Chubby-chasing sex trolls ran me offline, says fashion blogger A fashionista who blogs about clothing for "beautiful, well-dressed fat women" has become the latest person to step up and slam the behaviour of misogynistic trolls. Bronny Zigmond, a self-described “20-something fat feminist lady” from Australia, runs a blog called Fat Aus dedicated to helping chubby fashion-lovers find …
In a 3,000,000,000+ person city like TehIntraWebTubes, you're likely to run across across a few assholes. Especially if you troll in the underbelly of said city. Which you were, although (perhaps) unwittingly.
Hint: Lose weight. You'll be happier & live longer. See this post:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/485487
@codejunky
We do we just handle it differently.
Bollocks. I remember playing Halo 2 on XBox Live years ago with no mic, using my housmates account which had a female-sounding name.
If you've never done that you have no fucking idea, trust me. You get all the normal shit that everyone gets, plus a constat stream of "I'm going to fuck you", "I want to stick my tounge in your pussy, "I'm going to hunt you down and rape you."
@ mike2R
"If you've never done that you have no fucking idea, trust me. You get all the normal shit that everyone gets, plus a constat stream of "I'm going to fuck you", "I want to stick my tounge in your pussy, "I'm going to hunt you down and rape you.""
Poor mike. Poor poor mike. And how many offers of a T baggng do you get? Add the streams of insults towards you and your family. Guys and gals get this and I am not agreeing with it or opposing, I am remaining neutral.
That is part of the reason I play PC games. Much fewer children yet I still occasionally see a comment or two. Usually followed by an admin threatening to kick em for being idiots.
I will point out that in a simple comment telling me that you somehow know better (trust you) that you felt the need to swear twice at me (not including the quotes you attribute to other players). You start with bollocks and move on to fucking.
While not talking of any action you would take to me you still chose your language. I am not insulted nor offended but figured it was worth mentioning
It is interesting that I have 11 downvotes for pointing out the failures of thinking in mike2R's comment. He attacked my claim that both men and women suffer abuse by swearing at me and telling me about his xbox gaming experience.
So I wonder what the problem is. I guess these 11 people dont count the kid justin bieber as a guy since he pretty much seems to be the central attraction for abuse. Maybe the 11 voters dont play computer games or somehow believe (without justifying with a reply) that only women take abuse online (or in general). Maybe mike has 11 accounts and doesnt like his excessive choice of language pointing out (I have no problems with swearing but there was no need for it in his comment).
Or maybe I just upset 11 xbox players with my PC comment, and while they can click a down vote button they find a keyboard challenging? The fact that he cant manage a simple counter comment without swearing seems funny on a topic about inappropriate language used unnecessarily.
@codejunky
I guess people understood that I wasn't swearing at you. I did describe your opinion as bollocks, I'll admit, but that was more being succinct than anything else. Any other description would have been considerably more wordy, and probably no less insulting for omitting the obscenity. Say "utterly wrong, and indicative of an either an inability to understand the issue, a deep lack of knowledge of it, or latent sexism on your part".
You are arguing that men and women get the same amount of crap online. This is just plain wrong. There is a whole level of unpleasantness which purely flows from some men to women. If you don't understand this then i can tell you, as I said, from experience of being mistaken for a women on XBox Live, you have no fucking idea (swearing in this case is for emphasis). Try it sometime. Considering how sensitive you seem to be, I do not think you would like it at all.
Agreed, females get a lot of crap from FPS gamers. I play a lot and I've seen it.
OTOH whenever I play a new game I always start with a cute female char and a gender-neutral name. Because as a male char, if I screw up through inexperience I get a torrent of abuse as a 'fuckin noob'. My female char gets some kindly guy talking me through where I went wrong, or even mentoring me through the next level.
Once I'm up to speed on how the game works, I retire cutie and go back to the bald git I usually play. Gender in FPS works both ways.
@mike2R
"If you don't understand this then i can tell you, as I said, from experience of being mistaken for a women on XBox Live, you have no fucking idea (swearing in this case is for emphasis). Try it sometime. Considering how sensitive you seem to be, I do not think you would like it at all."
I have done it which is why I dont believe you. I have listened and read on PC games and xbox. I find on the xbox there is a lot more insulting (in my experience) but it is dished out to all. Maybe you do hang out in some sexist servers. Maybe your imagining girls get it worse. Maybe I am lucky to play in various random servers where women and men are treated equally. Nicely or not.
I have seen bits of this, but it always ends up with the idiots being picked on.
When you see woman players always with the same groups, they will shut them up with lots of kills, basically the idiots are targeted.
Even funnier when the woman is the wife of one of the other players. This makes the idiots panic quit.
This is a hardcore FPS.
