It is a testament to the deeply misogynistic nature of social media that, shortly after the horrifying sexual misconduct allegations against seven Cornell frat members made news last month, people on the internet immediately started trying to dox the victim.
Over the past few weeks, right-wing provocateurs and random troll accounts alike have attempted to publicly identify Jane Doe, the anonymous former Cornell student who accused seven Chi Phi fraternity members of sexually assaulting her in 2024. The drive to publicize her name and other personal details is stomach-turning—but according to Mary Anne Franks, in the context of the history of social media and sexual assault, it’s all too common.
Franks is a professor at George Washington University Law School specializing in the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. She is also the president and legislative tech policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, where she has spent years fighting online abuse and image-based sexual abuse. For decades, Franks has had a front-row seat to the myriad ways in which men on the internet have been abusive toward women, as well as some of the constitutional arguments invoked by independent commentator Michael Tracey, who has argued that his doxing of Jane Doe is legal under the First Amendment.
“When you have a cultural fetishization of an abstract notion of free speech, one thing that it does is it disembodies a conversation,” Franks says. “Somehow physical safety becomes oppositional to this supreme value of speech.”
With her work at the CCRI, as well as her history advocating for legislation criminalizing nonconsensual intimate images in all 50 US states, Franks hopes to reframe the conversation by making clear that “sexual abuse is a free speech issue. It silences people, and when we allow sexual abuse to happen with impunity, we are essentially saying, ‘We do not care about women’s voices.’”
I spoke to Franks as the Cornell story was rippling through social media. During our discussion, we discussed the doxing of Jane Doe, the “Elon Muskification” of the internet, the terrifying world of the far-right “burnerverse,” and Cornell’s troubling history of looking the other way when it comes to the abuse and objectification of women. Check it out below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EJ DICKSON: Mary Anne Franks, thank you so much for being here.
MARY ANNE FRANKS: Thanks so much for having me on.
So, I first started hearing the term “revenge porn” in 2011 or 2012. Obviously, technology and how we talk about it has evolved a ton since then. So for listeners who aren’t plugged into the work you do, I’m guessing terminology like image-based abuse or deepfake sexual abuse can seem sterile or maybe just confusing. Can you walk me through the evolution of these terms? Why is it better to be so formal about how we label them?
One of the hardest things about trying to talk about these issues is figuring out the right names for them.
So we think about the term “revenge porn,” which was used widely by, for lack of a better word, the perpetrators of this. It’s the kind of term that is very evocative, and people mostly know what you mean when you say that. But the troubling aspect of it was that it did seem to be the name that abusers were giving this conduct.
Revenge suggests that there’s something that was done wrong by the victim. The term “porn” was really difficult for a lot of people because they thought of porn as being something consensual as opposed to nonconsensual.
But it is an ongoing struggle because it is really difficult to communicate what we’re talking about clearly without falling into one of these pitfalls of either sounding as though we are blaming victims or sounding as though this is more trivial than it is in reality.
Right. And the word “porn” kind of has functioned historically as a shorthand, but that’s also kind of unfair to people who make consensual porn, right?
This is why, when we originally landed on the term nonconsensual pornography, what we were trying to emphasize was that pornography itself is not a moral judgment, but this is a nonconsensual version of that.
I often think about the best term as being the one that the audience that I’m talking to is most likely to recognize quickly and understand.
So for the purposes of what we’re about to talk about today, what are some good terms to establish here?
Image-based sexual abuse is a good term. The way we talk about it at CCRI, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, is anytime you have a failure of consent at any level of sexual expression or conduct, that’s a problem.
So we’re worried about lack of consent to the actual sexual activity. That’s one. Then there’s lack of consent to being recorded engaging in a sexual activity. Then there’s lack of consent to having that recording distributed, and there is, of course, lack of consent to being manipulated in an image or a video, making it seem as though you were doing something that you were not.
So we can think about all of those kinds of abuses happening. Sometimes more than one happens at a time. Sometimes we’re talking about recorded sexual assaults that are distributed. Sometimes we’re talking about consensual encounters that were recorded without consent. Sometimes we’re talking about consensual sexual activity that is recorded with consent but was not distributed with consent.
So last month a former student from Cornell University filed a lawsuit alleging that in 2024, seven members of a school fraternity raped and assaulted her repeatedly over the course of seven hours inside of their frat house. Of course, that story’s everywhere now. It sparked a national discussion about consent, accountability, and safety, and rightfully so.
