Inconsistent, Disappointing, and Cavalier Attitude Towards Sexism by Some Conservatives – Re: Woman Says A Man Groped Her Avatar in a Simulation
Most conservatives don’t support biological men being allowed into women’s only spaces, even if those men “identify as women.” Most conservatives recognize how that is bad news for biological girls and biological women. (As a conservative myself, I agree!)
I often see male conservatives infuriated, alarmed, or incredulous over things like Democrats wanting to pass legislation to get women drafted into the military, or with biological men who identify as women (transwomen) getting spaces on women’s teams.
But so many conservative men, and a smattering of conservative women, often act dismissive of other forms of sexism.
Earlier today, I was on Twitter, I saw (Link): this Tweet by (Link): Seth Dillon, who I believe is a conservative (and possibly a Christian?).
Dillon was “quote Tweeting” a headline by the New York Post which reads, “Woman Claims She Was Virtually ‘Groped’ in Meta VR Platform.” Here is the link to the article itself on the Post.
Here is how part of that article, by Hannah Sparks, reads:
A beta tester has claimed she was virtually “groped” in the metaverse VR platform Horizon Worlds from Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.
Meta revealed the incident on Dec. 1, saying it occurred on Nov. 26. The woman had reported the assault on the Horizon Worlds beta testing Facebook group.
“Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular internet, but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense,” she wrote, according to the Verge. “Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behavior, which made me feel isolated in the Plaza,” the virtual environment’s central gathering space.
“Severe” encounters of online harassment — including physical threats, stalking and “repeated” harassment — are on the rise, according to a 2020 Pew Research poll, with the percentage of users reporting such incidents jumping from 15% in 2014 to 25% today. While much of it takes place on social media, VR is still nascent and already an apparent venue for harassment.
…Sexual harassment in virtual reality is sexual harassment in real life, full stop, experts have said.
“At the end of the day, the nature of virtual-reality spaces is such that it is designed to trick the user into thinking they are physically in a certain space, that their every bodily action is occurring in a 3-D environment,” Katherine Cross, a Ph.D. student researcher of online harassment at the University of Washington, told Technology Review.
“It’s part of the reason why emotional reactions can be stronger in that space, and why VR triggers the same internal nervous-system and psychological responses,” she added.
— end excerpt —
I am a conservative, not a woke-ster far leftist.
I don’t know how it is that so many conservatives are fine opposing sexism in some forms – such as biological men who claim to be women wanting entrance to women’s only bathrooms and so forth – but then turn around and mock a woman who discusses being sexually harassed in a virtual arena.
I realize there are degrees of severity.
From some people’s perspectives, perhaps a man (assuming this was done by a man), in his avatar format, groping a woman in her avatar format, is no big deal, because the woman was not physically touched in real life.
However…
This is one of those situations that generally does not happen to men, it’s usually a male-against-female interaction, one of which women endure since they are little girls.
For a lot of us women, these types of situations are a steady drip , drip, drip over our lifetimes, and it’s annoying.
Being constantly sexually objectified by men we don’t know… weird, creepy stalker-ish guys hitting on us or cat calling us when we go for walks or jogs in public, or just try to work out at gyms, (here’s another example of a creepy guy sexually harassing a woman at a gym), it gets so tiresome as the years go by.
It is not welcome. Most women don’t enjoy this behavior or this disgusting attention from men.
(Side note. The only women I ever see trying to defend this inexcusable garbage are conservative women – because goodness forbid conservative women ever admit that occasionally, yes, some men can in fact act like sexist ass hats, and it is inappropriate, male behavior towards women, and NOT an indication of “woke” culture for women to bring this stuff up.
Conservative or Republican women will typically only acknowledge sexual harassment if it is committed by a Democrat.
(Liberals are of course bad at this, too, because they will only acknowledge sexual harassment allegations if they’re against a conservative or Republican man.)
These conservative women apparently feel that to acknowledge that sometimes some men can sexually harass women, and this is inexcusable behavior, would be giving in to, or conceding to, the feminists or the Liberals… or something.