Yet on a more casual TPS you do get more idiots including some players blocking in female characters (not players) and trying to hump them using the taunt system. Dropping a grenade gets the message through, then they got booted. I occasionally played female characters as they were nicer to watch
We don't because a far higher proportion of men are arseholes than women.
If I think back over my whole life and all the people I have ever known, far far more of the arseholes were men. The simple fact .is that prisons are full of men not women, obnoxious, threatening and violent behaviour is almost always perpetrated by men and all these cretinous trolls on the net are men.
It may be true that we (men that is, yes I am one of them) handle it differently but then we hardly have to as we encounter almost no unpleasantness from women compared to the barrage of unpleasantness many women have to tolerate from men.
I'm sorry to say it, but men suck.
Mathematically, wouldn't men run into the exact same number of assholes in any given day? Perhaps said assholes express themselves differently toward women (misogyny, objectification, etc), but I'll go out on a limb and posit that such individuals probably almost universally express their assholishness in a whole variety of ways. If someone's a jerk their gonna be a jerk no matter who they run into. Whether the conduct of male jerks toward females is more reprehensible (or perhaps simply perceived as offensive by the target) than some other gender configuration however could obviously be a subject of debate.
To suggest that assholes are only a problem for women however, is to needlessly isolate ones self from the billions of men who share your distaste for assholeish behavior. I think this is the logic you're missing here. Welcome to the real world where we all have to deal with assholes. Give enough people access to a public forum and some perception of anonymity and you'll have to deal with assholes.
Nope, nope, nope. Ask any woman who has just been groped on the Tube, or been propositioned and when the delightful advances have been rebuffed called vile names whether they have heard of men getting the same treatment and we'll say no. You may get some different treatment but I struggle to believe it is on the same scale based on what I hear from male friends. In fact if you repeat these stories to your friends quite a few men will dismiss them and say "take it as a compliment", or "you're making a fuss over nothing" because they are totally unaware of the scale that this crap happen. And this is being repeated online.
So women commit the same type of offences (on or off line) on the same scale? I don't think so.
" Ask any woman who has just been groped on the Tube, or been propositioned and when the delightful advances have been rebuffed called vile names whether they have heard of men getting the same treatment and we'll say no."
I say "yes". I have been called "fag", "cock sucker", asked if I were impotent and so on. Just because, guess what, I rebuffed female (I'm male) advances online. And the insults were dished out by the female.
I don't know about the proportion, but to say women are saints...
We run into just as many as women, but male assholes tend to not objectify other males the way they do females. And female assholeness* tends to express itself in ways that do not translate well to the internet. Women, for whatever reason, are less likely to objectify men. The female equivalent of the guy giving a detailed, graphic description of what he'd like to do to a woman (and, as often as not I suspect, not realizing what an ass he's being by doing so) is the woman complaining that all men are pigs or who constantly makes comments like "only a man would blah" or who knowingly leads men on to get free drinks at the bar then purposefully gives them a wrong phone number (which is doubly bad because then an innocent, happily married nerd in his mid 30s gets texts in the middle of the night from some horny 20 something guy...not-so-random example). These are just as common as your garden variety perverted troll, and in my opinion just as bad, but more socially acceptable.
Anyway, my point is that there're just as many women with bad behavior toward men as men who act this way. It's just that their bad behavior doesn't tend to be sexual in nature.
*Yes, yes, I'm making up words now.
They do, you just don't hear about them as often as women tend to be more subtle about such things. Trust me they are out there, I have had to get a restraining order or two in my day, they just don't use the net as much as the guys do. I hate to say it but sometimes stereotypes ARE true and women seem to just be better manipulators and realize that anything they post can be traced back while guys are about as subtle as a bull in a china shop.
Nope, still disagree. I wasn't just referring only to degree but frequency. Every woman I know (young and old) has had some guy making inappropriate comments, been shouted at in public, groped, leered at, intimidated....it goes on, and that's just the low level stuff. What is the male equivalent? There is none. Oh..actually drunk women in groups shouting at men in the street...that's the only example I can think of.
Then you ramp up to full-on nutter through to criminal abuse, and threats and then actual physical harm. Of course there are some extreme people of both gender but I do not, can not, believe the nature or quantity of incidents is anywhere similar for men as it it for women.
Regardless, abuse and threats of either gender of a criminal nature need to be addressed by Twitter, and the criminal's accounts blocked quickly
Actually in the real world bystanders would react negatively to these kinds of explicit comments and it is the public shock and negativity that is missing from these forums. Probably because they are so specialist only the trolls and victims see them. Therefore it is our duty as normal people to stand up and point out to the trolls that their behaviour is ill-informed and unwanted - not to tell the bullied victim to shut up and take it
How many times does this kind of thing have to happen before people realise that once something is on the internet they have no control what happens to it. The whole world gets to see your words or photos or video and that means you get the whole world's varying viewpoints. You think you're talking to a select group like in a pub but you're not. You're shouting out your message in a huge stadium. Most of the time no one is listening, but if someone does catch it, it could go round the whole stadium/world.
