The issue of Internet misogyny has received a great deal of attention in recent weeks, between the feminist website Jezebel battling rape GIFs repeatedly posted to their comments section and videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian having to leave her home after a series of Twitter threats that included her home address. There is a common assumption that the targets of such vile behavior are overwhelmingly women who are abused because they are women—to the point where “women aren’t welcome on the Internet,” as Amanda Hess argued in a widely discussed article in Pacific Standard magazine this year. Reviewing women’s online tribulations in the last month in The Daily Beast, Samantha Allen asks, “Will the Internet ever be safe for women?”
At the same time, there was little reaction to a report contradicting the narrative that male public figures get considerably less Twitter abuse than their female counterparts. While the study, conducted by the British think tank Demos, was limited to a fairly small sample of British celebrities, journalists and politicians whose Twitter timelines were tracked over a two-week period, its findings are nonetheless interesting. On the whole,
2.5 percent of the tweets sent to the men but fewer than 1 percent of those sent to women were classified as abusive. Male politicians fared especially badly, receiving more than six times as much abuse as female politicians.
Also, about 40 percent of the abusive tweets to women were sent by other women.
Are women really singled out for abuse on the Internet—or is it more the case that Internet abuse of women, at least when committed by men, is singled out for special concern and opprobrium? Many feminists would argue that there are good reasons to treat it differently. Sexual slurs toward women evoke the threat of real-life sexual violence; they are also perceived as intended to “put a woman in her place” and tell her that her opinion is worthless because she is a woman. (A sexual slur toward a man is considered just a personal insult.)
But the double standard also has overtones of traditional chivalry which views women as more delicate and deserving of consideration—while nastiness toward men is treated simply a part of the rough-and-tumble of public life, to be taken in stride and shrugged off.
A
survey of Internet users conducted by the Pew Research Center last year found that 13 percent of female respondents and 11 percent of male respondents said they had been harassed or stalked online. (While Hess’s Pacific Standard article drew on that survey to note that “5 percent of women who used the Internet said ‘something happened online’ that led them into ‘physical danger,’” it made no mention of the fact that 3 percent of the men also reported such an experience.)
If women are unsafe or unwelcome on the Internet, it’s hardly borne out by the numbers.
Of course, none of this diminishes the deeply disturbing fact of female journalists, bloggers, and activists—Hess among them—who have been targets of threats to themselves or their families. But are men really immune from such attacks? One blogpost (civilly) critical of Sarkeesian and her supporters offers a fully sourced compilation of online comments wishing death, rape, mutilation and deadly diseases upon Jack Thompson, an activist critical of violent and sexual content in videogames—as well as death threats directed at male videogame developers who ran afoul of their fans.
One male victim of cyberstalking, British expatriate novelist James Lasdun, told his story in the 2013 memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. Lasdun’s stalker, a former creative-writing student whose romantic overtures he had rejected, not only barraged him with abusive messages but emailed his colleagues accusing him of stealing her work, preying on female students, and even setting her up to be raped; she posted similar slanders on websites including Amazon.com and Wikipedia.
But an experience like Lasdun’s gets no political sympathy; indeed, the review in The New Yorker chided him for failing to admit his “crush” on the woman and his role in leading her on.
Often, in our commitment to free speech, we have been too willing to accept toxic behavior on the Internet. Just because abusive speech is protected by the First Amendment doesn’t mean that private websites should give it a platform. There is, too, a very real need for law enforcement to catch up with technology and offer meaningful solutions to cyberstalking and threats. However, the war on online abuse, particularly with the agenda of
making the Internet safe for women, has its own perils.
There is the obvious danger of censoring legitimate speech. In Canada right now, a middle-aged designer named Gregory Elliott is on trial for criminal harassment for sending non-sexual, non-threatening, but argumentative unwelcome tweets to feminist activist Stephanie Guthrie. But there is also the danger of perpetuating women’s vulnerabilities in the name of protecting them. In her analysis of videogames, Sarkeesian has been particularly critical of damsel-in-distress stereotypes and casual “depictions of female victimhood.” Yet
we bolster the same stereotypes when we focus on nasty things said to women while trivializing threats against men even though men are much more likely to be victims of violence by strangers.
