While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore. Extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevalent, as well as all the everyday harassment that women have traditionally faced in the outside world - cat-calls, for instance, or being "rated" on our looks. It's all very far from the utopian ideals that greeted the dawn of the web - the idea of it as a new, egalitarian public space, where men and women from all races, and of all sexualities, could mix without prejudice.Kudos to Jessica for keeping the attention on this issue. I've been really shocked by the number of women bloggers I know who've come out of the woodwork with their own tales of having to seek legal counsel or go to the police to deal with this kind of stuff since the Sierra story broke (about which more later).On some online forums anonymity combined with misogyny can make for an almost gang-rape like mentality. One recent blog thread, attacking two women bloggers, contained comments like, "I would fuck them both in the ass,"; "Without us you would be raped, beaten and killed for nothing,"; and "Don't worry, you or your friends are too ugly to be put on the black market."...
Most disturbing is how accepted this is. When women are harassed on the street, it is considered inappropriate. Online, though, sexual harassment is not only tolerated -- it's often lauded. Blog threads or forums where women are attacked attract hundreds of comments, and their traffic rates rocket....
[E]ven women who don't put their pictures or real names online are subject to virtual harassment. A recent study showed that when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that female usernames averaged 163 threatening and/or sexually explicit messages a day.
"The promise of the early internet," says Marwick, "was that it would liberate us from our bodies, and all the oppressions associated with prejudice. We'd communicate soul-to-soul, and get to know each other as people, rather than judging each other based on gender or race." In reality, what ended up happening was that, online, the default identity became male and white
This is not a speech issue -- what finally got people talking goes way, way, way beyond nasty comments. The Sierra controversy touched a nerve because of the way the new media has empowered new forms of criminality, and because new media businesses have been utterly flummoxed when it comes to dealing with the fact that they've created a vast new anti-progressive playground.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
