| inbluevt | Date: Wednesday, 2013/08/14, 6:28 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
|
|
Private
Group: Blocked
Messages: 1024
|
Quote Women who are in the least bit outspoken are subject to threats of rape, racist and sexist epithets, and deeply offensive trolling. How did it
get this bad?
When Rebecca Meredith took the stage in March at the Glasgow Ancients, an annual university debate tournament, she and her debate partner, Marlena Valles, were prepared for a little heckling. After all,
Meredith is ranked the third top university debater in Europe in 2012 and Valles won best speaker in Scotland’s 2013 national championship, so between the two of them they’ve “beaten men in debates hundreds of times” and “can deal with heckles,” writes Meredith in the Huffington Post.
But even before the two debaters started speaking, a cadre of men in the audience began to boo, continued to boo throughout the debate, shouted “Shame, woman!” and “analysed their sexual attractiveness.” When a woman judge intervened, reports Lucy Sheriff, the men called the judge “a frigid bitch.”
Feminist Marilyn Webb has a similar story. When she took the stage to speak at the New Left’s Counter-Inaugural, she tells Susan Faludi in the April edition of the New Yorker, men in the audience immediately started shouting things like “Take hero ff the stage and fuck her!” and “Fuck her down the alley.” Author and activist Shulamith Firestone tried to speak after Webb, writes Faludi, “but was drowned out by a howl of sexual epithets.” Legally speaking, “you can heckle a speaker but you can’t drown them out,” explains Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer, author and free speech advocate.
Drowning out speakers or preventing them from speaking by threatening to create a violent reprisal is called “the Heckler’s Veto.” Considering the 2010 case of University of California students arrested for trying to prevent Karl Rove from speaking at a book-signing, Kaminer writes for the Atlantic that “protestors were not exercising their First Amendment rights so much as they were effectively restricting the rights of others.” Because they sought to use their heckler’s veto to silence a speaker, the speech of the students was no longer protected as free by the First Amendment.
More
Message edited by inbluevt - Wednesday, 2013/08/14, 6:36 PM |
|
|
| |
Main 