What I’d really like to focus on here, though, is the chunk of Jane Doe’s lawsuit that takes place online. Basically, she says that early that night in 2024, one of the men who raped her also posted an explicit photograph of her body to his frat Snapchat group, announcing that she was upstairs and available, which was how other members of his fraternity even knew to enter the room she was inside of. In the most basic way, what makes the Snapchat component of this story worthy of discussion?
Part of what we all know now about the way the message was conveyed was, it was a reduction of a human being to body parts, to speaking about a woman as though she were her genitalia, right?
It’s not just the image, although that’s a big part of it, but it’s also this casual reference to a human being as this thing to be used, and a casual reference to a large group of men who then responded, not by thinking that anything was wrong about any of this behavior, but in fact rushing upstairs to see if they could participate in it.
So it isn’t just that kind of alleged assault that is happening in real time, it is also the idea that you can broadcast it with the full confidence that not only will no one criticize you for it, but that this will be a further bonding exercise, a further social validation exercise. That’s what’s really chilling about it.
And the Snapchat element of it, how does that sort of add to the depersonalization here?
I think that the Snapchat platform was a way to encourage girls to send nude photos, with the confidence that they would disappear. Therefore you wouldn’t be worried about them leaking.
I think that same mindset really is why the platform has continued to be successful in this sense. It’s this idea that it’s ephemeral somehow, one that almost gamifies what’s happening.
How is the experience of going to college in 2026 in conversation with the work you do? What sorts of stories have you heard about bad behavior on college campuses that make you think, “Actually, there is a fix for this”?
We have been hearing about fraternity sexual assault, and not just fraternity sexual assault, college assault that happens in many spaces, many places, and not just on college campuses. It is one of the experiences, unfortunately, that is so common for women in particular that whether they go to college or not, they are very highly likely to experience it all the same.
But we do see higher concentrations of these group assaults happening in places that are male-dominated like fraternities and athletic teams.
Let me back up and say, these kinds of experiences really show that when you take several men who have had all the privileges that one might want in a society, and you put them together, and you put them in an environment where the kinds of things they have been told are special about them may be challenged—and what I mean by that is college is sometimes the first place where a very privileged male, especially a privileged white male, might encounter the attitude that he is not particularly special or smart or interesting—that is going to create in that person a pretty pronounced sense of cognitive dissonance, and it’s the kind of thing that he is going to want to put out of his mind as quickly as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to dehumanize and to instrumentalize the very people that he thinks might be representative of his lack of specialness.
So I think that’s why you see these male bonding experiences at these highly privileged places in these highly privileged bastions, right? Fraternities and athletic teams. Part of what they are told is that you are entitled to feeling as though you are the person on top at all times. So when we think about how incredibly influential these fraternities are, when you look at members of Congress, you look at presidents, you look at Supreme Court justices and how many of them have been members of fraternities, you can see that it’s one of the places where all of that privilege builds up over and over in all of these different ways.
I think one of the things that has really resonated with people about this case was that it took place at Cornell, one of the most highly selective institutions in the country, an Ivy League school, somewhere where you think that something like this “couldn’t happen here.” I think that is one of the reasons why this story has lingered for so long and why it’s horrified so many people, just the level of privilege and the level of access to education that these boys have.
You would think that maybe they would think twice about speaking publicly or speaking to each other in this way, but education really doesn’t insulate anyone from misogynistic behavior at all. What’s interesting is at Cornell is whatever punishment was given out, like essays or suspensions, maybe it seemed unfair in the moment to the guys that it happened to, but it wasn’t really punishment at all. So are they even really learning a lesson?
It’s hard to know yet, with the ongoing litigation, what all the details are and what exactly happened, and we know that there’s obviously some kind of “there” there.
But men in the context of these elite educational institutions would not think twice. One of the first viral email incidents that ever happened—early days of the internet, back in 1995—was actually an email that escaped containment out of Cornell.
It was four Cornell undergrads who had written a list titled, I believe, “75 Reasons Why Women Shouldn’t Have Free Speech,” and “Women” was followed by, in parentheses, “Bitches.”
The 75 reasons included, I forget which number it was, but one of them was, “If she can’t speak, she can’t say no.” And that wasn’t the only one of the 75 reasons that was very reflective of that same attitude of very casual sort of sexual violence.
