00:03:20.120They make themselves known to you in online abuse.
00:03:23.000So I've been aware of them for a long time.
00:03:25.480These men are members of communities who have been sending me perhaps 200 rape and death threats a day for the best part of the last 10 years.
00:03:33.120But for a very long time, there was an argument in feminist communities that we shouldn't give them the oxygen of publicity.0.92
00:03:39.540And that was an argument I was sympathetic to. I largely agreed with.1.00
00:06:29.700And so I'm happy to see you sort of digging into that work.
00:06:33.920I'm wondering, could you tell me a bit more about some of the ways that you've seen young men be targeted, radicalized and sort of sucked into these online spaces that teach them some pretty toxic stuff?
00:06:45.640Yeah, absolutely. It's very sophisticated.
00:06:47.740They have extremely well honed radicalization techniques and they're very open about it.
00:06:53.260So these men will share their recruitment strategies with each other quite openly in their online communities.
00:06:59.100They talk specifically about using memes, using cultural delivery methods, cultural touch points, funny Instagram memes, viral YouTube videos, taking advantages of algorithms on platforms like YouTube that will automatically direct young people to increasingly extreme content.
00:07:17.420And they describe these delivery systems as, in their own words, adding cherry flavor to children's medicine.
00:07:23.220they deliberately target boys as young as 11 and they don't wait for boys to come to them
00:07:28.700in their communities that's quite a common misconception they find boys where boys are
00:07:33.280so they are in online gaming they're in gaming strategy chat rooms they're showing up a lot on
00:07:39.540bodybuilding forums which is a very clever space for them to operate in because of course there
00:07:44.760they have a ready-made group of young men already sort of self-selecting as having
00:07:50.260preoccupations with traditionally masculine ways of showing up in the world and portraying
00:07:55.000themselves so they are very clever about finding these spaces where boys might be isolated and
00:08:00.240vulnerable online and quite mainstream spaces and then they groom them very carefully and very
00:08:05.900gradually so at first it's just a few misogynistic jokes here and there and then if a boy seems to
00:08:10.760respond to that then maybe it's a link to a pickup artist website or to a youtube video
00:08:15.380and maybe from there it kind of gets very gradually further down the rabbit hole and they
00:08:20.480very explicitly see recruiting boys into anti-feminism and misogyny as a gateway to
00:08:26.280white supremacy and neo-nazism so they are seeing it as a kind of pathway for radicalization and
00:08:32.120some really interesting studies have been done that really back that up that many men who end up
00:08:36.500playing pivotal roles in the white supremacist movement for example are men who have made their
00:08:41.820name and kind of created a following and cultivated particular skills of online abuse in
00:08:48.080anti-feminist movements like End Father's Day or Gamergate. I'm not surprised hearing you say this
00:08:53.980at all. I know after the insurrection at the Capitol in January, so many of the men who were
00:08:59.980there and involved were really well known to people. They had these big online personas,
00:09:06.680was oftentimes like live streaming what they did. And a lot of them had prior domestic violence and
00:09:12.860harassment of women allegations against them. And so I do think it's difficult, but important to
00:09:18.780demonstrate the ways that white supremacy and misogyny are sort of, it's like that Venn diagram
00:09:23.560is a circle, you know, it's one in the same and they're kind of very much linked. Absolutely.
00:09:29.260This came out so clearly in researching the book. There's this public perception that we're talking
00:09:33.580about these two separate groups these two separate problems but in every way when you research this
00:09:38.620you realize that that that's not right that this is this is part of the same whole so you're seeing
00:09:43.620for example the lexicon the kind of unique language of the mammosphere and male supremacist
00:09:48.540communities showing up very much as part of the language of white supremacy the alt-right far-right
00:09:53.800communities you can see it there in the language but you can see it also in the kind of fundamental
00:09:58.400roots of their ideology incels are not just furious that women aren't sleeping with them
00:10:02.940they're furious if women are sleeping with non-white men instead of them that's what they
00:10:07.560see to be something that absolutely outrages and that's a repeated focus that they come back to0.88
00:10:11.760and white supremacists of course are also focused obsessed with misogynistic issues you know they're
00:10:17.980obsessed with the idea of birth rates with the idea of so-called replacement theory0.98
00:10:21.880they obsess over keeping white women in sexual slavery to breed a so-called master race they're0.95
00:10:28.360obsessed with the forced sterilization of women of color they talk about for example the idea that0.99
00:10:34.540they see white women as a kind of dehumanized fragile commodity that they see as being
00:10:40.120plundered by kind of invading immigrant men so very clearly if you can look at that and not see
00:10:46.700misogyny then you're only seeing half of the picture and in the same way if you can look at
00:10:50.100what's going on with incels and the manosphere and not recognize the racism inherent in that
00:10:54.820then it really holds us back, I think, from meaningfully tackling the problem.
