To be clear, I am NOT victim-blaming here. I think it's truly sad that female users on this platform get so much sexual harassment. Just to check if it was really that bad, I once tried setting up a fake account as a female using a face shot of a beautiful woman I got from Google Images. The number of sleazy messages I got was staggering, so I sympathise with this site's female users.
However as a male (both real-life and online) I can guarantee this platform is sexually sterile for me, just as it should be. I know that ideally this harassment shouldn't happen at all, but given this is an impossible problem to solve (harassers just create more accounts when they get blocked), I wonder why female users don't just masquerade as men on this site, and just reveal their gender to users they trust?
I know that this is a bad solution, but it is an effective solution. As undignifying as this might be, surely receiving messages from perverts is worse.
Personally, when I interact with anonymous users here I couldn't care less what gender they are, so I don't think it'd make the italki environment any worse. Any thoughts?
Welcome back, Alan :)
The problem is, if I did this and registered under a male account and removed my picture,
I would feel so weird!
I mean when writing notebook entries and comments on discussions, it would eventually
show that I'm a female. Otherwise, I would need to keep acting to convince everyone that
I'm a male, which is more annoying and a bigger problem than being harassed.
I believe removing a female photo would definitely minimize messages from men though.
As I said in another discussion 2 weeks ago, I've noticed that I no longer get the hi/ how
are you messages after I became a tutor here, maybe just 5-10% of what I used to get before,
which is great. Before that, those were mainly the messages that used to bother me a lot, and
I was only harassed by a few trolls via private messages.
Okay, girls, I hope you've all read Jack's comment: we're boring the poor guy with our constant complaints. So, let's just shut up and put up with it, shall we? After all, that's what we've been so successfully doing for the last two millennia, isn't it?
Alan's completely nailed it with his suggestion, I think. It's just that he's been too tactful to take the idea to its logical conclusion, so I'll do it for him: Girls, let's all start cross-dressing! Off with the skirts and the heels! On with the fake beards! Hey, presto, there's an end to sexual harrassment and rape! Problem solved! Why did it take a man to come up with this? Oh, wait...
To hide to be safe? I don't like that idea at all. It shows women as weak people. In my opinion, women have to fight against harassment instead hiding themselves. Ignore, block or report the harasser is the correct answer, and it claims for the women the freedom to be women.
