Sexual threats quiet some female bloggers

[one...two...tree 2,762]

By Ellen Nakashima

The Washington Post

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about "the daily ins and outs of being a mom" was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to "sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms."

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, "it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men."

http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/...loggers-ON.html

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

I believe it. There are some nuts out there.

[seldi 1]

wow. Thank God nobody pays attention to my blog (including me).

[Caladan 19]

The worst part is that when Sierra called the harassers out on it, many of the male bloggers (including Atrios) said, "oh, no big deal, we get threats, too", when the character of the threats are really very different (and much more common) towards female bloggers. Jackasses have no problems threatening rape.

Do an experiment sometime. Pick an identifiably feminine handle, nothing too flirty, but just something girly. Sit in a chat room for a day. Don't say anything, just leave your handle up. See how many nasty messages you get. Pick a male or neutral name. Repeat the experiment. It's really pretty striking.