00:10:59.140Yeah, I would love to talk a little bit more about that. You mentioned earlier that
00:11:02.300you look at platforms like YouTube, sometimes they're serving up these ads, you know, through
00:11:07.400their algorithm or through their recommended videos. I know through, you know, the research
00:11:10.680I've done for this show that Facebook's own reports show internally that most times, I think
00:11:17.220it was 86% of the time when somebody joins an extremist group, it's because Facebook's algorithm
00:11:21.160them has recommended it for them. I guess my question to you is, what do you think the
00:11:26.160responsibility of social media platforms and platforms like YouTube, what role should they
00:11:31.240be playing in curbing this kind of radicalization in men? Well, I think first of all, they and we
00:11:36.840have to recognize their influence. Because I think for adults, they think of YouTube in particular
00:11:41.620as the kind of benign home to movie trailers and grumpy cat videos. And there's a real lack of
00:11:46.720awareness that they have this pivotal role that 85% of US teens use YouTube, that they say
00:11:52.380explicitly that it's where they're getting their news from as well. And that YouTube has this
00:11:56.980massive kind of stranglehold, if you like, there are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world. So
00:12:03.280that's more than the number of households that own televisions. And YouTube accounts for 37%
00:12:08.440of mobile internet traffic internationally. And 70% of the YouTube videos that are watched are
00:12:14.020recommended to users by the algorithm so if you put those two statistics together you realize that
00:12:18.860a quarter of all international mobile traffic is accounted for by this one algorithm designed by a0.65
00:12:26.220workforce that's 67 percent male and five percent black and being being telling people what to watch0.92
00:12:32.700and so suddenly that becomes a power that should be interrogated that should be held to account0.50
00:12:37.800that should be accountable for the impact it's having and what I find really frustrating is that
00:12:42.820there tends to be this tendency from social media companies to go hey this is so difficult you know
00:12:48.140this is a huge thing there's not much we can do the algorithm wasn't built to do this and of course
00:12:53.920I'm sure that's true but I don't think it's a coincidence either that it was built by a community
00:12:58.060of people that is not particularly diverse and that didn't foresee these issues happening
00:13:01.620the argument that we can't hold them accountable and that there's simply nothing they can do
00:13:06.140because it's too difficult is absolute nonsense when you're talking about companies that have an
00:13:10.600income that's bigger than the income of some small countries, of course they have the money
00:13:15.660to tackle this, right? If they really cared, if it was a priority, they could hire 20,000
00:13:20.260human moderators and upskill them and train them in coordination with specific community groups who
00:13:26.640are affected by these issues. There's a lack of will there. We have to acknowledge that that's
00:13:31.420what's going on. Yeah, something that you brought up that I really harp on a lot, and I think it's
00:13:37.700complicated, but I think it's really important to understand. I talk a lot on this show about
00:13:42.900the importance of having inclusive teams in tech spaces and why underrepresented folks,
00:13:48.260so women, trans folks, queer folks, people of color, Black folks, all need to feel like it's
00:13:53.860our, like tech is our domain. Like we need to be able to take up space in those areas,0.91
00:13:59.560not just because it's the right thing to do or because it's, you know,
00:14:02.920because I'm a Black woman and I want to be in these spaces, but because of exactly what you
00:14:06.620just described, when you don't have inclusive teams building the tools that really do run our
00:14:12.600world and really do control how and what we, you know, come across in terms of the media landscape,
00:14:19.360that is when things get missed, right? And so if you have a team that is building an algorithm that
00:14:23.740is going to control so much of what we consume, and that team is mostly white and mostly male,0.89
00:14:28.480it's not surprising to me that these things go on to create unforeseen harms that this team that
00:14:33.920was mostly homogenous did not account for. And so, you know, I think it's critical, the way that