But these SAME conservative women will march loudly down to a public library or local school board meetings to holler and scream in anger about the city or school allowing (Link): books in the library that sexualize little girls or teen girls, or to Tweet in outrage against this sort of thing. Go figure.)
I for one, as a woman, never ever appreciated that sort of male attention (ie, the attempts at groping, the cat calling, the staring, etc), for different reasons, one of which is that it felt dehumanizing,
but also at times menacing (because you never knew for sure if the guy cat-calling you as you walk down a city street will also later follow you, ambush you, then drag you into an alley to rape you).
The man who “groped” this woman “virtually” as mentioned in this article was acting on some of the same attitudes that drive many men to think it’s okay to physically touch women without women’s permission in real life.
Actions like his derive from these entitled attitudes that a woman is public property, and men can treat women in any way they wish.
It all stems from the same sexist garbage that causes college frat boys to think it’s okay to gang rape college women or to rape a woman who is passed out, or for smarmy men to spike a woman’s drink at a bar with a date rape drug to rape her, or for Christian Universities who claim to respect women to (Link): keep brushing sexual harassment of female students by men (whether by faculty or other students) under the rug.
Unfortunately, because so many men (including conservative ones) have a difficult time affording each woman respect as her own individual, in her own right, I have to drag out this example:
what if the woman in the headline was Seth Dillon’s daughter, sister, or niece?
And this daughter, sister, or niece came to him, told him a guy was sexually harassing her in an online game, and she found it disturbing, objectifying, and maybe intimidating?
Hopefully, he’d not laugh her off or tell her to suck it up buttercup because it didn’t involve physical touch.
If these sorts of insulting interactions happened to men more often, one wonders if they’d not be more sensitive to it.
If a man like Dillon played the same virtual game, would he enjoy it at all if known users of the game were homosexual men who used their avatars to cop a feel off his avatar? Probably not.
If homosexual men routinely forced themselves on to other (hetero) men over a period of a man’s life, starting from the time he was a boy, I doubt many of these (usually hetero) men who scoff at a woman’s situation would be so quick to downplay or laugh it off.
I thought conservative Christian men claim to be against sexism? If they are, shouldn’t that be all forms of sexism, including the degrading treatment of women generally, even when it takes place in a video game? Not only in more “severe” cases, such as rape?
Many people are outraged by (Link): sex dolls that are made into the shapes of babies and toddlers (rightfully so).
Is Seth Dillion fine with adult pedophile men ordering those realistic infant sex dolls with working orifices? (Such dolls do exist… by and for grown men who say they are sexually attracted to infants order them to have sex with them).
Some might argue, “Aw, it’s just a doll, it’s not real, who cares?”
I for one find it disturbing, because it’s sexualizing a child, and it’s feeding into whatever degrading ideas pedophiles have about children in the first place.
How about if pedophiles developed a virtual game where they are allowed to appear as a regular adult male, and someone codes in an infant into the game that they are allowed to rape or perform sex acts on?
If such an idea makes you cringe (and it really should), that is part of the same objection I have to a real life man using his video game avatar to fondle a woman’s avatar in a game.
Just because it’s part of a virtual simulation makes it no less inappropriate.
If you are a Christian, the Bible says for Christian men to treat elderly Christian women as “mothers in Christ” and younger Christian women as “sisters in Christ.”
In light of that, if you’re a Christian man, how can you just brush off a man sexually harassing a woman in a simulation, as though it’s nothing?
Do you think it’s showing respect to grope a woman, even if it’s a virtual representation she is using in a virtual world? Is that treating that woman like a “sister in Christ?” I don’t think so.
Do you think Jesus Christ would approve of a man using his avatar to sexually touch a woman’s avatar in a game, without her consent? I’d say, probably not.
I continue to be dumbfounded (and not in a good way) that so many conservative (and sometimes Christian to boot) men constantly downplay the sexual harassment so many women regularly face.
