I Can't Believe This Needs Saying but Doxxing the Woman Behind the Shitty Media Men List Is Wrong

Rumors flew around on Tuesday that Harper’s magazine has a piece in its upcoming print issue which will reveal the identity of the woman who started the Shitty Media Men list.

The list, an imperfect but crucial tool that circulated for a night in October, was a crowdsourced and open access document compiling sexual harassment and assault allegations against different men in the media.

Journalists Dayna Tortorici and Nicole Cliffe led the charge against the impending article.

Harper’s confirmed to Business Insider’s Max Tani that a piece is indeed in the works by Katie Roiphe, a writer known for ridiculing the idea of date rape in the 1990s (from one 1993 New York Times piece: “Preoccupied with issues like date rape and sexual harassment, campus feminists produce endless images of women as victims — women offended by a professor’s dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers, women trying to say no but not managing to get it across”). But the magazine declined to confirm the topic of the piece.

It seems ridiculous that I have to say this, but publishing the name of the woman who started the Shitty Media Men list is a very, very bad idea. It’s not in the public interest and it would only put the creator in danger in an environment rife with alt-right trolls and sexist men. This isn’t to advocate for Harper’s to pull a piece I haven’t read, but it’s pretty clear that one can make criticisms of the list and the tactics of its creator without gratuitously revealing her identity.

According to Tortorici, the piece hasn’t even gone to print yet, meaning there’s still time to stop this from happening:

If you are a writer who has a piece in the upcoming issue, this is a pretty good strategy to protest the doxxing:

The calculus here is pretty simple: Don’t put women in danger for clicks.