00:14:40.060underrepresented voices and people and identities are seen in these spaces is critical to, I think,
00:14:46.660getting to a place where tech is not causing so much harm, because right now I feel like it's a
00:14:53.100bit out of control. And I think that sometimes that can be kind of a complicated chain of things
00:14:59.020to sell someone on. Absolutely and I really think that that lack of representation is deliberately
00:15:04.840and actively exacerbated by the lack of transparency and the lack of accountability
00:15:10.260that these platforms have on dealing with harassment because if you have a company and
00:15:15.620this is absolutely the MO of most of the major social media platforms instead of having a clear
00:15:21.400strategy on harassment and on these issues that works for everybody what they do is they judge
00:15:26.420each case separately and what that means is that when a case hits the media and hits the headlines
00:15:30.820they take action because they want to clear up they want to protect their reputation
00:15:34.660so that means that the cases that get acted on are dependent on media attention and we know that
00:15:40.240media attention is likely to be bestowed on a young privileged white attractive non-disabled
00:15:45.980cisgender woman who has a problem so you get someone like taylor swift she's being abused
00:15:50.520online suddenly instagram is taking action it's announcing new policies it's announcing tools all
00:15:55.640over the place to protect her and to deal with it. But if you have a woman whose profile is less
00:16:00.540likely to be picked up by our racist and misogynistic media, that means that Facebook
00:16:05.840or whoever it is, they're not going to get a call from a journalist saying, what are you doing about
00:16:09.500the harassment of this particular woman? And that means that those voices that we most desperately
00:16:13.820needed in those spaces are the ones being driven offline and being driven out of those spaces. So
00:16:19.300it's such a vicious circle, and it really is kind of self-perpetuating, I think.
00:20:13.320Have you ever felt like negative, inflammatory, or polarizing content
00:20:17.160gets more attention on your social media feed?
00:20:19.740It might not just be in your head.0.65
00:20:22.140According to Angry by Design, Toxic Communication and Technical Architectures
00:20:26.140in the Journal of Humanities and Social Science Communication,
00:20:29.780platforms like YouTube and Facebook privilege incendiary content,
00:20:33.560setting up a stimulus response loop that promotes outrage expression.
00:20:37.560So rather than seeing positive content, algorithms keep us angry and on edge by
00:20:41.960surfacing up a steady diet of outrage. These algorithms are optimizing for content that
00:20:47.560gets a lot of clicks and attention and that content happens to be very negative. And so
00:20:52.120part of me always wonders, you know, is that why, like the fact that I see the tweets that are
00:20:57.960that are inflammatory or super negative or super, you know, partisan or whatever,
00:21:03.080Or is the reason I see those more is because they just get more attention.
00:21:06.880Therefore, these algorithms are always going to privilege that kind of content.
00:21:09.640And, you know, part of me feels like, well, maybe it's just that maybe it's just the platforms showing us what we what we as like, you know, messy humans just want to see.
00:21:21.980Right. Like, oh, I'm not interested in the positive content.
00:21:25.760But even still, it's like, is that an online space where I want to be, where folks want to be? A space where the content that it often serves you is content that is really negative and not content that makes you feel good? It just really, I don't know, it makes me wonder why, personally for me, like why I spend time on spaces that make me feel so miserable sometimes.
00:21:48.600Yeah, absolutely. And that was the experience of so many of the women I interviewed for the book.
00:21:53.160And in many cases, the choice eventually for their own mental health was that they removed themselves from those spaces.
00:21:58.100And I think it's really interesting that the average white man's experience of social media is not necessarily a net negative in the same way.
00:22:06.660There have been so many examples where white men versus their female colleagues or their colleagues of colour have created similar accounts
00:22:14.380and have released similar kinds of information or opinions
00:22:17.360and the results in terms of the responses
00:22:19.840that they've received have been so dramatically different.
