THE UN WANTS TO CENSOR THE ENTIRE INTERNET TO SAVE FEMINISTS’ FEELINGS
In a report released yesterday, entitled “Cyber Violence Against Women And Girls: A Global Wake-up Call,” UN Women, the group behind last year’s risible “He for She” campaign, called on governments to use their “licensing prerogative” to ensure that “telecoms and search engines” are only “allowed to connect with the public” if they “supervise content and its dissemination.”
In other words, if search engines and ISPs don’t comply with a list of the UN’s censorship demands, the UN wants national governments to cut off their access to the public.
So, what sort of content does the UN want to censor? ISIS recruitment videos, perhaps, which lure women into lives of rape and servitude? Live-streamed executions from Syria? Revenge porn or snuff videos? There’s no shortage of dangerous and potentially traumatising content on the web, after all, much of it disproportionately affecting women.
Alas not. The UN is hung up on “cyber violence against women,” a Kafkaesque term that is apparently shorthand for “women being criticised on the internet.” At least, that’s how at least two attendees at the launch of the UN report, published by the United Nations Broadband Commission, explained it yesterday.
According to feminist culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, who spoke at the event, online “harassment” doesn’t simply consist of what is “legal and illegal,” but “also the day-to-day grind of ‘you’re a liar’ and ‘you suck,’ including all of these hate videos that attack us on a regular basis.”
Unable to prove that they are the victims of a wave of “misogynistic hate” – no bomb threat against a feminist critic of video games has ever been deemed credible and there are serious doubts about threats supposedly levelled at transsexual activist Brianna Wu – feminists are trying to redefine violence and harassment to include disobliging tweets and criticisms of their work.
In other words: someone said “you suck” to Anita Sarkeesian and now we have to censor the internet. Who could have predicted such a thing? It’s worth noting, by the way, that if Sarkeesian’s definition is correct, Donald Trump is the world’s greatest victim of “cyber-violence.” Someone should let him know.
Sarkeesian’s comments were echoed by former video game developer, feminist activist and professional victim Zoe Quinn, who told the United Nations: “There are individuals on YouTube who have made a living off of [sic] abusing Anita and I.” Quinn does not name any specific YouTubers, and we are left guessing as to who these mysterious “abusers” really are.
Hmm. Quinn makes more than $3,000 a month on donation site Patreon as she travels around the world talking about her “harassment” story. If anyone is turning a profit from alleged “online abuse,” it’s not the YouTubers.
The message from the UN seems to be: “cyber-violence” against women, at least according to their invited guests, is somehow equivalent to getting thumped, or bullied, or abused in real life, and it’s worth clamping down on basic free speech provisions to insulate these delicate first-world feminist wallflowers from the consequences of their own purposefully provocative statements.
The UN ignores the fact that both of their high-profile invitees are professional wind-up merchants who have capitalised on a media environment in which it has become acceptable to say almost anything about “straight white males” and which women, no matter how preposterous their opinions, can get column inches for saying they’ve been “threatened.” (No journalist will ever check their claims.)
Sarkeesian and Quinn are perhaps the finest living examples of what I call quantum superstate feminism, whose figureheads are at once aggressor and victim; trolling, provoking and ridiculing their ideological opponents while at the same time crying foul when their provocative language is returned in kind.
Somehow, I doubt women in actual peril outside Europe and the US will have much time for this self-regarding baloney.
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