Dreampepper

RECOMMENDED READING: Gratuitous: How Sexism Threatens to Undermine the Internet.

[...] Checking my Tumblr feed is like checking in with my friends, even if these “friends” are people I know very little about and will possibly never meet in real life. I met most of these people through friends of friends or via the social discovery that re-blogging affords. I somehow stumbled into their worlds, and they were interesting enough to make me want to come back. I interact with enough of them that I can pretty clearly say that when they post something, it is intended for me. I’m part of their small group, and I have no qualms about that.

Lisa, on the other hand, is a different matter. Lisa is a college student at a large university in the Midwest (and Lisa is not her name; I don’t know whether she would want a bunch of book nerds suddenly reading her posts or not, so I’m not going to link to her blog here, either). She seems pretty smart, and she blogs about her love life, her schoolwork, her friends, and all of the other things that matter to her. I find Lisa’s life very interesting, and her blog is great. But I haven’t completely settled the “is she talking to me” question. While Lisa follows me back, we don’t interact with each other. She uses Tumblr in a very social way, she isn’t really part of the crowd of people whom I otherwise follow. And I find this somewhat troubling. [...]

The pane of glass, and the contrast between the brightly lit casting room and the dim audience space, was enough distance to effectively dehumanize these girls. There were other factors at work, such as the blonde California girl’s status as marketing conceit and sexual totem, but I think a big reason we all felt free to dissect and dismiss these girls is because they couldn’t really see us. We were, more or less, anonymous. It was especially unsettling to turn around after watching for a few minutes and see one of the girls who had been in the call standing just behind us. How long had she been there, the girl in the leopard print shorts? And how did she suddenly become so real? [...]

Why are women treated differently than men online? I suppose the greater question is why they are still treated differently everywhere — online or otherwise — but since this post is about the web, I will focus on that. Surely there’s the garden variety sexism that permeates most of our culture, where women’s opinions are discounted or denigrated, and where the female form is used to sell everything from liquor to football. But I think there is something else at work online, and in many ways, it’s related to the strange feeling of watching all of those girls wait to have their pictures taken, as well as my conflicted feelings about enjoying college girl Lisa’s blog so much.

This is what I feel victim of:

"It had been stressful. The most difficult and trying thing I had ever done. We had pulled it off, gotten the damn thing in the can. I learned new things about the nature of stress. Arbitrary try-again-next-time school stress versus real grown-up you-can't-unfuck this stress. Hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars of ruin-your-credit-rating this-had-better-work stress. School stress, for me, was like a sunburn. It made you crazy, but a few beers, a couple of days reading and screwing around on the computer, and you were right as rain. But grown-up stress was the real fucking thing, persistent and militarized for the maximum infliction of pain and suffering. It took up residence in your lymph tissue, in the delicate webbing of the lumbar curve, odorless and colorless, waiting to be metabolized in an unrelated moment, releasing a cascade of misdirected rage."

(from http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Three%20McDonald%27s%3A%20The%20myth%20of%20regeneration%20through%20violence )

I came across this article whilst wandering found_objects and I post it here becase of the content related to the over eroticizing of children that it permeating our present culture. I believe that societies obsession with stamping out child pornography and related has created and is further creating an unhealthy obsession of the child as a sexual being.

She, the author of this article, has clearer words than I on this all too disturbing subject.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0303/goldstein.php