00:22:22.980And I think that it's really interesting to think as well
00:22:39.020He's a guy who comes forward and says,
00:22:40.440look, the YouTube algorithm is not about optimizing
00:22:43.700for you to see the most high quality content or the most relevant content it's about whatever
00:22:50.180will keep you watching for the longest because that's all that matters to the algorithm is
00:22:53.880getting you to see as many adverts as possible essentially and we know that the things that
00:22:58.200keep people watching for the longest are increasingly extreme content and as many
00:23:03.240researchers pointed out that's not such a big deal if you're looking for a video about you know
00:23:08.640cooking and then suddenly you're being taken to an all you can eat contest video. But it does
00:23:14.560become serious if you're looking at something about women and suddenly you're being told that0.86
00:23:18.600the gender pay gap is a myth. And from there that actually women are lying bitches who make up rape1.00
00:23:22.820allegations. And from there that maybe we'd all be better off if women were forced into sexual1.00
00:23:26.860slavery. There suddenly it becomes pretty important that that's what's going on.0.83
00:23:31.640You know, you mentioned that some of the experiences the women that you interviewed
00:23:34.680for your book shared with you or that eventually they're just, they leave these spaces, they leave
00:23:38.920social media. You know, we talk so much about things like deplatforming and people being kicked
00:23:44.720off, you know, social media or, you know, quote, cancel culture. And we never sort of talk about
00:23:50.440the issues of the women and the voices who are just kept from speaking, just kept from putting
00:23:57.080their opinions out there, who are pushed off of these spaces because they are no longer safe.
00:24:00.980I feel that that often gets missed in the conversation that like, isn't that a form of deplatforming? Isn't that a speech issue that these women are functionally unable to to, you know, express themselves?1.00
00:24:14.080It's ironic that the freedom of speech debate is usually dominated by people who are claiming to have been silenced, often in major media platforms, writing, speaking out about their silencing.
00:24:27.240Usually white men speaking out about how white men can't say anything anymore and we're all reading them saying it.
00:24:33.540And it's like on every page of the paper.
00:24:36.540Yeah, also being picked up by those same algorithms. But we don't tend to think about kind of freedom of speech in the negative.
00:24:44.080like freedom of speech from people who don't get to speak to tell us that they've lost their voices
00:24:47.680in the first place and I think there's a risk for our political discourse as well that we have a
00:24:52.660generation of young people who are honing their political skills online they're often described as
00:24:58.280a politically disengaged or apathetic generation but actually I think it's a generation who are
00:25:03.840just politically active in very new and different ways and a lot of that involves technology so
00:25:08.300these are young people who are debating on twitter who are cutting their teeth in political debate
00:25:12.940online. And if those online platforms are unsafe for women and girls, for various minoritized
00:25:19.900communities, then we are kind of weeding them out from the public discourse before they ever get
00:25:25.380the point where they might reach those public spaces later on, where suddenly we'll really
00:25:30.320feel the loss of them. And it might be that we don't realize that that's happening until it's
00:25:34.420too late. That's such a good point. I hadn't even really thought about that, that, you know,
00:25:39.980what does a landscape look like when a big section of that generation is just quiet and go silent?
00:26:59.920If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:27:06.540This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,
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00:29:07.640I got my first computer when I was in junior high.
00:29:10.640But most younger folks have lived their entire lives online in ways that I could never imagine when I first got online.
00:29:16.600So if the Internet is the backdrop upon which we're all living our lives, what happens when that backdrop is really harmful or toxic?
00:29:23.800What's it doing to a generation of younger folks who are coming up completely immersed in it?
00:29:29.120We've never really seen it because we are kind of hovering on the edge of the first real generation coming of age who have lived their whole lives on social media.
00:29:39.240We have this kind of unique political moment that never really gets picked up on.
