By Will Rivitz
Before I dive into this piece, let’s get one thing out of the way: I fully agree with the central tenet of 'Prince' columnist Shruthi Deivasigamani’s column, “Blaming Women.” The disconnect betweenthe blithe "post-gender" attitude our society ostensibly embodies and the massive, hideous underbelly of an American society extremely conducive to sexual harassment and assault is frightening. Op-eds like hers are absolutely necessary because despite the ever-growing U.S. population willing to confront such horrific norms as victim-blaming (especially if said victim is female, as Deivasigamani points out with her comparison between the Vanessa Anne Hudgens and Dylan Sprouse nude photo leaks), there are still countless Americans who obstinately refuse to confront their own bigotry and the toxicity of our country as a whole.
That being said, Deivasigamani begins her piece by calling social media aggregating website Reddit “home to ... the darkest and slimiest grottos … [of] the Internet.” As someone who frequents its various subcommunities (or subreddits), I feel that this is an unhelpful indictment of the site. Of course, it’s indeed true that many of the site’s nastiest subreddits could only have had the impact that the Internet eventually felt due to much user support, and subreddits like /r/jailbait, /r/creepshots, and most recently /r/thefappening are inexcusable examples of the horrors that the site can enable. What’s more, thanks to the website’s predominantly teenage-male userbase, there’s a fair amount of misogyny that occurs daily, ranging from the obvious (most of the “general use” pornographic subreddits contain almost exclusively female images) to the insidious (using the term “bitch” as a general descriptor of women, for example).
However, blaming Reddit as the worst perpetrator of the horrors of the Internet is still unfair, even if a significant percentage of the site’s userbase is responsible, directly or otherwise, for perpetuating countless forms of sexism. The worst parts of the website are not the root cause of misogyny in this country, but symptoms of the problem. At its most basic, the site exists to provide a largely unmoderated forum for users to share content and ideas via a simple upvote-downvote system. More popular opinions and images are upvoted; less popular ones are downvoted. As is clear from the website’s staunch support of net neutrality, Reddit believes in as little authoritative control as possible when it comes to Internet issues. There are a number of problems with this approach —for example, posts fall off the front page if they are not upvoted enough within a few minutes, giving more traction to easy-to-digest click-bait headlines and images rather than in-depth, nuanced articles. But for the most part, this system means that the userbase at large, not the administrators, determine what is displayed prominently and what gets shoved under the rug.
This means that the problem is not the site itself, but rather the users who frequent it. Blaming this site specifically, then, is needlessly restrictive. For every horrifically offensive community like /r/foreveralone, there generally is another community in which one might react accordingly against it —for example, /r/twoxchromosomes. What’s more, much of the site’s best content exists as far away from issues of sex and gender as possible. Subreddits like /r/gamedeals, /r/longreads, /r/comicbooks and /r/electronicmusic exist mostly in their own realms, largely separate from the wrongdoings of other parts (which naturally receive more attention from non-Redditors because of their unpleasantness).
And what of blaming the site’s administrators and creators for an apology referencing only the illegality of /r/thefappening instead of the creepiness within? The site’s apology is appropriate given its attitude toward user-created-and-vetted content. We wouldn’t have expected Facebook to apologize for the rampant homophobia it enabled around the time of the Duck Dynasty fiasco, and we wouldn’t have expected Twitter to apologize for the chilling xenophobia and racism many users expressed when an Indian-American woman won 2013’s Miss America competition. Reddit’s higher-ups exist to ensure the legality and legitimacy of the site, and nothing more. We expect a hands-off approach from almost all of the social-networking sites we frequent, so why should Reddit be any different?
Will Rivitz is a freshman from Brookline, Mass. He can be reached at wrivitz@princeton.edu.
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