Study: Men Who Harass Women Online Are Literally Losers
Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, published a study last week which focused on how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
The Washington Post reports :
As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that no matter their skill level, or how the game went men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
Some male players, however t he ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.
A chart from the Halo study that shows how nice male gamers were to other males (dotted line) and females (solid line) during gameplay. Men always treat each other about the same. B ut the better a player gets, the more likely he is to be nice to ladies. (Kasumovic et al)
In todays online environment, alas, this is not an idle observation. According to a recent Pew report, 40 percent of Internet users have personally experienced harassment. While both genders are frequent victims of this abuse, women tend to get the worst of it: They are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and stalking, Pew said.
To be clear, men are harassed online, too, but women are particularly targeted.
In each of these environments, Kasumovic suggests, a recent influx of female participants has disrupted a pre-existing social hierarchy. Thats okay for the guys at the top but for the guys at the bottom, who stand to lose more status, thats very threatening. (Its also in keeping with the evolutionary framework on anti-lady hostility, which suggests sexism is a kind of Neanderthal defense mechanism for low-status, non-dominant men trying to maintain a shaky grip on their particular caves supply of women.)
As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status, Kasumovic writes, the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a females performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.
I dedicate this post to my trolls, who during the last 24 hours have called me a cunt, a bitch, a whore, a cum dumpster, a druggie (Ive been drug free for 14 or 15 years now), made comments about my vagina, sent images of female hygiene products and mocked my husbands death .
Youre all losers. Literally .
.......
To women who are harassed online, know that youve already won when the abusive comments pour in.. Youre better than they are. Refer them to this study. Youre living in their minds rent free and there are no neighbors because their minds are vacant.
Its not about us (women), its about their issues. They have a problem. Abusive trolls cant even play a game without hurling insults about women. On top of that, they lost the freaking game in the study.
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I have to agree.
''I have to agree'', me too.
LMAO, indeed it is the Fuckwad Theory is action.
I'm not so sure they start out as a "Normal Person". Probably not.
You and I were talking about this yesterday. hee hee hee.
!!!
I, also agree with this comment!
It's the same here.
I don't think there's any getting away from these Slug Slimes.
This type of activity is merely a delayed response to the 60's in which groups of women abused soldiers returning from Vietnam . Video games like this are symbolic combat .
Could you be any more immature and peevish ? Yes , you could have left off the "might" .
You asked a real question above . Do you expect a real answer to it ? Here's my answer : STFU and go away .
You know that serious question you asked above ? Shove it ...
I don't hate you for being a woman . I hate you for your low class rankouts .
Comment removed for CoC violation. Randy
Yawn ... your repetitiveness is boring .
Our Gang/The Little Rascals...Alfalfa and Spanky, classic.
And to think I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find theTuesday afternoon NT prayer meeting.
But seriously, Petey darling, get a hold of yourself. Either that, or have some respect for the seeder and the topic.
Have you nothing to say to Max or are you too afraid of him to criticize ?
Afraid? Should I be?
What? Groups of women abused returning vets? What are you talking about?
I was alive then, and never heard of such a thing! It never made the nightly news.
never heard of such a thing! Neither did I Dowser.
You never saw "protest" groups of women spitting on returning soldiers and calling them "baby-killers" etc ? Were you old enough to have watched the news back then ?
I have heard stories of protests. But the baby killers and spitting on a soldier always seemed to happen to someone, who knew someone, who had a cousin that it happened to them...or at least one of THIER friends. I never heard of it happening from a vet. None of the Vietnam vets in my family had it happen to them.
First of all, it's wasn't groups of women. It was groups of men, women, teens, seniors that were involved in the anti war movement. It covered all genders and colors. Later, Vietnam vet's were part of the movement.
It was a very turbulent time in our history. They did one good thing and that was help bring an end to the war. Their blaming of soldiers for the wrongs of the government is not something that I accepted then,nor do I today.
Or it could be that given their relative rolls in society and in the gaming world, women are still being objectified and demeaned by creeps who haven't got the message that it is not ok to abuse anyone.
You weren't involved in combat . But for those that were it was a big deal .
The ultimate objectification is to send someone into combat ...
What is your point, or are you still making incoherence an artform?
That's what I was thinking. I thought at the time, although just a kid, that it wasn't right. It was sickening.
The very first time I saw my Daddy cry, was when his best friend, who was 'regular army' came home from the Vietnam war. He was arriving at our airport in Owensboro. There was a brass band, from the army, and as the plane landed, they played the Stars and Stripes forever. No protesters, just families and friends, behind the chain link fence, as the men deplaned. Daddy was gripping the fence, tears pouring from his face. When Walter deplaned, Betty, his wife, and Greg, his son, ran to him, arms outstretched. We stayed back so the first moments were with his family. As soon as we could, Walter came behind the fence, and my father took him in his arms, gently, and hugged him, saying, "Duke, you came home. Oh, you came home. You came home." We were so very glad to see him!
