personally are finding a particular issue, the more likely it is that you will have something incredibly valuable to contribute.
We’ve already established that I have hardly any skin in the game when it comes to intellectual property. Where as a feminist and digital rights activist I do have skin in the game though, is when it comes to the fine line between free speech and hounding women off the internet through bullying and threatening behaviour. Let me tell you a bit about the dangers of being female on the Internet…
Chat users with female-sounding usernames get 25 times more malicious messages than those with gender-neutral or male-sounding names. That’s on average 163 times a day that some random stranger will ask you if you’re feeling horny, tell you to get your tits out, or suggest that their dick and your pussy will make a great pair.
Online gaming is a particularly nasty corner of the internet if you happen to be of the wrong gender. There’s a couple of websites which curate the gems of creativity male gamers hurl at their female counterparts. Here are some screengrabs from a blog called Fat, Ugly or Slutty. From telling women gamers they should “get back in the kitchen” to “am gonna slit your throat you fucking slut”, it’s all in there.
A special sort of hell is also reserved for women who dare to express an opinion online. Female bloggers, prominent and otherwise, are regularly told, often graphically, that we deserve to be raped or killed (and raped, before and after). This kind of thing is so common that a female blogger’s first “fat and ugly” comment is practically a badge of honour – a sign that we’ve truly made it. Oh, and here is my very first rape threat.
Incidentally, while the anonymity of the internet probably exacerbates the issue, this is not a phenomenon confined to online space. In meatspace, we call it street harassment, and it’s just as problematic. But in meatspace no one calls for laws to make TfL hand over all Oyster Card data so the police can track down the guy who groped me on the tube. In meatspace, politicians don’t jump on violence against women as a reason to legislate for more surveillance and censorship – at best they ignore the issue, and at worst they make it worse. In meatspace, you generally have to bring out the big guns like terrorism to package up your horrible, illiberal, rights-infringing legislation.
And so when feminists start calling for police powers to track down trolls and play into the hands of the censorship and surveillance lobby, I do a double-take and have to ask myself which side of this debate I’m on. And it’s a tough question – but ultimately I’m not interested here in slogans and soundbites and kneejerk reactions. I’m interested in finding solutions that work, so I’m not going to bang on about the principles of free speech or – valid though it is – the concept of rape culture. I’m much more likely instead to tell you that there is existing legislation and police powers that can be used for truly threatening behaviour.
But I’m also much more likely to challenge the silent male majority in online spaces to make it clear that threatening and harassing women to hound them off the internet is not okay. That it is, in fact, also a free speech issue when women’s voices are silenced in this way – because it doesn’t matter if it’s the state doing the censoring, or Facebook, or a bunch of trolls who make you feel unsafe about speaking out – the effect is the same. So if you truly care about free speech you’d better be prepared to help find a way to let those voices be heard.
Let me give you another example: the Great Porn Firewall of Britain. We’ve had report after report describe the harmful effects pornography is having on children and young people. Stories vary in quality and sensationalism. Hordes of 10-year-olds addicted to porn? Check. Porn used to groom children by sex abuse gangs? Check. Porn to blame for the shocking rate of intimate partner violence among teenagers? Check. And you know what? Some of these things are probably even true. And as someone who was abused as a teenager – though porn had nothing to do with it – if there’s anything we can do to spare even one kid that experience then it’s worth doing.
But when Claire Perry and Ed Vaizey propose the Great Porn Firewall of Britain, as a digital rights and queer activist I look at it and go “WHOA! Let’s slow down a little here!” Because not only is there incredible potential for abuse in the technology, not only do the proposals contain absolutely no democratic oversight, but it’s simply not going to work. Yes, it looks good in the headlines, but children will continue to get exposed to porn while we’re all congratulating ourselves on having fixed the problem and look the other way. And not only that, but more likely than not, kids are going to lose access to vital resources on sex education and sexual health. LGBTQ kids in particular are likely to lose access to safe spaces online, spaces where they can be themselves, where they’re not being told their entire existence is wrong, spaces which can and do save their lives.
And so, faced with the Great Porn Firewall of Britain, as a digital rights and queer and domestic violence activist, and as an abuse survivor, I’m going to start asking difficult questions. I’m going to start asking why the education secretary, every time sex and relationship education is mentioned, sniggers like a 12-year-old behind the bike sheds. Why the department for education has half-arsed and buried campaign after campaign against abuse in teenage relationships. Why we are failing to teach kids about consent and respect and communication in relationships. And I’m going to ask for the evidence that blocking porn a. stops kids from watching it and b. has any actual positive impact on what really matter like abuse and violence in relationships.
These are the issues where my worlds collide. They’re the issues where digital rights for me become really, really difficult. I hope there are areas in your lives where you feel the same. Areas where being a digital rights campaigner doesn’t quite sit comfortably with something else you’re doing. Issues that make you want to ask the really hard questions. To go beyond the soundbites. To find solutions that work. Because those are the issues where you can contribute the most. Where you can challenge both sides to get off their high horses and actually talk to each other. Where you can really make a difference.
And I also hope that this has convinced you that we need a more diverse digital rights community. Because we all have blind spots. We all have issues that to us are no-brainers. And the more diverse our community is, the more likely that someone will say, “Hang on! What about this?!”
So there are two things I want you to do when you leave here today. One: I want you to start asking the really hard questions. And two: I want you to think about how we can reach out beyond our bubble of geeks in black t-shirts and make this a welcoming community for everyone.