Intensely personal missives of hyper-sexualized hate.

Conor Friedersdorf gets what the problem is with the kind of harassment women are subject to online, although he didn’t at first. He didn’t until he guest-blogged for Megan McArdle.

My stint running her page while she vacationed included the keys to the blog’s inbox. Even as someone who’d previously blogged about immigration in California’s Inland Empire, fielding insults and aggressive invective as vile as any I could imagine, I was shocked by a subset of her blog’s correspondence. To this day, I don’t know if I was experiencing a typical or atypical week. Perhaps in the abstract, there isn’t any threat more extreme than the death threats I’d received and brushed off as unserious. But I read emails and comments addressed at McArdle that expanded my notion of how disturbing online vitriol could be. And it took my actually reading them for my perspective to change.   [Read more…]

Is there anything really wrong? Really?

Madeleine Teahan (that seems like a peculiarly Proustian or edible sort of name) muses in a post at the Catholic Herald (yes, that would be the well-known, even “iconic”, religion of the same name) about gender equality and toys for girls versus boys. She wants everyone to realize that men have problems too, because sadly that fact has entirely disappeared in all the noise about princess dolls.

Is there anything really wrong with encouraging our sons to play with cars and our daughters to play with Barbie? [Read more…]

Cambridge student submits legal note to Universities UK against gender segregation

Joint statement of Southall Black Sisters, One Law for All, Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation and LSE SU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society

We are pleased to learn of the legal note submitted to Universities UK (UUK) yesterday in the name of Radha Bhatt, a student of Cambridge University, against their Guidance condoning gender segregation.

We share Radha’s apprehensions that gender segregation reinforces negative views specifically about women, undermines their right to participate in public life on equal terms with men and disproportionately impedes women from ethnic and religious minorities, whose rights to education and gender equality are already imperilled. [Read more…]

You’d laugh at them or ignore them

But then there’s the other way of reacting to threats and abuse on Twitter and elsewhere online – the way of dismissal and belittlement, the way of shrugging and laughing slightly and asking what’s the big deal.

Like someone calling herself (on Twitter) fleetstreetfox for instance. I’d never heard of her before but she used to be a columnist for the Mirror and she has over 60 thousand followers, so she’s not some tiny voice in the wilderness. What she says on the subject is horrible.

fleetstreetfox @fleetstreetfox

I think if there were really vile tweets to me I’d report them only if it sounded like the person was going to attack someone else. [Read more…]

86 Twitter accounts

Two people – one woman and one man – have pled guilty to sending menacing messages to Caroline Criado-Perez.

Isabella Sorley, 23, of Newcastle, and John Nimmo, 25, of South Shields, admitted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court sending the messages over a public communications network.

…

Alison Morgan, prosecuting, said Ms Criado-Perez had received abusive messages “of one type or another” from 86 Twitter accounts including those accounts attributed to both Nimmo and Sorley. [Read more…]

The nightmare in Bangladesh

Via Taslima on Twitter, a news story on violence against Hindus after the elections in Bangladesh.

Hundreds of Hindu families who fled their homes following post-poll violence in different districts on Sunday are scared to return as the administration could not ensure their security.

As soon as the voting ended on Sunday afternoon, BNP and Jamaat-Shibir men looted, vandalised and burned Hindu houses in Thakurgaon, Dinajpur, Rangpur, Bogra, Lalmonirhat, Rajshahi, Chittagong and Jessore.

The raids remind many of the atrocities by the Pakistani occupation forces and their collaborators in 1971. [Read more…]

These frivolous incidents

But, from a couple of months ago, a young sports writer called Jim Pagels explained at Slate that Twitter death threats are just a joke and everybody should ignore them.

Just about every week, it seems there’s a story about a celebrity, athlete, or politician receiving death threats from morons on Twitter. The media often treat these frivolous incidents like they’re a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. The latest example: New York Giants running back Brandon Jacobs, for performing poorly on fantasy football teams. (Fitting there be fantasy threats for a fantasy sport.)

The stories often give the impression that this is some kind of shocking event for which we should pity the “victims,” but anyone who’s spent 10 minutes online knows that these assertions are entirely toothless. [Read more…]

Disproportionately lobbed at women

More on the campaign against women on the internet: Amanda Hess on Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.

A woman doesn’t even need to occupy a professional writing perch at a prominent platform to become a target. According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. [Read more…]