Part of the reaction was, this is shocking behavior. The other reaction was, boys will be boys. This was just a joke. It’s satire. They shouldn’t have been punished at all. And you even had some individuals saying that this is a violation of free speech and that Cornell was violating the First Amendment somehow by punishing them at all and expecting them to apologize.
Do you remember any of the other 75 reasons on that list?
A lot of them had to do with the fear of a female president. A lot of them had to do with saying that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. There were several others that had to do with, she shouldn’t have to speak because if she’s performing oral sex properly, she shouldn’t be able to speak anyway.
What are some of the First Amendment questions here? You mentioned that people were raising First Amendment questions about that email. Even if this is free speech, now what?
I think that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The First Amendment issue, such as it is, is that private universities are not bound by the First Amendment. That means that if they say you can’t say these things or we’re gonna punish you for saying these things, it might not be a good idea.
We might think that there could be other reasons to complain about it, but it’s absolutely false to suggest that it’s a First Amendment issue. That’s one. Then, when we’re talking about public universities, even when you do have an institution that has First Amendment obligations, they’re not mutually exclusive with your obligations to keep your students safe or to impose discipline according to necessary conditions of, first of all, anti-harassment and discrimination principles and for keeping general order on a campus.
So what I think we’ve really seen is a deliberate warping of the free speech debate that has really portrayed any attempt to take sexual assault seriously or to treat sexual assault jokes as if they are quite serious, as censorship and sensitivity and cancel culture and wokeism and all of the rest of it.
It also reminds me of the conversation about deepfakes and the conversation from a few years ago about criminalizing deepfakes. The argument against that from tech platforms was that they didn’t want to censor free speech, and it just makes me think, why is the autonomy of women and what they want the freedom to do with their bodies, why is that always what’s at stake with the free speech issue?
It seems like it’s the first thing sacrificed when we talk about advocating for free speech.
When you have a cultural emphasis on, or I would say a cultural fetishization of an abstract notion of free speech, one thing that it does is it disembodies a conversation, right? Somehow safety, physical safety, becomes oppositional to this supreme value of speech, and that’s troubling enough in itself.
But even in terms of free speech as a debate itself, this really shouldn’t have worked because as has been relentlessly documented over the last few decades, sexual assault has a tremendous silencing effect on victims. It affects not just their bodies and their physical safety, although truly that ought to be enough, but it also means that they can’t express themselves freely.
We’re literally talking about situations where victims of sexual assault are told that they can’t talk about what happened to them, that they’re the ones who are placed under gag orders, not the person who allegedly assaulted them. We’re talking about them having to fear that they’re going to be threatened and harassed by either the person they have alleged has attacked them or their friends, and so they withdraw from their classes or they stop participating in activities.
They stop expressing themselves. Part of what we’ve tried to say at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative for over a decade now is, sexual abuse is a free speech issue. It silences people, and when we allow sexual abuse to happen with impunity, we are essentially saying, “We do not care about women’s voices. We do not care about the number of women who are going to decide that they can’t be journalists anymore or talk about the topics they want to report on because of the abuse and harassment that they’re going to experience. Or the number of female politicians who are driven out of political office because of some ex-partner who’s decided that he’s going to take a private moment and send it to everyone.”
We’re saying that we don’t care about their bodies or their speech, and that really should be a free speech crisis that we’re talking about.
In that vein, something I’ve noticed in the last few weeks is this thirst coming from dudes online to learn and reveal Jane Doe’s identity. What was it like for you watching this unfold in real time? What was the precedent for it in terms of the other high-profile cases you’ve looked at where Jane Does have been doxed?
What about this case and this particular instance of mass doxing stood out to you as different?
In some ways it was haunting because of how similar it was. We’ve seen cycles of this, and not just ones that I’ve witnessed myself, but ones that have preceded my own experiences. But when I think about how in 2011 or so when revenge porn becomes a term that people talk about, the woman who founded my organization, who was herself a victim of revenge porn, what it was like for her going public and actually putting her face to the story, and the number of people who tried to destroy her life because of that.
But the scale and the scope of it now, it’s just something that’s been accelerating for as long as we’ve had the internet there to serve as this kind of force multiplier for misogyny and harassment. We’ve just seen it get so much worse.