I used to agree with that. Still do to the extent that you're right that you'll never eliminate this sort of behaviour. However I do not believe the current state of affairs, particularly the huge amount of shit even slightly promenant women have to put up with online, is the best the human race can do.
I never really realised how bad it is until rockpapershotgun, a gaming blog I read, took it up as an issue (a female writer for them got a load of abuse I think). The sheer number of very very angry men this created was a real eye opener. I'm now fully in favour of creating a stink over this sort of behaviour. I'm not a fan of legal sactions (outside threats of or incitement to violence) but I think there is a lot of room for behavioural change, which can come about by people making a fuss about the issue and highlighting it as unacceptable, rather than just treating it as normal.
"The best the human race can do." Online? That's a laugh. If you're looking for the best the human race can do, you're looking in the wrong place. Going online, I assume there will be stuff I disagree with, things that are distasteful, derogatory, and even hateful, but I accept it because if I want the benefits of going online, I also have to accept some risks.
That said, I've learned not to feed the trolls, online or off.
It will never be pleasant, but things can and will be improved. The issue regarding the abuse women get online is not just because its online and everyone gets abuse, its so bad because there is still a deep well of misogyny in most if not all cultures.
This has improved, and will improve further. Women publicly standing up to this shit when it happens to them, and other people weighing in and making it clear that it is not acceptable, is one of the ways that this will be improved.
You're missing the point. It's very easy to be oblivious to it, if you are a man who does not personally harass women. Apart from a few oddities we have equality now right? Anyone who says differently is just a symptom of political correctness gone mad. Thing is that's crap - any woman who is even slightly promenant is going to attract a whole range of shit online which simply doesn't happen to men
This is what will improve over time - the misogyny - as the process of leaving it behind gradually continues. All the truisms about anonymity causing people to act like arseholes will remain, so there will still be arseholes on the internet. But there will be fewer who specifically attack women in the way that happens now.
I took images at the local skate park and posted on Flickr to try and help them with fund raising and getting the skate park updated. After a while the snaps were found by some jeans fetish creep who commented about the youngsters images in ways I found inappropriate. The UK is mad enough with Daily Mail reading morons assuming that “anyone with a camera around kids is up to no good”, add in some gay German getting over exited and then commenting was just revolting to me*.
I don't know the solution to free speech and open internet but I feel we need some ways to discourage the reduction to the lowest urges in all interactions.
Not having been to a gallery for a while I assume art shows don't have people walking round shouting “look at the arse on that!, hey great tits!”
Everyone now has a voice, not everyone has self restraint or decency.
If you wouldn't say it in the person, I question whether it is better unsaid.
Can the register acquire global powers so we can express our highly valued (obviously) opinions on world issues?
Get that knock on the door “This is the downvote police, we need to have a word with you”.
OH, I've used the down.... word, I'll get my coat.
* I don't have an issue with his being gay or jeans fetish but I do think there is time and place for everything, kids enjoying themselves in a healthy way in a public location is neither IMHO.
Gaz, no it isn't. Freedoms are not absolute, neither in theory nor in practice.
The clue is that places like the US are quite Ok allowing abuse and insult and passing that off as "freedom of speech", but see where my "freedom" goes when I start talking about subjects their prudish society finds more uncomfortable such as say sexuality, and see where that "freedom" takes you in cases like Mr. Snowden's or Mr. Manning's.
So please, do not confuse freedom to be an arse with freedom of speech.
Wasn't planning to post here as I'm completely disinterested in fashionistas and I've nothing useful to add about trolls, but surely there is some line, so where do you draw it? What distinguishes permissible abuse and insult from something more?
I know the line's fuzzy but I'd like your view, ta (or anyone's with a clear view, thanks)
You should be free to spout blatantly sexist threats, just as the police are free to arrest you, the CPS are free to charge you, and the judge is free to find you guilty of making threats of violence and free to punish you accordingly.
The precautionary principle is no way to live.
> Not having been to a gallery for a while I assume art shows don't have people walking round shouting “look at the arse on that!, hey great tits!”
But if you copied the same pictures to a porno gallery then you would have people making suggestive comments. I think I'm left with the impression that the only difference between art and porn is context. There are plenty of amateur couples these days generating home produced porn photos that are of a much higher technical and artistic quality than a lot of so called professional artist photography.
@AC:
"I think I'm left with the impression that the only difference between art and porn is context."
