[Content Note: cyberbullying, rape threats, sexual harassment]

Fancy! A woman analysed of an example of sexism/misogyny in popular culture, and the response was a disproportionate display of sexism and misogyny!

Golly, who could have foreseen that!

As gimpnelly points out to the anti-feminist flying monkeys of the internet:

If you really want to “get me” and prove that sexual harassment doesn’t exist in comics, I don’t know, maybe it’s better for you to answer honestly about how you haven’t been sexually harassed. Because certainly sending me rape threats proves my point, not yours.

For anyone wondering why this and other feminist blogs keep on posting about these online swarms of intimidatory outbursts? This pretty much sums it up:

At first I wasn’t going to talk about the rape threats because honestly, most of the women I know with a solid online presence get them regularly. This is just a thing we are forced to deal with. And I didn’t want to make it seem like it was a bigger deal than what’s happened to them for years. But I realized once I posted about the rape threats in passing that men I know and respect were stunned to find out this was happening. Let’s be real: if these men who are actually decent human beings don’t know how often this stuff happens, what hope is there for the men who are harassing me online?

There are still many, many people who simply don’t believe that these mass displays of macho intimidation regularly happen. What this almost certainly also means is that they don’t realise that it is statistically highly probable that amongst their regular colleagues and drinking buddies are more than a handful of members of the Flying Monkey brigade who gleefully pile on to these intimidation sprees, and that this reflects these harassers’ attitude towards women generally, and that a general unwillingness to challenge milder displays of sexism and misogyny reinforces these harassers’ belief that they’re just out there standing up for what all the other blokes truly believe too.

Categories: ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, social justice

Tags: cyberbullying, everyday sexism, harassment, silencing tactics