Where there might have been some concern to keep things within a certain context, right? Maybe there was some concern about this breaking containment and becoming a mainstream issue as opposed to an online issue. That no longer seems to be a bar to anyone now. Once it becomes the blood sport of this is a person whose story has ended up online, the ability to just jump in or the desire to jump in and become part of it, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of countervailing force to say, “Maybe you shouldn’t do that.”
We really seem to have removed whatever safeguards or disincentives there might have been once. They all seem to be gone now, and it seems to be the opposite. You will get validated. You will get attention. You will be maybe even just lauded for the fact that you, under your own name, are in fact providing this kind of entertainment, this kind of online mob attack on someone, and I think that is a little different.
There’s a kind of guy online who is so wrapped up in the slippery slope argument around free speech that if we don’t protect it at all costs, something much bigger is at stake, even though the other side of what they’re advocating for is exactly what we’re talking about. So what are these guys missing?
It’s hard to know where to start with how to answer that question, but they’re missing a lot of things. The free speech argument really has gained this kind of talismanic power in the last 20 years, and it is kind of the Elon Muskification of the free speech argument.
Because you had someone like Elon Musk saying, “I’m going to bring free speech back to Twitter, I’m going to be the anti-censor,” and you see someone with that kind of power and influence do exactly what everyone who has ever made that claim “I really care about free speech” do.
That was really what gave a lot of people permission to say, “Whatever terrible self-interested thing I want to do that might be criticized as misogynist or racist, I’ll just dress that up and I’m arguing for free speech, and I will get away with it every time. The worse I am, the more I’ll be praised.”
And that was true before Musk, but I really do think that there was something about him in particular that just activated that for a lot of people. In so many ways, you can’t convince men—who are saying the same things that men have been saying forever, about gender or about race or about wealth or whatever it is—that they’re not free speech heroes. That they’re not just exactly what they seem like, mediocrities, who seem really upset that the world no longer takes their mediocrity as a sign of genius. You can’t really convince them. They really think that there is something very special about them and that they really are the geniuses that people will adore.
One of the things I was really struck by in watching everybody so gleefully dox Jane Doe was that I didn’t see any of these tweets doxing the woman that they thought to be Jane Doe get taken down or even have notes appended to most of them despite this policy. Why?
For the same reason the Trump administration does not mean it when they say, “We’re going to return free speech. We’re going to really fight for the First Amendment.” The same reason that the administration will then just quite literally lock up all their enemies and silence dissent and shoot peaceful protesters in the street.
Because what the loudest defenders of free speech usually really mean is they are going to put in place a system where everything they approve of will have all the freedom possible to be expressed, and anything that they don’t approve of, they will mercilessly repress. It goes beyond hypocrisy.
It really is just the absolute conviction that you are the special boy, right? You really know what is true and what is meaningful and what is nonsense, and therefore, when you make the decision that this should be elevated, or you need to tweak your own algorithm so that your posts get more attention, that you have to resort to that, right?
The conviction that you alone can see what is truly free speech and what is not, and that is what is so frightening about those people actually getting control. Because for a while, that wasn’t necessarily the case, right? When you have someone like Musk have this kind of megaphone and that kind of platform, it really does send a signal to the entire world.
This is someone who quite candidly will say he got Donald Trump elected. He’s got all the power in the world. And so when he re-creates what free speech is, and it satisfies a certain longing that many people have had for such a long time, to be able to be as misogynist and racist as possible and not have to be called out on it because they want to be able to defend themselves by saying, “No, no, no. You have to understand. What I’m doing here is really something very radical, very free speech oriented.” And it is an old, old story. I mean, both of the books that I’ve written, The Cult of the Constitution and Fearless Speech, have documented how this has always been true about the way that people interpret free speech and the First Amendment.
We tell ourselves as Americans that we love free speech, and we’ve always upheld it, and we’ve always allowed for dissent to flourish. When you actually look at our history, and you look at how much every time truly radical ideas were expressed, those radical ideas are the radical ideas of racial and gender equality.
Every time those ideas have been expressed, we have locked people up. We have put lynch mobs on them. We have tortured them. We have suppressed them. That’s our history. But in this elitist American sense, we keep telling ourselves that we are actually defending something.
Ruby Cramer put out a story in The New Yorker this week about Jane Doe’s doxing, and something she covers are men who, for one reason or another, got caught up in the crossfire, who were doxed too after being erroneously associated with the men being sued.