The difference between everything is context. Everything we do or say is based on context. Mistakes of context cause friction. People looking to take things out of context cause friction. Context expands our language beyond words.
And so we have the context of some seriously sad morons who probably want to get laid but cant so they are trapped with their imagination and 2 inches. Oh and a computer.
"The UK is mad enough with Daily Mail reading morons assuming that “anyone with a camera around kids is up to no good”, add in some gay German getting over exited and then commenting was just revolting to me*."
"Everyone now has a voice, not everyone has self restraint or decency."
Conflict! re-think needed.
"It's not ok to be an arsehole, people who are should have this fact drummed into them."
No one is stopping you telling them they are arseholes, but, that is not what the offended are asking for is it.
They are demanding someone else silences them or locks them up.
Some people are arseholes and when you have silenced or locked up some people some people will still be arseholes. People being allowed to demonstrate they are arseholes tells us which people are, rather than having to assume everyone might be a suppressed arsehole. Tolerating demonstration of arseholeness is a price worth paying. After all what is so hard about tolerating arseholes? Do you think the offended really value their opinion or something?
it is like everyone just realised that a small subset of the world is made up of assholes.
"small" is copmpletely the wrong word, the vast majority of the human population are arseholes, they just have different interests, and so their arseholeishness is spread around lots of different areas of interest.
While a lot of the commentary has suggested some pretty illiberal solutions, this kind of thing does pose some interesting problems. How do you deal with the small minority of sad gimps in their bedrooms acting badly? In the past they would have limited impact - using twitter etc the reach of the numpties is so much greater than before.
More stringent ban hammers? Sharing of numpty's ip addresses between websites for an uber ban? Not sure.
"Sharing of numpty's ip addresses between websites for an uber ban?"
"Because we all know that IP bans are effective and are personally identifiable information!"
An IP address is now a personal identification marker, given at birth, and only used by that one person to access the internets?
An IP address is now a personal identification marker, given at birth, and only used by that one person to access the internets?
All this time I've spent trying to figure out why my light bulbs need individual internet accessable addresses, and finally someone explains what IPv6 is really for... thanks.
This post has been deleted by its author
People have downloaded her photos and reposted them elsewhere so that puts them in the naughty boys category and no doubt there will be a few naughty girls as well. Then it appears that she got unwanted comments on her blog. So don't have a blog. The comments may be unsavoury to her but based on this article they don't sound to be threatening, abusive nor targeted by a core group just misguided. She should get a sense of humour, laugh it off and turn the tables on the commentators.
Should she be grateful? Well she's getting publicity for her blog if nothing else.
See, that is the problem. You think it's okay for people to be silenced because there are arseholes posting abuse and threats. Don't blame the abusers blame the victims, of course, entirely logical. The reason why the recent group of women are kicking up such a fuss is that they refuse to be silenced by some really vile people. Why should the recipients of this abuse be the ones to shut up - why don't you defend them instead of tell them not to have a blog?
I'm not sure that many of these trolls are particularly driven by mysoginistic motives. If a young black man were to produce a similar fashion blog then I suspect that he'd get lots of racist insults and homophobic slurs from trolls; probably with some overlap from the trolls who posted to the Fat Aus woman.
The fact is that they are mainly sad pillocks who don't have anything approaching a 'life'. That raises the wider question of why they became like that and whether we can be bothered, as a society, to find the answers and correct the situation.
I wouldn't like it if someone found (the very, very few) photos of me online and then decided to spam me with messages saying how fat and ugly I am. Why is it acceptable just because this person's a woman and a blogger. Sure, bloggers like visitors to their site and comments - that's not the same as you having free licence to be an asshole to them.
Err, they're not spamming here to say she's "fat and ugly". They're saying that they find her attractive, hence the chubby-chasing bit in El Reg's subtitle. I suppose I should get all uppity about the time some lass found a picture of me that she liked the look of. I didn't appreciate the unsolicited naked selfie of her someshat "buxom" body, but it didn't really bother me.
" I didn't appreciate the unsolicited naked selfie of her someshat "buxom" body..."
You did, and we all know it.
On a slightly more serious note, assuming you owned a blog or a message board or something, couldn't you just set it up so that comments that people send don't get posted until you allow them to show up? Maybe reward people who have been posting like rational, normal beings for a certain period of time by having their posts show up immediately? If the blog is specifically about you, you could maybe have a friend do the moderating, so you won't have to see the bad things people of certain mindsets tend to post?
I dunno, it just seems that, this being the internet, this sort of thing should be more or less expected, and the internet shouldn't have to be regulated for the rest of us due to the actions of the few dregs of society with access to an internet-capable device.
