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APPLES AND ORANGES. To add to Garance's earlier post about Markos's comments on the Kathy Sierra case: Markos is talking about oranges while the Sierra case and Web-misogyny are all about apples (a few rotten ones?). Markos writes:
Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you'll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist -- evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said "death threats". I suspect many are like this gem I recently received...Perhaps. But a recent study found that just having a female user name made chat participants from 6 to 25 times more likely to receive malicious messages from other users. Markos doesn't have a female user name, and he is unlikely to be attacked purely because of his gender. And the people (and bots) in that study were not bloggers or public figures, and they said no "controversial shit". Indeed, they were silent. This suggests that just being seen as a woman increases the odds of net harassment. But suppose, just for the sake of the thought experiment, we agree with Markos that if you can't take the heat you should get out of the kitchen:
Email makes it easy for stupid people to send stupid emails to public figures. If they can't handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work. Because no "blogger code of conduct" will scare away psycho losers with access to email.Markos may well be right that blogger codes of conduct wouldn't do much about the problem. But given the apples-and-oranges problem, women are now being asked to take a lot more heat than men -- both the kind of harassment Markos gets and the very specific kind of sexual harassment women on the Web get.--J. Goodrich