00:29:43.600this I find it wild that we're living at this moment in history it's never happened before and
00:29:47.580will never happen again and yet it's never really discussed where a generation of non-digital natives
00:29:52.780is parenting and educating a generation of digital natives and there is this chasm there this huge
00:29:58.660gap in culture and understanding of what their world is like what the day-to-day landscape of
00:30:02.740their online world is like amongst parents who grew up in a pre-internet age and that generation
00:30:08.560will be coming of age and what will that look like when our political representatives are being
00:30:13.500drawn from a generation who have literally grown up with the sheer daily bombardment of racism and
00:30:19.780misogyny and transphobia that comes with living your life on the internet in the way that young
00:30:24.500people do today and I don't think we'll know what that looks like until we get there and I think
00:30:28.620when we do it will be a shock. Wow I yeah I hadn't even thought about that but you know it's true and
00:30:36.520I do think I think about this a lot so I don't I don't know if you're a parent I don't have
00:30:41.020children, but I have a lot of young people in my life. And I think about how hard it must be or how
00:30:49.040different it must be to be wading through this very complex online experience that young people
00:30:56.360today have to wade through. And as you said, that experience is often racially charged,
00:31:00.960politically charged. I think that it very much overlaps with real life. I think when I was
00:31:08.540coming up online, people were like, oh, your online world and your real world. Today, it's
00:31:13.480very clear that those overlap. Things that you say online get you fired from your job or in trouble
00:31:18.300at school. And they're largely wading through it with parents who have not had that experience.
00:31:25.180You're exactly right. I hadn't even thought about that. And I think the people, we see it in the
00:31:31.380way that we report on things that happen online. We don't take them seriously. We don't look
00:31:34.940seriously at them. And as you were saying in the beginning of our interview, that lack of scrutiny
00:31:40.340allows for these things to just go unchecked. And so, you know, if you're a reporter who spends all
00:31:46.380this time being like, oh, kids on the internet, what are they doing? Taking selfies? Like, oh,
00:31:50.680just trivializing it when it really becomes an issue that we should pay attention to,
00:31:56.580you know, it can be a problem. Absolutely. One of the experts I interviewed for the book,
00:32:01.780Dr. Carleen Furman, she said that one of the things that she really sees in her work with
00:32:07.160young people around sexual violence is that it's extremely rare for her to come across a case
00:32:12.300of sexual violence that doesn't have an online component, and that adults find it difficult to
00:32:18.160recognize that connection. But for young people, there is no meaningful distinction between their
00:32:23.000real lives and their online lives. And she said that the normalization of violence in the online
00:32:28.480world is having a massive impact in young people's perceptions of violence offline and that's very
00:32:33.260much something that I see in my work as well when I'm working with young people it's really common
00:32:37.460to hear them say things like rape is a compliment really it's not rape if she enjoys it you hear
00:32:42.580young people repeating stuff that they've seen in online porn and assuming that that's how they'll
00:32:47.040be called upon to behave in a sexual relationship so for example I visited a school where they'd
00:32:52.960had a rape case involving a 14 year old boy and a teacher had said why didn't you stop when she
00:32:58.080was crying and he had said because it's normal for girls to cry during sex because that's what
00:33:03.620he'd seen online and so much of what the very mainstream readily available online pornography
00:33:08.760is showing kids that sex apparently is something very violent and aggressive that's done by men
00:33:15.480to women again it's racialized there are these kind of fetishized racial stereotypes there
00:33:21.120it very much suggests that it's normal for women to be hurt humiliated and degraded during sex
00:33:26.660And so I'm seeing young people who've experienced quite extreme sexual abuse and wouldn't recognize that what's happened to them is wrong or that they would ever have the right to tell someone or that support would be available because it's so normalized by what they're seeing online.
00:33:41.100And there's a real barrier to dealing with that when the majority of the parents I speak to, their conception of what online porn looks like is a kind of Playboy centerfold, but online. It's like FHM photos, but you see them on a website. There's very little recognition of what the reality of that landscape looks like for the teenagers who are immersed in it on a daily basis.
00:34:02.820Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's got to be so incredibly difficult to navigate as a young person. And then, you know, talking to your parents about porn and sex is already so hard. And then like to have there be that kind of extreme barrier in terms of like your parents' ability to even understand what you're experiencing. That's got to be so hard.
