Is There a Cyber War on Women?
Some pundits say women are under attack on the Internet. But do they have the data to back up their claims?
Last month, freelance journalist Amanda Hess, in a lengthy feature in Pacific Standard, declared that women are not welcome on the Internet. After describing her own frightening experience of online stalking, Hess lists other ugly incidents and cites statistics and studies arguing that women on the Internet—journalists, bloggers, and general users—are routinely terrorized solely because of their sex. New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat called the article "a candidate for the most troubling magazine essay of 2014."
Troubling, indeed. But is it true?
There is no doubt that many women, prominent and obscure, have experienced severe online harassment that can spill over into "real life." Hess's stalker, who repeatedly threatened her with rape and murder, went from emails to phone calls and voice mail messages. Whether such harassment is a female-specific problem and so pervasive as to actually deter women's online participation, is far less clear.
Hess and her supporters' argument relies heavily on out-of-context (and sometimes inaccurate) data, anecdotal evidence, and conflating serious harassment with garden-variety trolling and petty insults. These claims, uncritically received, are fanning a moral panic that could punish legitimate speech and create a more negative environment for women on the Internet.
As evidence of the perils of being a woman online, Hess states that, "of the 3,787 people who reported harassment incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female." This is an average of 288 women per year and these numbers hardly indicate an epidemic. Moreover, only a minority of the reports involved threats of violence (20 percent on average, and as few as seven percent in 2011-2012).
It's important to note that men make up a nontrivial percentage of the victims of online harassment. Some of the disparity is likely due to self-selection; men who are harassed may be less inclined to complain than women. When American Internet users in a random survey by the Pew Research Center last year were asked if they had ever been stalked or harassed online, 13 percent of the women said yes—but so did 11 percent of the men. This is a surprisingly small gap within the poll's margin of error.
Hess's article does not include these statistics, but cites another finding from the same study: "A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said 'something happened online' that led them into 'physical danger.'" For men that figure was three percent. Again, a gender gap so trivial it wasn't even mentioned in the Pew report on the survey, which gave a combined figure of four percent for both sexes.
Quoting a different Pew study, Hess reports, "From 2000 to 2005, the percentage of Internet users who participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28 percent to 17 percent, 'entirely because of women's fall off in participation.'" She offers this as proof that sometimes, women are actually driven out of virtual spaces by sexist abuse. Yet this alarming claim turns out to be, quite simply, a pseudo-fact made of statistical smoke and mirrors—an apparent error made by the report's author, Deborah Fallows, and further amplified by Hess. The statistic is contradicted by one of the study's own infographics, in which chat and discussion group participation rates for September 2005 are listed as 24 percent for men, 20 percent for women. The full dataset shows considerable volatility for both sexes on this item, with a low of 20 percent for men and 14 percent for women in February 2005.
In an email responding to my query, Pew senior researcher Mary Madden acknowledged that the wording in the report "does not appear to reflect the fluctuations that occurred in online men's use of chat rooms" and said that "clarifying language" would be added to the text. Meanwhile, other Pew data on Internet usage are dramatically at odds with Hess's claim that "on the Internet, women are overpowered and devalued."
In September 2013, the Pew website featured a "FactTank" brief, "It's a Woman's (Social Media) World," based on the finding that in the last five years, women's use of social media has exceeded men's by an average of 8 percentage points. This gap is partly due to Pinterest, where women dominate five to one. But women are also the majority on Facebook, used by 72 percent of women Internet users and 62 percent of men in 2012–2013. Twitter and Tumblr are both close to a 50/50 split. The only predominantly male social media network is Reddit, used by eight percent of the men online and four percent of the women.
Of course, these generally encouraging statistics are cold comfort if you're in the small minority to be targeted by a cyberstalker.
But online harassment doesn't only happen to women. Last August, First Amendment advocate Ken White documented one "progressive" activist's persistent harassment of several male conservative bloggers, including postings of lurid violent fantasies and, in the case of former Breitbart.com writer Lee Stranahan, phony child abuse reports to authorities. Stranahan was also one of several men who received rape and death threats (their phone numbers were also posted online for anyone to see) over their role in a documentary critical of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And, in 2012, a number of bloggers (all male) were targeted in "SWAT-ting" attacks, phone calls intended to trick the police into dispatching an emergency team in response to an alleged homicide.
