Justice

This Woman Documented a Decade's Worth of Creepy Messages From Men

October 20th 2015

It's well known that many women face harassment online, but professional violinist Mia Matsumiya has probably been aware of this problem for longer than most.

Matsumiya recently published a decade's worth of creepy and sometimes racist messages she has received on various social media platforms. She posts the exchanges on her Instagram account @perv_magnet, which currently has more than 21,000 followers. According to Dazed, she has also started posting creepy messages her friends have received online and on dating sites.

Her Instagram page features messages dating back to MySpace's glory days. She told BuzzFeed News in an interview that the creepy messages started piling up when she started performing in rock bands and maintaining a blog in the early 2000s. The message flow continued over the years, with many users spewing racist comments at her along the way:

“I received an insane number of creepy messages the whole time I was in [a] band,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I thought for sure that the messages were going to stop at some point, but they’ve persisted to this day.”

She added that she received a death threat at one point and was forced to stop blogging as a result. She claims that the police told her to "just turn off" the computer when the messages got out of hand.

Matsumiya was particularly alarmed when she kept getting messages from a man who had been arrested for stalking another Asian female.

“The guy would write me all the time, and even though his messages weren’t over-the-top creepy, they were definitely a little sexually aggressive,” she said. "When the police arrested him at the public library, he was found with a hard drive containing a bunch of pictures of me and hundreds of pages of stories he had written about stalking and raping me. It was really terrifying.”

Matsumiya is far from the only woman to publicly call out online harassers. Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe recently started Bumble, a dating app in which the woman gets to make the first move, as an alternative to Tinder, which many men use to harass women who ignore or reject them. In 2014, Slate writer Amanda Hess published a chilling piece about the outrageous abuse many women experience on the Internet.

(h/t BuzzFeed News)

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