Have you ever experienced Cyber Mob?

Here is my response to Men Explain Technology to Me: On Gender, Ed-Tech and the Refusal to be Silent by Audrey Watters.

Honestly speaking, it was very hard for me to feel connected to this article.  I have never thought of online harassment targeted at women who express their opinions related to gender online.

Honestly speaking, again, I am a kind of woman who feels comfortable when men try to explain to me about something.  If men “assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge”, that would be perfectly fine with me.

I feel sorry to say this kind of things that I know will disappoint my professors.   It has something to do with my background and culture.  I love smart men and I love being explained by smart men about something that is new to me.  I tend to fallen in love with men who I sense are smarter than me.  Probably I have been immersed deeply in or coded by gender representation in media and education since I was a child (e.g. red or pink for girls and blue for boys stuff).

So while I was doing this reading assignment, I tweeted to ask my 594 followers (80% of them are women) if they have experienced being harassed or have witnessed somebody being harassed for their online comments just because they were women.  I also researched using Twitter’s search engine by entering “online, gender harassment” in Japanese.  I found a good video with a transcript:

TEDWomen Talk about Online Harassment & Cyber Mobs

Anita Sarkeesian at TEDxWomen 2012

http://feministfrequency.com/2012/12/05/tedxwomen-talk-on-sexist-harassment-cyber-mobs/

Having watched this video, I learned that Nintendo’s Super Mario bothers many women like Anita Sarkeesian because it gives “sexually objectified, stereotyped and downright oppressive portrayals of women” in it.

I have never played with Super Mario, so I don't know how bad it is.  Yet,  it is very scary if what Anita feels is correct, as so many boys as well as adult men play with Super Mario.  I have to think this issue more seriously.

While I was writing this post, I got 12 notifications from Twitter: 4 followers retweeted my survey tweet and 4 followers liked it.  One of them replied that she had felt a story of a Super Mario game (a bad male monster took away a princess and the princess just waited for someone to rescue her without doing anything) as strange when she was a kid. 

I have decided to think this issue more seriously.