In a little-noticed response to Hess's article, Gerard Harbison, a chemistry professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and libertarian who blogs as "The Right-Wing Professor," described his own experiences with online retaliation. In 2008, a blog called "The Gerard Harbison Files" not only labeled him a "right wing nut" and a "sociopath," but falsely asserted that he had been "accused of sexual harassment" and was "infamous for making inappropriate sexual advances towards his students." While the Gerald Harbinson Files has not been updated after the first three posts, it remains online. Harbison believes the culprit is a local Democratic Party activist and says that his attempts to get the page removed proved futile.
Just as the victims of cyber-warfare are not always female, the offenders are not always male. On average, about a third of the reports of online harassment to Working to Halt Online Abuse identify the aggressor as female (with the perpetrator's gender unknown in another one-fifth of the incidents).
Last year, novelist James Lasdun published a compelling memoir, "Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked." He recounts his experience with a former student who contacted him for advice on getting published, then progressed from flirtatious emails to obsessive ones, and finally declared war when he began to ignore her. Over several years, the woman bombarded Lasdun, and several people close to him, with abusive and often threatening emails, faked emails from him to others, and posted vicious attacks in comments threads on his articles and in reviews of his books on Amazon.com. She accused him of stealing her writings and ideas, sexually exploiting his female students, and even setting her up to be raped because she wouldn't sleep with him.
In her article, Hess mentions the arrest of "three men" for making rape and death threats on Twitter to British feminist activist Carolyn Criado-Perez last year. Hess does not mention that a woman, 23-year-old Isabella Sorley, was also arrested. Additionally, only Sorely and one of the three men, John Nimmo, were prosecuted for the threats. Criado-Perez blamed Sorely's participation on internalized misogyny. Sorley herself blamed booze and boredom.
Men are also targets of online harassment as punishment for perceived antifeminist transgressions. Ken Hoinsky tried to raise money on Kickstarter to publish a men's "guide to being awesome with women" and received hundreds of abusive messages, including death threats, after excerpts were posted online and the book's advice on "escalating" physical intimacy was interpreted as encouraging sexual assault.
While Hess looks primarily at harassment and threats, some of the ensuing discussion has focused on less extreme forms of nastiness, such as abusive feedback (particularly sexual slurs) received by female bloggers and online journalists. Megan McArdle suggests that while most bloggers experience verbal abuse, those "different from the able-bodied, thin, heterosexual white male norm" tend to be singled out for more specific types of abuse—fat jokes, racist or homophobic insults, or gender-specific and sexual taunts, for example. McArdle also believes that female commentators are generally respected less than men by their political counterparts and tend to elicit more vitriolic or dismissive responses from women and men alike.
Is this kind of prejudice really common? Perhaps, though it's nearly impossible to either prove or disprove. It always comes down to somewhat subjective claims that so-and-so would have been treated differently had genders been switched. Perhaps, as McArdle argues, an outspoken woman with whom one disagrees taps into many people's still-lingering, unconscious, atavistic distaste for women who step outside a proper feminine role.
But that's only half the story. Critics of anti-female bias underestimate the extent to which both sexual and political stereotypes may work against men. A man who gets into a fight with a woman risks being seen as a bully if he wins, a weakling if he loses. Women in the public eye may experience more hate, but they may also benefit from chivalry. For example, the recent outrage at ex-MSNBC host Martin Bashir's attack on Sarah Palin, was undoubtedly magnified by the fact that Bashir's target was female.
Female journalists, meanwhile, can get away with explicitly sexist attacks on their male colleagues. Last August, after getting into an on-air spat about U.S.–Russian relations with MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, New Republic senior editor Julia Ioffe penned an article titled "Dear Lawrence O'Donnell, Don't Mansplain to Me About Russia." In January, Marjorie Ingalls, a columnist for the online Jewish magazine Tablet, derided male reviewers who were insufficiently impressed by Disney's latest animated feature "Frozen" as "boys" who miss the film's girl-power message because they are "writing with their penises."
As for nastiness in Internet comments, it is treated as white noise when directed at male writers. Comments on a 2012 piece by Deadspin columnist Drew Magary criticizing Jerry Seinfeld included: suggestions that Magary wrote the article while masturbating, advice to get some sexual action, a wish for Magary's genitalia to become infested with large maggots, and a threat to drive a pen up his urethra. Men routinely get comments impugning the size, or even the existence, of their male organs and are not infrequently accused of being sexual predators or perverts.