You see this with these stories all the time, like people in the wrong place at the wrong time who haven’t actually done harm or people who happen to have the same first and last name as the accused and therefore get mistaken for them. I saw that happen, like, three times on X a couple weeks ago.
What do we owe those individuals? Obviously, we don’t wanna see innocent people getting punished for stuff they didn’t do, but sometimes avoiding that comes at the expense of actual victims, right? So how do we make room for both?
It’s genuinely a troubling question, right? One answer is that the mob mentality that social media platforms have made possible is so destructive for exactly this reason.
That’s the tune of saying, “We are trying to protect all freedom of speech, so everybody can say what they want. They can name her if they want. It doesn’t matter.” We have seen what that does to our environment, right? What it does to our information environment. It’s not just that you get a lot of misinformation and you get falsity, which you do, but you also get this fury, and you get this immediacy, and this unwillingness to slow down and fact-check.
You get this weird confidence that people online suddenly develop that they are, again, uniquely clued into what’s happening, and they have the conviction that, “Oh, I now know who this is.” So, how do we undo all of that? I think the answers aren’t going to please people, but I don’t think that social media platforms as they operate now are ever going to mean that we can have a safe expression of accusations like this.
Because if the mob is going to come after people without any regard for whether this is accurate information or whether this is a proportional response, no one is going to want to speak out. I think anyone ethical is going to worry that even if you do have good information and you do have the right names, that you wouldn’t want this to become a mob phenomenon because something terrible is going to happen.
You want people to be held accountable, but I don’t think we should ever be enthusiastic about a mob coming to someone’s house, or people getting swatted, or people’s family members getting harassed and intimidated. It just seems like there’s no way to calibrate that. The kind of bloodlust that is the currency of social media platforms, it’s incompatible with releasing information like this.
So, I think at this point, there really isn’t any safe way to release people’s names or their information about these issues without this being the inevitable result.
Last month, I published an investigation into the burnerverse, which has been very, very active in the doxing of Jane Doe. Essentially, the burnerverse is a community of college sports fan accounts, many of whom are frat kids, who have made something of a recreational sport out of doxing young women.
My story focused on a 20-year-old girl named Maddie Kowalski, who had a nonconsensual intimate video of herself having sex circulated at the University of Florida, where she went to school. And the video likely would’ve just been circulated among kids at campus if not for these anonymous burner accounts amplifying it by posting it on X and including her full name and her sorority.
It ruined her life. She was nonstop harassed via text and phone calls and social media posts. So Snapchat in the Cornell case and the burnerverse in Maddie’s story, how, if at all, are these two things in conversation with each other?
In both situations you’ve got an amplifier effect by an app, right? And there’s the underlying conditions that we’ve always seen prior to the technology that we know of right now. We’ve always seen these tendencies of, again, that kind of homosocial bonding, that kind of performativity of masculinity for other men, and that’s that impulse to treat women always as lower on the hierarchy than men are, and usually in a sexual way, because that is the way that these things get expressed.
Particularly in fraternities or in athletic teams, it’s a kind of hazing process originally, right? You treat certain men like women, and you teach them how to be abused, right? And then you give them the power to abuse others, and you make it essentially a bonding exercise.
And then what does technology do for that? It adds a kind of performativity and a kind of spectacle aspect that is somewhat new. So as opposed to maybe being a somewhat fleeting but also still potentially terrible event, it’s now something you can record. It is now something you can present to others.
It is now something you can get an even larger audience for. Now you can turn the entire internet basically into your online frat. And that is the really terrifying thing about the story that you highlighted, the fact that this isn’t something that was ever easy for a victim to deal with, right?
If it’s your whole social circle, like all of your friends, everyone on your campus, your entire town, that was devastating enough. Now it’s the entire world. That now it’s the sense of absolute captivity to the online world that has no boundaries whatsoever, where nothing ever gets forgotten.
It is just terrifying, not only because we can see the results of it and what happens to the people caught up in it. It’s what’s being done to all the participants and what is happening to their sense of humanity or empathy or whatever they might have had, that it’s all being trained away to become these kinds of participants in this horrible online spectacle.
We’ve known for a long time that that kind of mediation of the screen, of the app, has this corrosive effect on our ability to sympathize, empathize, to see the humanity in someone else. But you combine that with an already toxic environment of male bonding and this attempt to retain some kind of meaning in a world where increasingly men’s mediocrity is something they can no longer ignore in every other way.