I know there were places where people were mean and hateful, but I never saw it. I never saw anything about specific groups of women targeting the vets for evil. If they had tried that in my home town, they wouldn't have lasted long, for sure!
I was so glad to see Walter, and still love him with all my heart.
The only thing that was GOOD that came out of that war, was that it finally woke the people up to the fact that the soldiers were not at fault. If we have a national guilt, (and we should), about how we mistreated our vets, our heroes, then perhaps we have learned something, finally, about honoring the people who serve us. May all of us never forget, and may all of us continue to work for our veterans that served their country, and us.
Every night, Petey. I remember the rows of coffins, draped in flags, the unloading of the coffins from the planes, and the sick feeling of being helpless to fix anything. The Vietnam War sort of grew out of Eisenhower's "advisory" roles, and just got worse.
I can never forgive Nixon for playing games with people's lives. I was born in 1955, Petey. I saw a lot. In the early stages of the war, my Grandpa was still a telegraph operator at the railroad, and typed out the Western Union messages. When he came home upset, it was because some poor fellow had died, and it distressed him greatly.
Please don't demean my patriotism, or my feelings. There was nothing I could do. I was one year too young for my classmates to go to war, but the class ahead of me contributed many of my fellow students to Vietnam.
Their blaming of soldiers for the wrongs of the government is not something that I accepted then,nor do I today.
I couldn't agree more that it was wrong to blame the soldiers. I also was aware of the protests as I wascertainlyold enough to. I marched against the war at 13 in 1969 in local protests in West Michigan while I had 2 brother-in-laws serving in Vietnam. Still, the one that bothered me the most is that being calling baby killers and being spit on arriving at the airports remain, as far as I can tell, myths, despite what some people on here indicate. I knew and know I lot of combat vets and it never happened to one of them and according to them it always seemed to have happened to someone that they heard of from some guy who told them about it at some airport and it was one of his cousins friends, who also heard that it happened to another guy.
I didn't blame the soldiers and wanted to be one and go to Vietnam more then you canpossiblyimagine, so if I knew of this happening, I would be the first to say it wasdisgusting. In protests some used the words baby killers, but it was only by a few assholes, but that was as far as it went. It was not the norm. Blaming the soldiers was the norm, sadly, but not those things.
You're wrong . I saw it happen on the news .
Dowser ,
That was in Kentucky . The events I described happened in the northeast and on the west coast .
Every night, Petey. I remember the rows of coffins, draped in flags, the unloading of the coffins from the planes, and the sick feeling of being helpless to fix anything.
For me it was the count every night on Walter Cronkite. The official statistics (often wrong) of how many Americans died that day, how many ARVN and how many Vietcong.
Only someone who has never been subject to the draft would be that obtuse .
When I was in the Marines, back in the early 70's, I never saw or personally experienced any of this kind of abuse and none of my friends in the service ever mentioned it happening to them either.
Our biggest problem with the civilian population was trying to get dates with the girls while looking so out of place with our high & tight hair cuts, during the "Age of Aquarius".
I'm sure there were some folks that went overboard, (when is there not?), but as far as the stories ofa large segment of the population "spitting on vets" or "calling the baby killers", well that just seems to me to be more apocryphal than real. Moreurban legend than not, but it does feed into the memethat "Liberals hate vets".
Ok, I can see that. It didn't happen here, Petey, that I know of.
You weren't involved in combat . But for those that were it was a big deal .
That is a laughably absurd comment, Petey. I've seen you make references like this before on a variety of issues. Do you really believe that only people who were drafted or involved in combat have a legitimate opinion? Is your intellect and ego really that fragile that you would fall back on "you aren't a vet or combat veteran so you aren't qualified to speak reference this issue"?
That's plain old malarkey, Petey.
I started online when I was in high school...mid to late 90's.
a) I used to get hit on, when I was younger, by pervs. I was stalked three times. I stopped mentioning sex and flirting....for the most part. I've also taken technological measures to prevent that.
b) I started getting harassed at the very start using USENET, IRC and ICQ. That's where I formed my abrasive online avatar. I refused to play the helpless female part and hit back; fire with fire.
c) There is a lot of female harassment. There continues to be web sites that post revenge and slut-shaming images. There is also a growth of misogynistic forums and web sites.
d) As most men get older than 25, they shed their juvenile behavior towards females. Unfortunately, not all do.
I mean this as a compliment-- Gee, you're young!
Please do not be offended...
For clarification, my post was in response to your initial post here .
Why didn't you put it there instead of where it ended up ?
That is where it put itself. Shrug.