In The Atlantic.com, Conor Friedersdorf asserts that women are singled out for particularly demeaning and vitriolic abuse (and that such sexism is at least partly to blame for the relative paucity of female voices in the political blogosphere). Yet Friedersdorf himself was the target of some nasty sexually themed attacks from the far-right blogosphere in 2011. After he made fun of the poorly attended premiere of the pro-Palin documentary, Undefeated, two conservative bloggers responded with apparently satirical innuendo that Friedersdorf had made lecherous overtures to two teenage girls whom he interviewed at the movie theater. One post was headlined, "Conor 'Pee Wee Herman' Friedersdorf Exposes Himself To Female At Palin Film Showing."
Directed at a woman, such an attack would have likely struck Friedersdorf as horrific misogyny. When directed at himself, he treats it as deplorably crass but not particularly injurious.
This double standard is based partly on women's greater sexual vulnerability (specifically, the risk of sexual violence) and partly on historical inequities. Because journalism and political discourse were traditionally men's territory, a slur that targets a woman's gender or sexuality is taken to attack her as an interloper. A below-the-belt insult directed at a male writer is just an insult.
There is, of course, another aspect to this issue: Much of the abuse Hess deplores is directed not simply at women, but at active feminists. This is easy to interpret as misogynist backlash against women's quest for equality. Yet any honest discussion has to acknowledge the fact that modern feminism is not simply a pro-equality movement but rather, one that has disturbing strands of hate—a movement whose adherents argue that women should treat every man as a potential rapist and that the collective bashing of men is a justified response to women's oppression. Internet feminists have played a major role in turning online discussion of gender issues into a toxic swamp that naturally attracts trolls.
Amanda Marcotte, Hess's colleague at Slate.com, once hurled such epithets as "rape-loving scum" at commenters who questioned the guilt of the three Duke lacrosse players accused (falsely, as it turned out) of raping a stripper. More recently, atheist feminist and frequent troll target Rebecca Watson made a Twitter post stating that sex with "someone who is drunk" is always rape. She received reasonable objections to the statement, such as, "What blood alcohol content negates consent?" and "Is it mutual rape if you're both drunk?" Watson responded with a tweet that arguably qualifies as trolling in its own right: "Here's a thought, assholes: don't ask me if your specific situation is rape. Ask the one you're fucking." To cap it off, Watson reported the dust-up on her blog under the headline, "Twitter Users Sad to Hear They May Be Rapists."
Blogger and columnist Susannah Breslin often writes about sex-related matters and readily admits to getting her share of sexually abusive online comments. In an email exchange, she stated that she feels sympathy for feminist writers who have been harassed and threatened, but also believes feminist behavior is part of the problem. According to Breslin, "Today's feminism by and large defines itself in relation to men. It's about obsessing over how men are keeping women down and about attacking men for all the wrong they do. This feminism promotes reverse sexism." Moreover, she argues, "Feminists are the new thought police online, self-appointed cops for what men can and can't say on the Internet. And when you establish that as your methodology, men are not going to respond well."
The strategies many feminists propose for dealing with online harassment may hurt more than help. In a Jezebel.com article last July, Lindy West argued that, because online attacks on feminists are not simply random trolling but "hate speech … directly aligned with our male-supremacist power structure," they should not be dismissed or ignored but widely publicized and met with counterattacks. Watson has given similar advice, asserting that what misogynist trolls actually seek is not attention but the silencing of outspoken women, and thus remaining silent about their attacks gives them exactly what they want.
Criado-Perez, the British activist whose experience with Twitter attacks brought attention to the issue last year, has angrily lashed back at supportive Twitter users who have suggested that publicizing abusive tweets is counterproductive. She went so far as to threaten one of them, Guardian columnist Nicola Clarke with legal action for "harassing" her.
Yet, in reality—if the Criado-Perez case is any indication—these alleged cyber-warriors for male supremacy are likely to be losers and social misfits who do, in fact, take attention as encouragement.
"I think a lot of the so-called harassment is a self-perpetuating monster," Ellen Beth Wachs, founder of Atheists and Humanists of Florida, told me by email. "A troll attacks a woman. She reacts in the manner the troll wants her to. The troll gets the satisfaction [he or she] was looking for and continues, and perhaps onlookers see this and join in."