This is where they go. This is what they choose. They’re going to make an example out of these women so that they can feel better collectively about the status of people like them. So I think that’s what’s bonding a lot of these men. I think that’s why they use social media. I think social media is driving a lot of it because it is performative.
The more you can perform how much you are humiliating or degrading a woman, the more of a man you are.
Social media is so often lauded for tearing down the walls between states and countries and continents and improving connectivity, but it’s also removing our boundaries and increasing our sense of shamelessness and making us think about ourselves constantly, ourselves as brands, our own self-interest.
As somebody who has witnessed the evolution of social media and the accompanying de-evolution of how people are treating each other. Do you feel like people have just gotten worse as a whole?
I’ve always been someone who’s been more worried about what technology was going to do to us than excited by what it was going to do. I wrote my first apprehensive paper about cyberspace in 1999 because I was a college student and I was freaked out by what I thought was going to happen when the internet was on the way to becoming what it was, which was that things were gonna get so much worse for vulnerable people in particular, that everybody was going to become monstrous.
That was my fear in ‘99, and I used to joke about how pessimistic I was, but now I think I was probably largely right. It doesn’t affect everybody the same way, right? It’s worse for some people than for others, but it’s bad for all of us. So we can talk about it as we don’t deserve social media, but also that maybe social media is a punishment, right?
That this is what happens when you don’t care about boundaries. This is what happens when you don’t care about context. This is what happens when you don’t want and don’t believe that you need to be responsible for your own communications, and that if people are ignoring you or that you’re not having the connections that you want, that you should work on yourself, and you should try to figure out how to have more meaningful connections to others.
Instead, you’ve got this cheap, easy social media platform to tell you, “No, I do deserve attention, and anybody who denies it to me is wrong.” And it just becomes this kind of expectation that no, people must pay attention to me, not because I have anything interesting or valuable to contribute, but because I deserve it.
That’s a really terrible thing to do to humanity. I think the idea that we don’t have to work for our human connections is a terrible, terrible idea. So the more that we are told that we are the stars of our own story, the more that we are told that attention is something we can game out, the worse everything is going to get for everyone, but particularly for people who are already vulnerable.
We talk a lot about how terrible everything is and how the worst people are in charge of our platforms. I think what a lot of people want in these moments is real actionable advice. Acknowledging everything is terrible, what would you tell young women in or starting college about best tech practices right now?
I can’t remember how many years ago it was, but I had a friend, a former peer of mine, who worked for a college in my home state, which is Arkansas. At some point, because of the work that I had done, he reconnected and said, “You know, we’ve had this kind of spate of sexual assaults by the football team at this university in Arkansas, and we really thought it’d be great if you would come and have a conversation with the student body because this is really alarming that this is happening.”
I was really excited to do it, and so we were making some of the plans and he said, “So you’re gonna have an hour with the girls.” And I said, “I’m sorry, who am I talking to?” And he said, “Well, you know, we’re going to have all the female students who would like to come. We have a big enough classroom for them.” And I said, “I’m sorry, I think I should be speaking to the football team, right? Because if you’re telling me that you’ve got a spate of sexual assaults, I don’t know that it’s the women I need to be speaking to so much as the men.” And so we went back and forth on this for a while and eventually he said, “OK, that’s probably true.”
I said, “I’m happy to do both, but I really do think the conversation needs to be with the men.” So we got a conversation with the men first, and the women came if they wanted to, but I said, “They’re the ones we need to be talking to.” So I think I’d partly say that one answer to your question is we need to be talking to men, and we need to be holding men accountable.
I know that that’s something that all women know. But then you also want to be realistic about, well, how can women keep themselves safe? Because no matter how many times you talk to men, does it mean that they’re going to stop hurting women? Probably not. So what can you do to protect yourself?
This is gonna maybe sound like not a very practical solution, but I hope that it is. I actually did for many years teach self-defense, and I do think that physical self-defense is a big part of what women are going to have to learn. I wish that this were not true. I really do think that one of the most valuable things that women can learn is actually how to defend themselves physically.
Not just because of the physical aspect of it, but because of the other things that are taught in good self-defense programs, which is reinforcing for women that “no” is a complete sentence. People who are trying to push your boundaries early on are going to do much worse things later. Here are the red flags. Here are the kinds of things to avoid. Here’s how you can engage in solidarity with people who are also vulnerable. So I think that a big part of the conversation is to try to change men’s behavior because they have to be held accountable. But also try to make sure that should it not go that way, that you will be prepared to be able to physically defend yourself and maybe help others.