Did you read the article? There is no mention of anyone calling her fat or ugly. She got messages from people saying what they'd like to do to her in an inappropriately friendly manner. That to me would suggest that even if she is overly ample they find her attractive. Should they have kept their comments to themselves? Looks like they should have. Should she be offended? Not to the point she seems to be.
Some people are easily scared and others scare others easily. I once worked with someone who's contract was terminated for saying good morning to one of the cleaners, apparently she was terrified by the salutation. I myself have made grown men throw their coffee in the air and turn running screaming into the toilets merely by turning a blind corner at an inopportune moment yet I'm not in the same league as my friend. His appearance was intimidating and if he approached you with such a suggestion I wouldn't blame you for your reaction however I doubt it would be same if the offer were from a 6 stone when wet 14 year old acne repository.
Oh, and I never said the comments could be considered complimentary., in fact I pointed out they were overly familiar.
Why is it ok if the Sun does it to celebrities ? Either it is ok or it isn't but it cannot be ok for Murdock to do it but not everyone else.
If people set up these things wanting to be a celebrity they should accept the other part of it which is what is happen to her.
Personally I don't give a damn what anybody thinks about me other than about 5 or 6 people. (Maybe another 3 people for the time whilst I am in a job interview).
"There are times - all too frequently, recently - when I am thoroughly ashamed of my sex...."
<tangent>
you shouldn't be... individuals sometimes do bad things.. sometimes even groups of people, but genders, races, sexualities, or religions do not (Ok, that last one a bit maybe.. in some of them.. where they have a central nexus declaring what everyone should think and do next).
Do not be ashamed of your gender; your gender has broken no laws, commited no sins, caused no-one any grief. Do not let anyone try to attribute guilt or shame to your gender; if anyone tries to then they are very very bad people.
</tangent>
It's the internet, you should have anticipated something like this may happen.
It sucks, yes, but if you post hundereds of pics of yourself online expect comments, both good and bad. Hell I have pics of myself online somewhere (I forget where) and I've had the piss taken out of me for them, I expect it because frankly it's the internet, and I'm not all that attractive. (Except to gay men for some reason. Still haven't figured that one out yet)
Perhaps she should consider comment filtering on her blog posts, "post won't appear publically until it has been verified by the author" etc, sure she'd still get just as much crap, but she could at least stop it ruinging the front face of her blog. Perhaps put in a word filter to block certain se talk and send it straight to trash.
Should people make fun of / insult / sexually harass people online? No, but they will anyway, and if you're online you should really anticipate that there will be somebody who'll insult / sexually harass / make fun of you.
I don't think anyone is effectively saying women shouldn't use the internet, simply that you should expect idiots.
I think men get just as many issues it's just done in a different way - when the idiots have a go at a women they tend to use sexual context, when they have a go at men they use a different approach generally aggressive, but not sexual, and hence it doesn't get reported in the same way (if at all).
As others have said, this is the problem when angry people with no life get to hide behind a keyboard. Not sure there is any good answer...
In my imagination Bronny looks like Millie Tant from Viz...
Funny thing is that in my mind Bronny looks rather like Charlotte Church.
Appropriate enough that the first related image in the Charlotte Church link is a newspaper frontpage of her half out of her bikini top, then another Sun image of her teetering precariously in a different bikini top. I guess that you really do get the media you deserve.
talk to the media about how bad I feel about all this unwanted attention that I am getting all of a sudden? I am sure that talking to the media and making _everyone_ aware of me and my blog will finally stop people from bothering me. This is not a pr stunt, after taking hundreds of pictures of myself and posting them online, and then finding out that people were wathcing them in ways I didn't intend.. and sometimes reposting them elsewhere! and then some jerks contacting me, going to the media about it was the only way I could think of to make the issue go away. or at least warn others. What is this world coming to when a girl can't post pictures online without people looking at them?
ps, please don't read my blog.
Oh my gawd! Two people dared to down-vote my previous post. Didn't they know that the purpose of the internet is to provide wholehearted support of me and my ideas? I'm so crused and hurt.
Rather than utilise the wisdom about sticks 'm stones, I'll have a whiney sook instead. These down-voters are yet another example of the discrimination suffered by people of my $SEX, $RACE and $HAIR_COLOUR. Life's so unfair. Woe is me. Here's my blog at
http:// qqq. blahblah. wah/
"Re: I have decided to..
So, a victim of some pretty unpleasant behaviour online stands up and rather bravely calls it out and you think they're publicity seeking.
You are part of the problem."
there are several problems here.. one of which is that someone got harassed online with sexual remarks from a hobby she didn't expect to lead to that. The other problem is that this person then decided to use that to push their blog.. which seems to have worked... I find that a bit distasteful.
so yes, I am suggesting that she is mainly using a distasteful situation to push her own blog. Are you suggesting that she isn't, or do you just have a problem with that I find it distasteful?