Wachs is no stranger to harassment. At one point, she says, an obsessive cyberstalker, who targeted her as first an atheist and then as a feminist, not only sent abusive emails but created fake social media accounts in her name. She believes that real online harassment, sexist or otherwise, needs to be taken more seriously by both Internet companies and legal authorities. Yet Wachs also stresses that such threats need to be differentiated from garden-variety nastiness, ramblings by unbalanced people, and even comments that get labeled as misogynist trolling for merely questioning the feminist party line.
Both Breslin and Wachs have had run-ins with another kind of "gendered" online abuse: feminist trashing of female dissenters. Breslin encountered this in 2010 when she wrote a blogpost on the True Slant site criticizing the vogue for "trigger warnings" on feminist and social justice blogs (based on the idea that the readership is filled with trauma survivors who must be warned about flashback-triggering references to everything from rape to racism). The response was a hatefest in the comments on the post and on several feminist blogs. Breslin was slammed as a "Sister F***er," a "certifiable asshole," and a "cunt." For months after, she says, "an unhinged woman" sent her emails saying that she should be raped and killed.
Caroline Kitchens, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, came under feminist fire last fall after she wrote a column for U.S. News & World Report questioning the existence of a campus rape epidemic. Jezebel.com trashed her as a victim-blaming, slut-shaming man-pleaser and included a link to her Twitter page. Kitchens, a recent college graduate, received such a deluge of abusive tweets that she temporarily stopped using Twitter.
For Kitchens, the attacks ultimately strengthened her determination to soldier on. For women who are part of the online sisterhood, the toll of such bullying can be devastating. The Nation recently published a controversial article by Michelle Goldberg on "feminism's toxic Twitter wars," bitter, endless conflicts in which women are savaged for perceived ideological infractions, heresies and impurities, leaving many fearful of saying anything at all. Goldberg's piece echoes an essay posted last December by blogger Megan Murphy lamenting that Twitter feminism had turned into a "mean girls-style popularity contest" and an "absolutely endless stream of hate." With friends like these, who needs misogynist enemies.
In principle I don't have a problem with the idea that there should be less Internet nastiness. I even think Hess has a point when she argues that defenders of online anonymity sometimes underestimate the damage of cyber-harassment and stalking, especially when accompanied by nontrivial threats of violence, privacy violations, or slander. According to Stranahan, the conservative blogger who has been a target of such attacks, they can actively discourage people from blogging. "Some of the smartest political people I know have told me, 'I would never blog in a million years. I saw what happened to you, what happened to your wife, your kids' pictures being posted online,'" he says.
But framing this issue as a devastating "war on women" does far more harm than good. On a broad level, it continues the blame-and-shame cycle that has made gender debates such fertile ground for trolls and bullies.
Hess's article prompted Damon Linker, a columnist for The Week, to write that Hess's account of online abuse towards female journalists made him feel shame for his gender. Linker pokes preemptive fun at those who would accuse him of joining the "war against men." But one needn't embrace the "war" rhetoric to see his nostra culpa as the kind of collective guilt-tripping that could not be safely directed at any other group.
Meanwhile, in a BBC discussion of sexist abuse on Twitter, American tech journalist Quinn Norton opined that the larger problem is that "men are raised to hate women." Note how a discussion of hate speech towards women by anonymous Internet trolls becomes a vehicle for hate speech about men by a female journalist in a major media outlet.
In more specific terms, the crusade against online abuse of women can turn into suppression of legitimate criticism of feminists, particularly in countries with no First Amendment protections. In Canada, 53-year-old Toronto artist and designer Gregory Allan Eliot is currently on trial for "criminal harassment" toward three feminist activists with whom he had been embroiled in a political dispute on Twitter. The prosecution acknowledges that none of Eliot's tweets contained threatening language, only epithets such as the hashtag #fascistfeminists. Meanwhile, his supporters argue that Eliot himself was the target of abuse from Twitter feminists. Among other things, they point to a 2012 exchange in which Eliot questioned the morality of murder in retaliation for rape and a woman responded by repeatedly suggesting that his sons were rapists.
