Without hiding her pain or her vulnerability, Nina Jankowicz describes how hundreds of thousands of grotesquely sexual and violent online assaults have hurt her, frightened her, and impacted her life.
We must “fight for a world that recognizes that our rights as women to free expression online are just as valuable as our abusers’,” she writes in her most recent book, How to Be a Woman Online. And fight she does, effectively and ferociously.
In this episode we talk about how and why girls and women are attacked by virtual rape mobs, and how that might change with the passage of the Take It Down Act, legislation that has passed the U.S. Senate and is due for a vote in the House.
How can 250 Fox News segments be wrong?
Fox News has many, many things in common with professional wrestling. Both mass media products are conflict-driven soap operas that script and perform storylines that manufacture a pretext for violence.
In the case of Jankowicz, the violence Fox News engineered has been virtual. It has also been grotesquely sexual, misogynistic, and antisemitic.
Since Fox News aired 250 segments instructing its millions of viewers to hate her, Jankowicz has endured hundreds of death and/or rape threats, hundreds of thousands of messages containing sexualized and/or sexist abuse, a cyber stalker, and the virtual assault of “deep fake pornography.” A few weeks before she was due to give birth to her son, her private security contractor advised her and her husband to flee their home after their address was posted online.
Now, you might be asking yourself why Fox News targeted her. What she might have done to deserve these attacks? Was she caught on camera sharing a ginger mint with her mother on Election Day? Did she once sign a petition alleging that 9/11 was a hoax? Well, no. And really, that’s not the point.
She’s a progressive woman with ideas that sound threatening to some men and to many conservatives. But conservative women have faced online sexual abuse as well. Perhaps we can put political goals aside in the interest of equality, democracy, and free speech — or how about public safety?
The purpose of crowdsourced online abuse is make the target feel afraid and alone. They hope she will feel so isolated that she will decide that her voice and her online civic engagement are not worth enduring the backlash.
That’s precisely why we need the targets of such assaults to break their silences, and that’s why the rest of us need to have their backs.
This molten thing about interracial sex
“This molten thing about interracial sex” was always at the core of fights about integration and equality, explains historian and author Dr. Timothy B. Tyson.
Mentioned in this the episode are This Molten Thing About Interracial Sex featuring Tim Tyson, and Woman Hating (Season 1, Ep1), and Renée DiResta who appears in Sins of the Algorithmic Curator (Season 2, Ep2).
Watch all episodes of Wrestling Darkness on Substack and YouTube, and hear them on all the usual podcast apps such as Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Episode 1: Woman Hating
This episode works just fine as a podcast. Yes, continue washing dishes! But some of this imagery needs to be seen to believed.
Sins of the Algorithmic Curator
“A deluge of content sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously among aligned believers has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts.”
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