This post has been deleted by its author
Granted the troll character sounds like a complete arsehole, but aren't these self aggrandising, self obsessed, 'badass' feminist types the exact sort of po faced idiots that trolls can smell from a mile away?
Get a bit of a sense of humour and learn to ignore people and you'll find that most 'trolling' will disappear. If you take every online insult as a personal assault on your liberty that needs to be defended with the fury of a thousand eagles, then yes, you will become a target for trolling.
Well, obviously, a lot of these people are nonsense. But trolling has regularly got up to rape threats against women journalists in the past in the UK.
And if they've gone that far, frankly, it's more fun not to ignore them. If someone threatened me with rape, even if they were fat spotty scum living on the other side of the country who couldn't catch me if I gave them a hundred metre headstart, I wouldn't want them doing it to someone else, I'd want them getting a criminal record. Is that wrong?
The internet is full of websites and people expressing fetishes for "odd" or not very obvious things - like someone said earlier it could be people in jeans, it could be cuddly jolly ladies, it could be slagging off Microsoft in capital letters. People need to remember that anything posted online is up for grabs and their aint really anything that can be done to stop that so don't be too suprised and outraged if it ends up on a tumblr blog named "Sexy El Reg MILFs dressed in bin liners" etc - its how the interwebz are. Sure ask them to take any pics down if you so wish if you own the copyright but there is nothing that can be done to stop people getting their jollies in ways that are a bit specialist!
As for trolls commenting - moderate comments, tell them to eff off, or just ignor them. These are sad people who cry themselves to sleep out of loneliness in their mum's cellar every night - sod 'em they aint even worth thinking about! If you are not a troll yourself then you can rest assured in the knowledge that your life is way better than their sad existence!
Paris because she is the original El Reg MILF - though I don't think she is a mother - but she might be, I only know her from her work here I do not follow her every move on twitter or anything!
Over the long term the lads who sit in their mothers' basement harassing people like Bronny will fail to reproduce (masturbation just doesn't hack it) and thus eliminate themselves from the gene pool ... Bronny on the other hand is probably getting marriage proposals by the Mb.
See lads - that's the way that the Internet works - you may not be doomed, but in the long run your genes are.
"Over the long term the lads who sit in their mothers' basement harassing people like Bronny will fail to reproduce (masturbation just doesn't hack it) [...] See lads - that's the way that the Internet works - you may not be doomed, but in the long run your genes are."
And your jeans too,
Never under-estimate the levels of genetic quality men will accept. You could put a female walrus in a pair of jeggings and some knock off Pineapple dance tudio boob tube , and after a few cans some men would try to shag it.
This is why some women are able to get so fat that they find they can't conceive.
They should even be aware of that fact if men could control themselves.
'Technically yes, but unless they are making money or she can prove a loss in court there is not much that can be done.'
DMCA takedown notice doesn't just get the pic removed. If you get all legal on the hosting service, then depending on where the server is located you might get the entire site offline.
Depends how vindictive you are feeling.
This post has been deleted by its author
Do I detect a vague hint of "what did you expect?" in the article?
It's the internet. If enough people get to see a photo then someone will fap off to it and want to tell you they've done it. You can't post pictures on the internet and only expect people to use them in the way you want.
This is not Stella Creasy or the other cases we've seen this week. This is a woman who posts hundreds of photos of herself, publicly available, on the internet, and then expects that only the audience she wants should view them and only for the reasons she deems acceptable. Re-read her comments, its not just the blog comments she's offended by, it's the idea that people might be getting a thrill from looking at the hundreds of pictures of her she put on the web for anyone to see.
Can't decide if that's stupid, naive or pig-headed.
These are not Trolls. These are fat fetishists. They are not trolling. They mean what they say.
They are guilty of being horny bastards, and might have been confused about the purpose of her posting those photos (for example, a lot of selfies on tumblr are from attention seeking people that like to be told what people would do to them sexually).
I'm really confused about what Tumblr is for!
The most I ever heard about Tumblr was just after Yahoo bought it and then shafted all it's loyal Flickr subscribers so the two sites fell into line with each other (nope..not bitter at all!)
The www used to be such a wonderous thing, just after html was invented until just before www2
Chubby bird with pics of dresses that are clearly a one or two sizes too small showing large amounts of cleavage (yes I did actually check out two or three pages of the blog).... what exactly did she expect? That her blog wouldn't be stumbled upon by a chubby fancier at some point or other?
So she posted some pics to her blog, someone reposed them elsewhere (the only vaguely naught bit of the story) and then she got some unwanted comments where exactly is the story?
