I'm home for spring break right now, and I want to remark on some stuff that showed up on feministing about online misogyny.
I've always felt-- and I would imagine that a lot of like-minded blog-wielding women feel similarly-- that the internet is sort of two-faced in its tolerance of me. While the internet provides me with such a terrific wealth of awesome (here I am with this blog where I can type whatever I want), using any sort of female-identified voice or identity online is comparable to leaving a freshly dead carcass out for the vultures. The internet's anonymity meets its tendency to attract the slimy excesses of society; the result is an online environment so openly hostile to women, so crassly woman-hating, it's really a testament to the murky newness of online prosecution that we haven't seen more defamation/harassment lawsuits.
The internet gives voice to the closeted misogynists of the world. There are the oft-illiterate, always-enraged Maddox types, the ones who post hundreds of scathing comments on Jessica Valenti's YouTube videos and talk about "hate-fucking" feminist bloggers. There are the CollegeHumor.com boys who ask Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi to return to the kitchen and make them some sandwiches, the guys whose humor is supposed to be so farcical, so witty, but which folds back on itself so many times it becomes something that isn't satiric. Then there are the hateful, scary, fucking crazy stalker woman-haters, like the ones who abused blogger Kathy Sierra.
It might be too early to start debating the fair accessibility of the internet in a world where so few humans earn an annual income greater than the cost of a computer, but an issue is at play here, and I think it's really important. What good is having any kind of internet presence, if female bloggers become totally fair game to be berated, if comments are going to be made about our bodies, if people are going to publicly speculate and remark on everything from how well we give oral sex to how satisfying it would be to kill us. WHY IS THIS OKAY?
Salon: Men who hate women on the web
Guardian: How the web became a sexist's paradise
Sunday, March 15, 2009
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