There’s an interesting piece in The Guardian about sexist harassment online, especially as experienced by female bloggers. (It’s also by the editor of Feministing, which we link to regularly.)
I was reminded of the hate mail that I get for a site I built, about ad trucks. I put it up when I was probably seventeen, and unfortunately haven’t updated it much since. But instead of disappearing into internet obscurity, the site has steadily climbed Google rankings. One side of this is that I’ve gotten some interesting feedback, from people around the world who are writing and campaigning against mobile advertising. But the cool email has been overwhelmed by strangely intense hate mail.
I didn’t think ad trucks had many supporters. But somehow every couple months, someone finds the time to tell me that I run the stupidest website they’ve ever found; that I need to get a job; that I’m ruining the economy; that I’m a hippie; that I must be a Democrat. The sheer rage behind most of the messages scares me a little.
After reading this article, I’m wondering where the insults would go if it was obvious from the site that I was a woman.
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two comments
speaking of sexist harrassment, i hope you look into this story about how the campus newspaper at the university of western ontario tried to silence activist women's voices on campus by threatening them with rape under the guise of "satire":
soapboxspinster.blogspot.com
http://uwo.facebook.com/group.php?gid...
Posted by thatsallshewrote
April 7, 2007, 8:06 PM
this is so interesting. I have experienced a similar thing in starting to do a comic for a large, mixed audience through www.torontoist.com. i've always self-published or done work through progressive pubs like shameless, and i was shocked by the sexist bullshit i was getting in response to the torontoist comics. criticism was mostly vitriol spewed at me as a woman making comics, not much at the comics themselves, including two morons who log in week after week to slam me with Cathy comparisons and lame "the comic is so ugly it hurts my eyes" crap. It really hurt my feelings at first, until i realized "wait, these jerks are doing the same thing week after week." At which point i realized, it really wasn't me personally, it was me as a woman daring to do something like make a comic. I honestly had not experienced any sexism whatsoever as a comic creator until that point.
Posted by Roxanne Bielskis
April 17, 2007, 9:50 PM
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