In the United States, the calls for Internet speech policing are directed primarily at social media companies, which obviously don't want to be seen as condoning online abuse of women. Last summer, an Internet user known as "Elevatorgate" had his Twitter account closed after several feminist bloggers complained that he was harassing them by using the Storify platform to compile, republish, and ridicule their public tweets. By that definition, MediaMatters.org could be taken down for harassing Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and other right-wing pundits.
Around the same time, feminist activists mounted a successful effort to pressure Facebook to crack down on "misogynist hate speech." The campaign by Women Action & the Media focused on unquestionably nasty content that slipped by the Facebook mods. They pointed to "humorous" graphics of bruised and battered women with such captions as, "She broke my heart. I broke her nose," and pages with titles like "Violently raping your friends just for laughs" (which had a mere 17 "likes" before it was shut down).
However, days after Facebook announced its new commitment to ridding its pages of "gender-based hate," the material removed for violating the site's "community standards" included a different type of image. One graphic challenged the "1 in 4" rape statistic for college women and proclaimed, "Rape culture is bullshit." Another mocked the popular "I need feminism" Internet meme, featuring a woman holding a sign that read, "I need feminism because when I kill my husband feminists will defend me." In these instances, the "misogynist" material amounted to an attack on specific feminist ideas and practices. (The men's rights group that posted these graphics has published genuinely vile stuff on its own website; but the graphics removed from Facebook expressed genuine criticism.) While this is not a First Amendment issue since Facebook is a private corporation, banishing such critiques from the Internet's largest social media site is a disturbing decision.
Finally, there is the issue of paternalism toward women. It's not very surprising that Ross Douthat, a traditionalist known to argue that women need to be protected from the perils of sexual freedom, would choose this particular feminist issue to champion. Feminists should recognize that this brand of chivalry, which treats women as fragile flowers, is not much of an improvement on misogyny.
We do need remedies for actual threats and cyberstalking, regardless of gender, and, perhaps, better guidelines to determine when trolling crosses the line into potentially dangerous harassment. Quinn Norton offers sound advice: ignore the trolls, flag the ones who won't go away when ignored. There should also be—and for the vast majority of Internet users already is—a stigma attached to misogynistic speech. Personally, I'd like to see the same stigma towards male-bashing.
But in the end, we must also accept it's a big Internet and bad apples will always be out there. They include bona fide misogynists, people willing to use every available weapon in a verbal fight, and trolls who get their kicks by pushing people's buttons. In the Internet age, any idiot with a laptop and an Internet connection can single-handedly declare a "war on women." To take this "war" seriously is to give the idiots far too much power.
While the political blogosphere, like punditry in more traditional media venues, skews male for many complicated reasons, the female presence in the new media is strong and thriving. Currently, the top-rated blog according to Technorati is the female-headed Huffington Post and the most popular independent, one-person blog belongs to University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse. Althouse's take on the issue of woman abuse online can be summed up as "report serious threats to the cops; otherwise, grow a tough skin."
To demand special protection on the grounds of women's particular vulnerabilities is to turn female disempowerment into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we casually assume that a woman suffers more harm from a nasty (or even sexually threatening) online comment than a man does from, say, castration threats and gibes about pedophilia or jeers about the death of his infant child, we're not only being callous to men but upholding the very stereotypes of "the weaker sex" that feminists supposedly deplore.
In the discussions of women and sexism online, I keep coming back to Eleanor Roosevelt's famous quote: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." I've always thought it was an overly simplistic statement; it's certainly not true for people relegated to inferiority by oppressive laws or stifling customs. But if you're a woman on the Internet dealing with people behaving badly, it's a pretty good guidepost.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
Sometimes man, you jsut have to roll with the punches.
http://www.Anon-VPN.com
Talk about your cyber wars on women.
…men who are harassed may be less inclined to complain than women.
Ms. Young just fired another shot in the online war on women.
I get threats from internet tough guys all the time. Nazis, Commies, L. Ron Hubtards, etc. I have no reason at all to believe that any of them would actually show up and try to attack me.
-jcr
I’ve been threatened by GOP tuff-boys on this very site – not that I care very much.
Palin’s Buttplug|2.2.14 @ 11:04AM|#
“I’ve been threatened by GOP tuff-boys on this very site”
Cite missing.
What, you don’t count the voices in his head as reliable sources?
I frequently post on soc.culture.israel, defending what is right and true. One of the subscribers, who goes by the name of the Revd, keeps calling me a gook and keeps accusing me of having a needledick.
