How the web became a sexists' paradise
Everyone receives abuse online but the sheer hatred thrown at women bloggers has left some in fear for their lives. Jessica Valenti, editor of Feministing.com, reports
Friday April 6, 2007
The Guardian
Last week, Kathy Sierra, a well-known software programmer and Java expert, announced that she had cancelled her speaking engagements and was "afraid to leave my yard" after being threatened with suffocation, rape and hanging. The threats didn't come from a stalker or a jilted lover and they weren't responses to a controversial book or speech. Sierra's harassers were largely anonymous, and all the threats had been made online.
Sierra had been receiving increasingly abusive comments on her website, Creating Passionate Users, over the previous year, but had not expected them to turn so violent - her attackers not only verbally assaulting her ("fuck off you boring slut . . . I hope someone slits your throat") but also posting photomontages of her on other sites: one with a noose next to her head and another depicting her screaming with a thong covering her face. Since she wrote about the abuse on her website, the harassment has increased. "People are posting all my private data online everywhere - social-security number, and home address - a retaliation for speaking out."
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.
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."………..snip
Sierra thinks that online threats, even if they are coming from a small group of people, have tremendous potential to scare women from fully participating online. "How many rape/fantasy threats does it take to make women want to lay low? Not many," she says.
But even 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 user-names averaged 163 threatening and/or sexually explicit messages a day………...snip
Thankfully, women are fighting back. Sparked by the violent harassment of Sierra, one blogger started a "stop cyberbullying" campaign. This was picked up by hundreds of other bloggers and an international women's technology organisation, Take Back the Tech, a global network of women who encourage people to "take back online spaces" by writing, video blogging, or podcasting about online harassment.
It won't mean the end of misogyny on the web, but it is a start. Such campaigns show that women are ready to demand freedom from harassment and fear in our new public spaces. In the same way that we should be able to walk down the street without fear of being raped, women shouldn't have to stay quiet online - or pretend to be men - to be free of threats and harassment. It is time to take back the sites.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2051394,00.html