00:34:25.100I don't envy the, I mean, I always, I say this in so many different ways.
00:34:29.500Like I don't envy kids today who have to navigate this largely on their own.
00:35:21.440The investigators, they interviewed him this morning, and they got that impression that, yes, he understood the gravity of it, and he was pretty much fed up at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.
00:35:37.520I'm not going to go to—I don't know if he was remorseful or not.
00:35:40.220We see this time and time again, yet when we talk about these issues, like in Atlanta, that awful sheriff said, oh, well, this guy had a bad day.0.94
00:35:49.820He said he was a sex addict, blah, blah, blah.
00:35:51.440I've never seen a situation where they just take the perpetrator at their word, like, oh, not motivated by race.0.91
00:35:57.740Sure, checks out. You know, I wonder why do you think it is so difficult for people to recognize this as extremist or even in some cases like terrorism?
00:36:08.060We almost never describe the kind of havoc that extremist views on women and folks of color domestically in the United States.
00:36:17.580We almost never talk about that as terrorism. Why do you think that is?
00:36:20.900I think as a society, we are very comfortable with homogenising other groups than white men. But we tend to afford white men the dignity of discrete and unique identities. And so when a white man commits a mass atrocity, because he doesn't fit the stereotype our society has of a terrorist, we look for other reasons. And we dig into mental health. And we see these, these kind of almost glowing photographs of him as a cherubic child.0.74
00:36:49.360and we get a quote from his neighbor to say that he was a really nice guy who helped out with DIY
00:36:54.080around the neighborhood and and hey something from his granny to say how sweet he was as a boy
00:36:59.100and we portray these men as we can't it's almost like as a society we can't compute the fact that0.67
00:37:05.340this could have happened because we're not able to recognize white men as a group who can be
00:37:10.060radicalized and who can carry out extremist acts even when we reach a situation where they actually
00:37:14.920become the majority of perpetrators of mass shootings. We still fail to recognize it. And I
00:37:21.300think partly it's an inability to kind of see those white men in that way when the media reports on
00:37:26.500them in such a kind of forgiving and normalizing and excusing way. But it's also about who the
00:37:31.280victims are and a society that is used to seeing those folks as victims as well. In the case of
00:37:38.320men who have gone out and massacred women because they're women, for example, we haven't called these
00:37:43.780men terrorists we never called Elliot Roger a terrorist Alec Manassian the Toronto van attacker
00:37:48.640who murdered 10 people and injured 16 80 percent of the people he murdered being women who explicitly0.99
00:37:54.140told police I've murdered these women because I hate women because women won't have sex with me0.68
00:37:58.720and the police came out and gave a press conference and said there's no evidence of terrorism here0.98
00:38:03.060the city is safe and I think in part it's because brutality against people of color and violence
00:38:11.520against women are the wallpaper of our daily lives. These are things that have become almost
00:38:17.320normal. If one in three women on the planet is raped or beaten in her lifetime, then a man0.97
00:38:22.760violently murdering women isn't exceptional. And so we struggle to recognize it as terrorism. And
00:38:28.120I think the police and the criminal justice system are at fault here. The media is at fault here.
00:38:33.540The way that all of us talk about these crimes and about these criminals are at fault.
00:38:37.700and unless we start to recognize these particular forms of terrorism and extremism it's very
00:38:43.200difficult to see how we'll move forward because right now because we don't call those men
00:38:47.220terrorists we don't look at their often online journeys that have filled them with hate as
00:38:53.320forms of radicalization and if we don't do that it means that nobody is looking at the grooming of
00:38:58.300the next generation of these attackers nobody is looking at boys when i was researching the book i
00:39:03.380rang up a lot of counter extremist counter terror organizations globally and I was really shocked
00:39:09.140that when I used the word incel typically there would be a long silence on the other end of the
00:39:13.220phone and then somebody would say can you can you spell that for me there was a U.S. government
00:39:17.820accountability office report which was literally looking at the U.S. government's response to
00:39:22.160forms of terrorism and in the period of the report there were three massacres carried out by
00:39:27.380male supremacists by people with kind of incel backgrounds online and they weren't included in
00:39:32.720the report. But over this 10 year period, they were tracing and carefully tracking people with
00:39:38.180extreme views on federal ownership of public land or extreme views on the environment. And
00:39:43.600shockingly, in the period of the report, no one was killed by people with those views. So we're
00:39:48.880looking at the wrong people. And, you know, you look at someone like Donald Trump describing
00:39:53.740Black Lives Matter activists as extremists, as terrorists, and you realise it matters if the
00:39:59.300people who are choosing, who is designated as a terrorist or an extremist, isn't representative0.90
00:40:04.860of the communities that they're serving and has the ability to carry deep prejudice in them. So
00:40:09.420I guess it also comes back to that issue we discussed earlier about representation in the
00:40:13.820people who are policing and governing our countries and how we respond to this threat.