Clearly we need legislation for this including, but not limited to, funding for hotlines and support groups and severe punishments for any who would dare anonymously call someone names.
Watching Meet the Press.
Is it just my imagination, or are All the President’s Fellators starting to sound palpably desperate?
They seem to be thrashing the water desperately in an attempt to convince themselves his True Glory will be revealed in the fullness of time. Just because he walks like a failure, and talks like a failure…
It’s like watching people trying to convince themselves that the rapture is coming. If only they remain faithful then their faith will be rewarded.
Cathy:
A couple of points.
1. I am not a statistician — I am basically innumerate. I have observed this: of all the things I blog about, and many are controversial, the posts that have drawn the most comments and the most vituperative comments have been the ones talking about how women are treated on the internet and inquiring why it makes some people so very angry even to talk about this topic. I don’t get people furious at me for discussing any other topics. I recognize that’s anecdotal.
2. As to Lasdun’s experience, when he wrote his book about his experience being stalked, a female reviewer wrote and the LA Times printed a review that amounted to “maybe he was asking for it.” http://www.popehat.com/2013/02…..e-a-point/
3. It would be interesting to see real and reliable scientific research into this. I have only observations, which are biased. But even though I have drawn crazy stalkers (male and female), it sure appears to me that women saying things on the internet draw threats and nutty vitriol more reliably than men.
As a participant in a few of those very long comment debates, I seem to recall most of the vituperation from the pro-feminist side, with one or two trolls who got cross-linked from the MRA groups to muddy the waters. There was a lot of interest, to be sure, but most of it was substantive debate. I have no doubt you saw the debate as particularly scathing to your side, but as you note, we are all biased. Just my (unwelcome, I know), two cents.
I was rolling my eyes at this & then realized I know people who genuinely believe these things are true. That they’re abused, oppressed & constantly in danger simply because they’re women.
& in some countries that is one hundred percent true. In some situations, even — the campus police at my school are kidding themselves if they think I’m not carrying some self-defense every time I’m there at night.
But I have an acquaintance (hardly friends anymore, it’s hard to be friends with someone you want to hit upside the head with an iron half the time) who sits at home & reads these ridiculously inflated rape statistics posted by places like Jezebel & is convinced that every man she encounters wants to sell her into sex slavery. She’s never been on a date. She couldn’t even talk to guys when we were in high school, before she was exposed to all this, so you can imagine how terrible she is dealing with them now.
It makes me sad that young women are being taught that they must be protected from everything, particularly men. Of course there are terrible men out there, but also some really terrible women — the constant us versus them helps absolutely nobody in the end.
(This is, uh, long. Sorry.)
it would be more surprising if you did NOT know people like this. When you have marinated for years in a stew of “rape culture/male gaze/patriarchy/ad nauseum”, it is impossible to believe there will be no effect on anyone.
What is ironic is how many of the women who perceive themselves as victimized also bitch about how few decent guys exist. No self-awareness at all.
I wonder if anyone ever defined “raspe culture”?
Megan McArdle suggests that while most bloggers experience verbal abuse, those “different from the able-bodied, thin, heterosexual white male norm” tend to be singled out for more specific types of abuse?fat jokes, racist or homophobic insults, or gender-specific and sexual taunts, for example.
Can we finally come up with an adequately derisive term for able-bodied, thin, heterosexual white male normals? This playing field really needs to be leveled.
Be advised, those of you too lazy to read all the pages of this multipage post, it name drops several Hit & Run commenter favorites (Lindy West, Amanda Marcotte, ect.) so I suggest you give it a read.
I tried. I failed. I could only stand 1.75 pages documenting grievance mongering.
Fake scandals huh? Has anyone mentioned at H&R that the left constantly projects? That they never argue in good faith?
How about WHAMs (White Heterosexual Affluent Males)?
Wake me up before you get this to catch on on.
Well played.
If guys are stupid enough to put this stuff in writing and permanent storage, then girls should save every such thing they get, to substantiate their cases. I’ve done that with a couple of women’s text messages and emails, too; I didn’t have to take real action, but I let them know it’s all saved, and any more abusiveness would be considered harassment.