They keep on depicting women who don’t like this sort of behavior, who speak up about it, as being crackpots – which they are not.
I remember years ago reading about a case a woman employee won in an all-male (except for her) workplace, because the males kept tacking up pornography in the workplace, which she said intimidated her and made her feel uncomfortable.
No matter how often she asked, the men she worked with and for refused to remove the X-rated pictures, and they’d laugh at her, some would tell her she was too sensitive, while some took delight in knowing they were making her ill at ease with the photos.
The court, from what I remember (this would’ve been around the late 1970s, I believe), sided with her and agreed that men hanging up photos of nude women in the workplace was creating a hostile environment for her.
The men were arguing the porn and the nudity was “no big deal” and should be permitted to remain. That is not how the court saw it.
As the years went by, and the laws on harassment in workplaces changed, finally, sexual harassment was defined in such as way as that whatever the target of it considered wrong or abusive was at the crux of the matter, not what the intent of the perpetrator was.
Because too often, men who sexually harass women (whatever the context, whether by physical groping or hanging up nude photos of porn actresses on job sites) always argue if the woman complains to any one or to a human resources department, “But I didn’t mean anything by it, she just needs to learn to take a joke. I was just kidding.”
Too many men hide their gross, dehumanizing behavior against women as “I was just being funny, that lady that’s complaining about my behavior just lacks a sense of humor.” And I think Dillon’s attitude is an off shoot of that, unfortunately.
I wish more conservative men stopped downplaying and diminishing women’s concerns or complaints of sexual harassment… stop treating it like a big joke.
And I don’t completely see how a conservative man can laugh off another man using an avatar in a game to sexually harass a woman but then turn around and make comments criticizing or mocking biological men who compete on the sports teams of biological women in the name of “trans rights.” Why one form of sexism is ridiculed while the other is taken seriously is really strange and shows inconsistency.
Democrat donor and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein not only groped women IRL (in real life), but he also raped numerous women. Is Seth Dillon okay with that? No? If he’s not okay with a man IRL groping a woman against her will, why is he brushing it off in a virtual reality like it’s nothing to be concerned about?
The same, underlying, odious attitudes about women held by men like Weinstein are the ones behind whatever guy did this to the woman who says she was groped in an online simulation.
I have no intention of ever becoming a liberal, and sure not a far leftist, because while the conservatives, who claim to respect women!, are making light of sexual harassment of women, the left thinks it is peachy to allow biological men who identify as women into places like women’s prisons, where they rape women now.
All sides in this – many liberals, conservatives, and leftists – harbor a lot of sexist attitudes.
I usually enjoy Dillon’s commentary on Twitter, but this time, I think he really dropped the ball.
As you can see from the assortment of links to other posts on my blog below, neither the left or the right are champions at how they treat women – both sides have problems with sexism:
Related:
(Link): ‘Family values’ Republican: Men should be allowed to grab breastfeeding women’s nipples in public
(Link): Woman Says She Was ‘Virtually Gang-Raped’ in Facebook’s Metaverse
(Link): Ashley Madison Data Reveals Republican Men Are More Likely To Cheat On Their Wives
(Link): Dutch Pedophile Selling “Therapeutic” Baby Sex Dolls by Anna Slatz
(Link): Democrats Pushing Transgenderism In Schools Are Fully Responsible For Bathroom Sexual Assaults
(Link): Married, Republican Pro-Life Politician Allegedly Asked His Pregnant Mistress to Get an Abortion
(Link): Tennessee Republican Kicked Out of State House for Sexually Harassing 22 Women
(Link): AZ GOP vice-chair calls for sterilizing poor women: If you want a baby, get a job
(Link): Republicans And Women: Single Women Vote Democratic Because They Wish They Were Married, Pundit Says
(Link): The Trans Assault on Freedom by Frank Furedi
(Link): What Makes A Woman? by Elinor Burkett
(Link): Radical Feminist: Transgender Activism Is a ‘Men’s Rights Movement’ by T. O’Neil
Christian Pundit 