00:40:19.120You know, the people who are talking about it, who are investigating it, who are, you know,
00:40:23.920mired in it, they also have things they can't see. We all have biases. And so it really is,
00:40:30.260I think it's critical that we think about inclusion in terms of, you know, this, if we
00:40:36.780don't think about it and aren't able to talk about it, it will hurt us all as a society. I completely
00:40:40.960agree. And just as a side note, you know, your work with everyday feminism, creating a database0.99
00:40:46.280for women to talk about their experiences with sexism and misogyny online, even things like
00:40:52.420that where you're building these spaces and these platforms where you can sort of flip the script a0.99
00:40:57.160little bit and say like, hey, we're here. We have experiences that we want to talk about online.
00:41:03.620You might think that the online experience is just, you know, dominated by men, but actually
00:41:09.620here is a slice of what we deal with or what we experience. I think doing that kind of archival
00:41:15.740chronicling storytelling work is also very important in terms of getting us to like
00:41:19.780a culture shift where we think of these spaces as you know places where we are and places where
00:41:27.060we're you know showing up and taking up space if that makes sense absolutely I hope so I hope that
00:41:33.140the internet is in a transitional phase you know I feel like the internet is in its infancy it's
00:41:37.640basically still teething I had these are teething problems it's so new relatively speaking surely
00:41:43.280we can't carry on like this. Surely it can't be forever a space where women, where people of color,1.00
00:41:50.480where trans folk have to practically brace themselves to step in. That can't be sustainable0.99
00:41:57.120in the long run. I really hope and believe that this can't just be the way that things are. This
00:42:03.360has to be a transitional period. I hope you're right. I hope you're right.
00:42:07.280i want to take a moment to thank all of y'all for the reviews that many of you have left
00:42:14.760they really do help the show grow and yes i personally read each and every one i wanted
00:42:20.120to highlight one particular review because it really stuck with me this is from listener lisa
00:42:24.760hazen i've been listening for a while but hadn't bothered rating the show and noticed the weirdly
00:42:29.940high proportion of one star reviews scrolled through and i couldn't believe anything shocks
00:42:34.780me anymore. But did some guy really just say a Black woman's podcast is as bad as Jim Crow?
00:42:40.520How does someone go up with the trouble to find the show, leave a rating, type that out,
00:42:44.520hit send, and never have a single moment of self-awareness? Jokes on them, though. People
00:42:49.120like that are just enthusiastically proving the point that this podcast is necessary and more
00:42:53.920people with diverse perspectives need to have platforms. And Lisa, I just have to tell you,
00:42:59.640this review made me legit laugh out loud. In my first few weeks of making this podcast,
00:43:05.120it's true, someone did leave a review comparing the podcast to Jim Crow, which I gotta say,
00:43:11.140feels a little bit harsh. And Lisa, your review reminded me of how hard it was to keep pushing
00:43:16.920through even when vocal critics like that left that kind of feedback. But reading your review
00:43:21.800today, you know, 50 episodes in, just made me really happy that I stuck with it. And I wanted
00:43:27.260to share this for anybody who's maybe thinking about starting a podcast of their own or making
00:43:31.700anything at all, really. Just ignore the trolls. Ignore the haters. Ignore that discouraging little
00:43:37.520voice in your head that tells you to stop and just keep going. So, Lisa, thank you for the reminder.
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