As for the mix of real data and nameless anecdotes, that’s never good. I’m kind of reminded of one woman who was complaining about dumb things guys want to do in bed with them, and I finally asked her, have you ever had an intelligent boyfriend? She didn’t really answer.
On that NYT hit piece on libertarians:
http://www.economicpolicyjourn…..k-was.html
Maybe Obo could fix the WoW the way he has helped gays. Oh, wait:
“Now that President Obama has responded to congressional inaction on minimum wages by ordering pay increases for federal contractors’ employees, gay-rights advocates want to know why he has ignored their pleas”…
Surprise! Someone else finds out he’s a lying bastard!
http://www.sfgate.com/default/…..197046.php
The world is a little more complicated than some seem grasp. Not all cultures in the world have the same take on gender issues. Do we wage war to impose an *ideal* one? Do we incarcerate or economically sanction men into accepting this *ideal*?
I don’t know many guys these days who if they said they hit their wife or girlfriend, would have their buddies condoning it and more likely having their buddies disturbed by it. This is a relatively new attitude and I doubt that it came about because of legal sanctions.
Men don’t beat their wives these days because it just isn’t acceptable to most people.
Modern radical feminism is best described as a war on sexuality.
If you’re not being verbally abused on the internet, you’re doing it wrong.
OK thats liek the craziest thing I have heard all year lol.
http://www.Anon-VPN.com
“Quinn Norton offers sound advice: ignore the trolls, flag the ones who won’t go away when ignored.”
Best advice on this whole thing. I never fully understood cyberbullying. There’s so many safeguards to shut it off. If someone insults me, I delete the comment or contact the admin and move on.
One way in which women really do have it worse, though, is that they are judged on looks regardless of context.
Considering that known Dem activists have actually instigated no-shitting assaults on their on-line male conservative enemies by having them SWATTED, I think there is no question whatsoever that IRL stalking/harassment is emphatically not a female problem.
One way in which women really do have it worse, though, is that they are judged on looks regardless of context.
I would say “different” rather than “worse”, because being judged works both ways. Let’s not forget that if you are a good-looking woman, you automatically reap a benefit from that regardless of context.
If you want to understand modern feminism, check out XOJane. Over the last week they’ve published not 1, not 2, but 3 articles about being in a yoga class with one black girl in it. It’s an issue of such importance that even the Huffington Post has gotten into the action (though it’s only published one article on this pressing topic).
I’ve been threatened by GOP tuff-boys on this very site – not that I care very much.
“Ridiculed” =/= “Threatened”
Now if shreek used words like they had meanings, it wouldn’t be shreek, would it?
Who are the GOPers who hang out here?
Tulpa and John, perhaps, but they don’t strike me as braindead partisans who turn everything into a simplistic, binary MY TEAM GOOD, YOUR TEAM BAD thing.
Who are the GOPers who hang out here?
Ken Schultz went on a months-long crying jag about how simpleminded libertarian backstabbers, Hell-bent on making the perfect the enemy of the maybe-perhaps-not-quite-ultimately-horrible (aka Romney), handed the election to The Zero.
No, that was Tulpa. Or was it both?
God that was an annoying time online and IRL. I had one friend trying to convince me to vote for Mittens, and finally I said “Look man, the guy is MA RINO squish. Holding my nose and voting for someone is one thing, but you’re basically asking me to pretend that his entire governing record doesn’t count, because it was MA and he didn’t mean it.”
Honestly, the GOP needs to run someone from Texas who can respond to all the diversity/war on women concern trolling with fervor and humor.
“Oh I’m sorry, I was talking to the lesbian mayor of the fourth largest city in the nation the other day. Tell me again how backwards my state is.”
They do this stupid shit where they’re like “The rubes in the South will always vote for us. If we nominate a Northeastern governor, then we can split off PA!!!!” This will never happen. Ever.
been on the internet for 20 years. there’s still that red X up in the right hand corner of every browser ever that makes it all go away.
amazing.
-FFM
Sorta like the folks who shout “KILL YOUR TV!”
Every one I’ve ever seen has a switch and it comes from the store with the switch in the “off” position. If you really don’t like it, leave the switch where it is.