To that end, what advice would you give young men starting college about best practices? Like, what are some of the traps, particularly in the tech space, that you see young men getting caught up in, and what can they do to avoid them or be better?
Well, here I would start with something that I think probably is advice that I would give to men and women both, which is to be much more intentional about why you are engaging with technology and social media in particular. I used to teach a class called Law, Policy, and Technology, and I would start it out by saying, “The last time you were on your phone or doing something on a social media site, do you remember why you were on it?” And part of what I wanted them to think about was I can use social media, but I don’t want it to be using me at the same time.
So be intentional about why you’re on it, what you’re getting out of it. Ask yourself after you’ve engaged on social media, do you feel better, worse? Have you learned something? Do you feel stupider? Are you angry? Just to ask yourself, “What am I actually getting out of this experience?” Because what I found is that people are becoming much more conscious about their social media practices, but maybe they haven’t confronted that social media might be making us angrier and dumber and wasting our time because what are the other things we could actually be doing with our time intentionally?
So a big part of it, totally neutral, is try to think intentionally about why you’re using social media and then think about all the things that could go wrong and why and also think about how if it’s not something that you would do in front of somebody, why would you do it online? Which sounds obvious, but sometimes escapes us because there is a gamification and dehumanization factor to being online.
There are patterns here that everybody should know about and they’re probably not patterns that you want to embrace, so try not to embrace them and really have answers for why it is that you’re making decisions every day, including the ones that you’re making online.
What does that actually look like in terms of being intentional about the way you use social media? Does it mean deleting certain apps? Does it mean engaging less?
We do have a lot of conversations about image-based sexual abuse, right? It’s a question for everyone, because we’ve actually seen a lot more victimization of young men when it comes to sextortion schemes. So there’s this kind of epidemic that’s happening that’s really targeting young men, and I mean, like young teenagers.
What breaks my heart about it, and what breaks my heart about a lot of these things, is how many of these interactions begin because boys, girls, everyone are so lonely. Because they are being told, “Oh, you’re very attractive,” or, “I’d like to get to know you better,” or, “I find you really sexy. Send me a photo. Show me this.” How much of it begins in this really heartbreaking desire for connection.
Again, what is the interaction you’re trying to have here? Do you want to put pieces of yourself out into the world because you want connection? Is it something that you are grasping for that you’re not going to get out of the social media connection? A big part of it is just telling them all the horror stories of what can happen to you.
Without trying to blame people for what happens to them. Just telling them, “These are the kinds of things that can happen.” So think very carefully about what you want to reveal about yourself to others. Think of yourself as something precious, right? That does not need to be parceled out to other people because you are enough in yourself.
You don’t need to be chasing after someone else’s validation, hopefully. You probably have skills, and you probably have hobbies, and you probably have interests, and you probably have important actual connections around you that you could be spending time on. So a lot of this is “do less of it,” because there are probably more valuable things to do with your time.
But also be aware of the things that can go so badly so quickly, and how those things are almost always going to begin in a place of vulnerability, either yours or someone else’s. And try to not look at vulnerability as something to exploit. Look at it as something to guide or to support if nothing else, to not make it worse when you see it in someone else.
I understand that the work you do can be incredibly stressful. I know I’m stressed out every single day looking at my feed. What I wanna know is what gives you hope? What do you see changing right now in real time?
It is sometimes hard to find hope, but looking at the Cornell Daily Sun editorial, when I saw that headline, when I saw that these were students who had kind of stuck with the story, that really wanted to tell the story, and they knew that it was a risk. They knew that there were going to be all kinds of legal and other implications for bringing the story out.
I just thought, I don’t know why these are not the free speech hero stories that we’re telling, because to me, that’s a free speech hero story. That is such a dedicated, brave thing to do, and that really does give me some hope. It does actually give me hope that people continue, despite all of the terrible things that might be awaiting them for doing so, to speak out because they know something to be true or because they’re trying to highlight something that is important.
So journalism is one of those things that really does speak to me still. When there are stories like yours, when there are stories like the Cornell Daily Sun’s, I think, OK, there are still people who are going to talk about this no matter how much negative consequences are going to come from that, and I think that that’s important. As long as people are still willing to do that, then there’s still something worth fighting for.
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