Creeping via Twitter at Project A-Kon

[the_archfiend]

This has nothing to do with the recent SFWA fiasco, but it's yet another illustration of the unpleasant fact that sexism in fandom is alive and well in some corners - and with a vengeance.

Around the time of a recent Project A-Kon in Dallas, two groups of Twitter-enabled creeps using the hastags #gropecrew and #rapecrew decided that it would be such fun to sexually harass female cosplayers attending that convention by making a series of sexually explicit threats against them. From the Daily Dot article:

A pastebin document from ED (Encyclopedia Dramatica) members created shortly before the convention which mentions (ED  sysadmin) MeepSheep and trolling was originally tagged #gropecrew. The mention of "cwc" could be Twitter user colesl4w_king, who, along with MeepSheep and a handful of others, sent threats of rape, harassment, and even murder to con attendees over the weekend.

You could read the entire article (and should), but my guess is that you'd still be just as disgusted by this as anyone else who's been involved in fandom for as long I have. Granted, I'm on the far end of the age spectrum when it comes to anime fandom (I've been into anime longer than some of the people who now attend conventions have even been alive), but I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would go to these lengths to harass and threaten people via a medium that can be so easily backtracked unless there's something seriously fucking wrong with them in the first place.

And yes, I know that ED is a site for Internet shit-stirrers. So what? Are they actually justified in doing this for that reason?

I suppose that this could be classified under the general term "creeping", but that term is starting to seem rather insufficient to describe some of the following:

The now-banned Twitter user xplsvs, using the #gropecrew hashtag, sent one Twitter user a picture of a murder victim with slit throat.

Other participants joked about infecting con attendees with HIV ("poz" is slang for having the virus):

At least one Twitter user alleged that the Grope Crew took the trolling offline and actually made good on its threats.

Unbelievable, Simply unbelievable.

I suppose that some people out there - someone whose own misogyny is so intense that he literally believes that "the little bitches deserved it", or someone so naive that he thinks that this is just some prankster ring's idea of fannish fun n' games and that it therefore has no real-life consequences - is eventually going to step forward and defend this crap. They're idiots. Maybe not as big a set of idiots as the perpetrators themselves, but still idiots just the same.

So if anyone else is going to choose this time to claim that they're isn't a sexism problem in fandom in general and anime fandom in particular, don't bother. Others have rebutted your argument far worse than I ever could.

Comments

[unhipster.livejournal.com]

WTF is wrong with some people?!