The Feminist Way to "Download Britney Spears Sex Video - FAST!"
Would you subvert community-agreed uses of technology for your political beliefs? Radical feminist bloggers have decided to rage against the machine by hyperlinking "Britney Spears' crotch" and similar text to sites which are either feminist or hostile to visitors.
Some would say that's one category, not two.
Either way, drive-by and search-engine visitors alike will be flummoxed when they click on Free Britney Spears Crotch Shots and end up at The National Organization for Women.
"How incredibly great would it be, for example, if we were able to make it really, really difficult for people to find pornography. Consider the possibilities!"—Heart, Women's Space/The MarginsTake a gander at Screaming into the Void's post if you want to see what this looks like in action. She has a lengthy list of porn-style phrases that she's linked to feminist organizations, educational pages, or simply hostile pages as a joke. I had the unfortunate experience of clicking through to the "Most Annoying Web Page", which I could only exit by shutting down my browser.
While Screaming into the Void does not allow comments, Women's Space/The Margins does, and it's also the origin of this radfem action. See background links below—there are some good discussions going on there.
I have no problem with Google bombing for Choice and combating anti-semitism, but this latest development presents a grey area for me.
While I believe that the porn industry harms women and perpetuates misogyny, I'm not entirely convinced that messing up the waterworks of Google, Yahoo, et al., is the best approach. If taken up by a number of causes, couldn't persistent use of this sort of online activism cripple search engines like Google and Yahoo?
So I reiterate my original question:
Would you subvert community-agreed uses of technology for your political beliefs?
Background links:
All links from the radical feminist blog Women's Space/The Margins.
"'Britney Spears Crotch'—Question"
"More Truth About Men: Britney Spears 'Crotch' Photos, Poetic Justice, A Proposal"
"Feminist Anti-Britney-Crotch-Shot Activism and Internet Search Engines"
Photo: Gawker. Also posted at BlogHer.
6 comments:
I just spent about an hour reading all the posts you linked and their comment threads. I do like the organic origins of it (I have a similar "post that will not die" that brings in too many hits) and I love the idea that women took something that was already happening and bent it to serve their own purposes. I have no problem with them using it and bringing in misdirected hits for educational value or even for the intent purpose of jerking them around. However, I'm leery of the list of links sending porn seekers to sites that didn't choose to be a part of the effort. I dislike a draft in any form, even for a good cause.
As for messing up the legitimate uses of search engines, I don't know. So much of that is already being done by spammers. I'm constantly hit with comment/trackback spam that links seemingly innocent words and phrases to ugly porn sites. If I let them get through it would add to an already serious problem. It's bad enough to sort through the splogs for serious drug information. Something is broken in the system.
Truth and honesty remain the best policies. Tricking folks (even if they are folks who are Looking For Bad Stuff) into Goodthinking sites is not honest, is ineffective, and only creates hostility.
It's also begging for someone else to do the same thing for less honorable purposes. Spam has already been mentioned, but in a political/philosophical perspective, how is this fundamentally different from redirecting searches for Jewish heritage to anti-Semitic sites, or redirecting searches for progressive political commentary to the Rush Limbaugh page? Heck, what if porn sites were similarly trying to dirty-trick folks looking for feminist sites over to their own? I suspect the tactic would be soundly condemned in such cases, and I have to do the same here.
For the record, it's the National Organization FOR Women.
But porn sites *are* effectively (and sometimes totally on purpose) hijacking huge amounts of the language and of searchability from women and women's issues to porn. Just that you can't type "women" into google without getting porn - isn't that a problem? Fighting it with the same tools seems like a fine idea - in any case, definitely something to try as an experiment - we need to flex our muscles and show a little power, here, in the feminist blogosphere...
Thanks Diane - corrected.
I took part in the porn googlebomb, slightly differently to some of the other women, but that was more for my sensibilities than that I disliked their approach. I just didn't quite have the stomach for the misogyny in the language used.
I think I would feel more bad about potentially messing up search engines if porn merchants and spammers weren't already doing that on a massive scale. I think things like this googlebomb go a small way towards redressing the balance.
And let's face it, a bit of subversive techie stuff is good for the soul :)
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