I draw your attention to the following
12: Anything you say can and will be used against you
14: Do not argue with trolls - it means they win.
19: The more you hate it the stronger it gets
20: Nothing is to be taken seriously
34: There is porn of it, no exception
41: No matter what it is it is somebodies fetish
If she had just folled the rules then this would have been expected.
That I have every sympathy with her. Ok, she's a big lass who likes to show herself off a bit, but the goal of her blog appears to be to provide encouragement and fashion advice to other big girls and to help them with self-esteem rather than to attract the attention of chubby chasers. A laudable enough goal, surely
I myself belong to a community of people who attract that sort of unwanted attention. I'm a member of a trans * support site which has something in the region of 160,00 members which breaks down roughly into 80,000 trans * people and another 80,000 chaps who find people like me at least theoretically attractive. There's a small'ish minority who are happy to be out and about and to socialise with us and make friendships and relationships. And a rather larger group whose motivation for being on the site is to make random 'sexy' comments and glop off to the pictures. Mostly that's harmless enough, but when a shy, gender confused 18 yr old makes their first tentative steps into a social life with other people who are prepared to accept her for what she is, the last thing she wants is a comment from some oaf saying he'd like to 'F*ck her 'till her arse bleeds' or to tell her she's a 'f*cking queer' when she rejects his crude suggestion of meeting up in some sleazy hotel someplace. We get that stuff so often that it's taken as routine.
The photos she can do nothing about. They become public property as soon as you post them on the net. As for the comments, there are various ways of dealing with them. Moderating comments logs does work but it makes the whole thing less spontaneous. Ignoring the comments always worked for me - when it comes down to it, it's not me who's looking like a moron. The third option is to return fire. Not something I have a problem with (I can get very creative when it comes to insult) but not something that comes naturally to most women.
The real solution of course is for the minority of blokes who do this sort of stuff to evolve. But that's a big ask.
Personally I'll be using her blog. As a size 18, I'm no lightweight myself.
I agree with everything you said except for:
The photos she can do nothing about. They become public property as soon as you post them on the net
Under US law anything put on the web obtains an automatic copyright, provided its not already copyrighted by someone else and you're not releasing it to the public domain or otherwise giving your permission to use it. So, in theory, she could send out DMCA takedown notices to the people who are using them without her permission (provided, of course, that they're in the US). Actually enforcing the copyright might be difficult, but, much as I'm usually against it, DMCA does give her some recourse.
I've had that arguement with somebody before (copyright) they'd uploaded a large number of pics to photobucket and somebody on a social site I used had decided to use one of these pics for their avatar. They did the whole public. "I demand you remove this, it's being used without my permission"
My response was along the lines of. "You uploaded it to photobucket read the terms of use."
When you make your Content public, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to copy, distribute, stream, post publicly display (e.g. post it elsewhere), reproduce and create derivative works from it (meaning things based on it), anywhere, whether in print or any kind of electronic version that exists now or is later developed, for any purpose, including a commercial purpose.
By making your content public, you are also giving other Members on Photobucket the right to copy, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and create derivative works from it via the Site, third party websites or applications (for example, via services allowing Members to order prints of Content or t-shirts and similar items containing Content, and via social media websites), provided such use is not for a commercial purpose.
Then told the guy that it's his own fault for not reading the legal information of the stie he uploaded the image to, then advised he ask more politely that it be removed, set his gallary to private and password protect it so he has some kind of legal protection elsewhere.
He apologized and asked more politely, image removed etc.
Basically what I'm saying is although you have copyright over your work the moment you upload it, so long as you're identifable as the original copyright holder, most places you can upload pictures to effectively invalidate your copyright by giving everyone a right to use it so long as it's not for commercial purposes.
Even some webhosts where you pay for hosting will circumvent your copyright.
The reason why this occurs is that some sad people somewhere feel that they can get away with it and maintain their anonymity or at least do not suffer any consequences of their actions.
It's also one of the reasons why these arseholes would rarely if ever say the same things to the faces of their targets.
In my view, free speech is sacrosanct. If we start saying to these people you can't say that, then we don't have free speech.
The only weapon we have is the one thing that used to control this type of thing and that is "shame". The very same free speech should be used to "out" them, deride them and, in the real world, ostracise them.
If someone is known as the local bigot, the local shops and/or pub would refuse to serve them.
They would be booed in the street.
The local pizza places would refuse to deliver (that would probably have the biggest effect).
All perfectly legitimate and legal behaviour.
Very quickly they would learn that if you want to be an arsehole, there are real consequences.
The only weapon we have is the one thing that used to control this type of thing and that is "shame". The very same free speech should be used to "out" them, deride them and, in the real world, ostracise them.