“Hess and her supporters’ argument relies heavily on out-of-context (and sometimes inaccurate) data, anecdotal evidence, and conflating serious harassment with garden-variety trolling and petty insults. These claims, uncritically received, are fanning a moral panic that could punish legitimate speech…”
Gee, haven’t we been here before? Sounds just like what happened with sexual harassment in the workplace, sexual assault on campus, hookers at the Super Bowl, spousal abuse spiking on Super Bowl Sunday, etc., etc., etc.,
First, big props to Cathy Young for finally getting an accurate story on the Internet “gender wars”. There’s been some very skewed coverage and an incredible double standard perpetrated in how incivility toward women, and feminists in particular, is treated versus general incivility online. In particular, Young is right on the money in seeing the toxic “callout culture” of the online feminist and social justice movements as part of the same phenomenon as online misogynist bullying. I’ve been saying this for several years now to anyone who will listen.
I do however, have one quibble with a minor detail in the article:
‘Goldberg’s piece echoes an essay posted last December by blogger Megan Murphy
Actually, this is a problematic example, because Meghan Murphy is an extremely bad actor and in fact one of the absolute worst “mean girls” on Twitter and other online spaces. She’s notorious for claiming victimization in the light of backlash toward nasty fights that she herself has started. The real source of her animus against online feminism is not meanness and incivility per se, because she dishes that out in spades, but rather the fact that the kind of old-school Dwrokinista feminism she pushes so zealously has fallen out of favor, with a more trans- and sex-worker friendly “intersectional feminism” largely supplanting it. Radfms getting a taste of their own vitriol is something Murphy simply can’t abide with.
Maybe I just haven’t been paying close attention (again?) to this particular issue but whenever I read about how the internet is so mean to women all I can hear is a nine year old girl whining about not getting her “female privilege” while on-line.
Twenty years ago, on the online service Delphi (i.e., before the Web), I was an active poster on the PC-Compatibles forum. There were a lot of flamewars, and I participated in them vigorously (as did most of the posters there), but I also helped other people with troubleshooting computer problems (as did most of the posters there).
One day, a newbie showed up and started telling us that we should make the forum more welcoming to women. The forum moderator agreed and suggested holding a special “woman’s chat”. I wrote to the newbie privately and told her I saw no reason for such handholding; that there was already a women’s chat group associated with the forum, just an unofficial one, and I gave her its details.
Well, she went crying to the forum moderator about how a terrible male chauvinist had flamed her (funny thing was, I hadn’t; I’d been being polite by my standards of the time), and the forum moderator took me to task in the forum, and I said, “Whatever else I may be, I’m not a male chauvinist, because I’m a woman myself.”
So thus far, I agree with the above article.
On the other hand, there is an ironic sequel. For the rest of my time on that forum, just about everyone ignored my technical-help posts. I had been, I think, fairly well-regarded as a source for technical advice, but once they knew I was a woman, that changed. I spent ten years afterwards hiding my gender online, just in case.
Modern women. They want to pick out the resturant, but still expect you to pick up the check. This is just more of the same. If you want to try running the world for a few milennia, ladies, it’s fine with me. I’ve got better things to do, anyway. You’re just going to have to develop thicker skin.
Heuristic: If Amanda Marcotte is on “your side”, you want to examine your actions very, very closely and rethink things.
I suppose Marcotte can’t always* be wrong, but over years of seeing her antics I’ve noticed she comes pretty close.
(* I mean, she probably likes kittens and thinks the sky is nominally blue, which are both fine positions to hold, and that I agree with.
But on substantive or disputed issues, well…)
Iamcuriousblue said: […] the kind of old-school Dwrokinista feminism she pushes so zealously has fallen out of favor, with a more trans- and sex-worker friendly “intersectional feminism” largely supplanting it.
Dworkinists vs. intersectional oppression-fetishists?
“Don’t pick sides, pray for an asteroid”, as the saying goes.
(Oh, for the day when feminism becomes what the bumperstickers assure me it is, “the radical proposition that men and women are equal”.
I’m behind that 100%, and act on it to the greatest extent I’m capable of.
Pity the “feminists” don’t seem to think it suffices.)
Wow, you cite the infamous Hoinsky Kickstarter case and compare it to being a female writer who is stalked/threatened by internet sociopaths. Seriously? I suppose it all boils down to waiting until after the blood is running down the walls and the bodies located (eventually) before threats are to be taken seriously, eh? Good thing I’m a big tough hero and don’t have to worry about anyone making threats to dismember/disembowel me BC they disagree with my opinions. 0_o