That is called society and worked well enough until politicians decided they needed something else to do to appear to be a little less of a waste of space. By definition they can't replace or improve the function of a society all they can do is destroy society and turn us into a nation of individuals controlled and regulated by the state. Their talk of social and anti-social behaviour is just farcical.
Learn to read mail headers, learn to use network registries, and fire off abuse complaints. There are a lot of trolls, spammers, and hackers out there but there's satisfaction in kicking them off the Internet when they violate their laws or TOS. E-mail harassment and hoarding copyrighted material are easy ones. China, Taiwan, and Korea almost never have valid network contacts so it's best to stop all of their mess at the firewall.
This is just waiting to be flamed, but I have conflicting views of this.
As far as I am concerned, the elephant in the room is why does anybody want to make themselves look good?
Whilst it can be said that there is something about appearing neat and tidy, I would say that the main reason is for the person to be attractive.
"Attractive" is often used in isolation to mean "looking good" but to look attractive literally means that they will attract people. That is what the word means, and if someone is successful, that is what it does?
Unfortunately, this does not mean that it will attract the people you want to, nor does it prevent interest from people whom you have no interest in (and the Internet is a big audience).
People are animals, and by that, I mean that they are flesh and blood, not significantly different from apes, dogs and even mice. We have coded into our make-up desires and wants which in a civilised society have to be repressed for the good of society. But I'm sure that for the majority of people, at some time, they have been so attracted to someone that if the opportunity presented itself, they would jump into a physical relationship at the drop of a hat. This is what attraction, especially of a sexual manner, is all about.
Some people are less able to suppress this type of desire than others, and some are clumsy or just plain crude in expressing it. This can be why unwanted attention can be unpleasant, especially if it is expressed in ways that the recipient finds upsetting.
But, by saying that unwanted, crudely expressed attention is wrong, we are effectively saying that the whole world's population has to share a single absolute view of what is morally acceptable. People, we live in a Global Village on the Internet. What we in Western society regard as acceptable will, in many Muslim countries, be regarded as disgusting. In countries not tainted by western ways, partial or full nudity was/may still be the norm.
We are at risk of using our standards to judge the whole world, and this is wrong. For example, to people in Bahrain, where the age of consent is (according to Wikipedia) is 21, much of what is seen on European and American television is wrong, and we probably find that Bangladesh's age of consent is too low at 14. We don't like the Burkah, and the bikini and budgie-smugglers offend some people.
But I will say that I personally find physical, sexual or emotional threats or actual acts unpleasant to consider, and I would not wish that type of unwanted attention on anybody.
This post has been deleted by its author
Zigmond wrote: "They would reblog photos of naked fat women, fat women in porn, and then also photos of me wearing the new cute dress I'd just bought from Top Shop. Often they would even include detailed comments about what they wanted to do to me sexually."
I'm sorry, but this is to be expected. To be clear I do not excuse people sending her unsolicited salacious email missives or posting such comments on her personal blog, but she's got a button inviting others to reblog. Not on tumblr admittedly, but on twitter, which also allows porn. While I can understand her distaste about her picture appearing along side sexually explicit images and text, I don't think she has a leg to stand on when it comes to telling people what they should put on their blogs after having invited people to share her pictures. For the most part I don't think trolls had anything to do with it, they simply liked her pictures and shared them. Just for different reasons than she intended.
I was left somewhat unclear after reading the article whether this, the comments on her blog, or some sort of unelaborated trolling was the main problem. Some of her complaints are valid, but about the reblogging in particular, I really do think she should just ignore it.
I remember walking home one day and some young blokes drove by in their mum's Corsa and honked at this attractive lady who was walking with her young son and went "Whoooooooorrrrrrrrrr darlin!" etc. etc. at her.
Her son who was about 5 turned to her and asked "why did those men do that mummy?"
She simply sighed and said nonchalantly "it's because they were born without a penis!"
Good on yer! I thought.
Some things you just can't help, but there is something about a lovely curvy young lady that makes me go a bit "Sid James/Carry On"....I suppose the difference is that I'm not about to bombard anyone with cock pics and rapey fantasies.
A lot of people in this world are arses and if you are an attractive person with pictures to prove it, some of them are going to be attracted your way. You shouldn't feel you have to change your life to accommodate or mollify them though, I don't want to live in a world designed for the shittiest, lowest common denominator.
"...always asking herself: "How likely are these photos to turn on some creepy guy and make him desire to tell me about it?"
Keep in mind that some of these 'people' would get excited at a cigarette burn in a fur coat.
Any photograph will get their attention. She could be demonstrating a suit of knights armour (the normal male variety, not one specifically sculpted to the female form) and still get such comments.
The only way not to have people commenting on your photographs is not to put them out there in the first place, which defeats the aim of advertising.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
