Letters to the Editor
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Like I Said: Stupid.
"they are violent and bear watching. A lot of them own guns, and don't like women at all. Just one word to illustrate: Hillary. The most evil creature to walk the earth."
In 1996 the Pew Center polled Americans on Hillary and she was found to be a "bitch". (How many politicians can claim THAT from a poll?) And more women felt that way than men.
Methinks you're out of touch with America.
And blaming everyone else.
Who you say own guns.
Not smart.
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i love ignoring trolls
i love the new troll-proof skin i've picked up reading feminist blogs.
i don't want to argue that all women should ignore all trolls, but engaging them is an at-your-own-risk scenario, just as when men do it. a guy who starts from the premise that women are good for one thing only is not a stable person. where's the challenge in verbally tangling with a lunatic like that?
they do seem to escalate to throat-slitting and gob-cumming more quickly with women than with men, but why let it get that far? at the first hint of insane misogyny, why not just scroll on down?
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We're Blocking Our Own Better Natures
There is a shameful aspect of humanity -- of men and women, children and adults, born of nature or nurture I cannot say -- that can be dowright dismaying. With that, I mean the tendency to sit back when someone is being attacked, perhaps relieved that we are not the target, maybe even secretly enjoying the pile-on, perhaps just sickened by it... or lost in some conflicted combination of the two. It's sad, and it's a sorrowful-lonely facet of our convoluted human condition, and yet if we spoke up each and every time a bully is given free reign, we'd spend most of our lives embroiled in flame wars. So many times I've just sighed and clicked past an ugly flamefest, here and elsewhere, for the simple reason that I don't always have the energy or the time to engage. No doubt, a few misogynists or racists or homophobes or other assorted bigots have felt emboldened by my silence, by the silence of others like me.
One thing I do need to say, though: I think men feel this peer approbation Joan Walsh mentions, too. Certainly, we're not immune from the crippling self-doubt that comes from faceless stinging criticism.
But all that said, there undoubtedly exists an unignorable ecosystem of misogyny within the larger domain that we (some of us) call the Interweb. Attacks on women do tend more toward the sexually graphic, or centre on appearance. Even here at Salon, we see examples in the response to Camille Paglia's return, we see it in thinly veiled sexist attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton, we see it in some of the gut-churning reactions toward the very introduction of Broadsheet, we sometimes witness it from the very people who ought to know better -- in specific attacks on Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham that mention their physical appearance in any way, often in very hateful, ugly fashion. I think it bothers me more when it emanates from "progressives" than it does when the usual knuckle-draggers on the political right grunt and belch their familiar weary crap (such as the foaming wingers linked to right here in The Blog Report that called Rosie O'Donnell a "big fat lesbian" just yesterday).
I do think it can be, and often is, misogyny. But I also think that it's something even larger than that, that a significant portion of it is one more symptom of the precipitous drop in civility and plain warm-hearted kindness so evident throughout current American discourse and, well, life these days. To an extent, as a Canadian, I'm an outsider, but it's a tenuous outsider-status, so geographically close am I (ten or eleven kilometres from the United States border) and so much closer yet to the often miasmic prevailing cultural winds. But with whatever objectivity I can legitimately muster, I'd make a large affectionate appeal to thoughtful, compassionate Americans reading this to -- please -- begin to consider turning this around, to resist the temptation to stereotype and judge (especially with the disinhibition effect of the online milieu), maybe to see our adversary in one area as a potential friend in another, go beyond the rigid bipolar perspective.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is -- misogyny or misanthropy, either or both, whether rooted in the divisive political swamp of public life or in our more private personal nightmares -- we can, and should, do so much better than this, really. And we can make a start now, if we want.
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men who hate women
Dear Joan,
I have not read any of the other letters, so I expect I will be repeating what many others have said. I know nothing about the Kathy Sierra affair, but I fully support your general thesis about misogyny on the web. Let me carry it a bit further: there is a general lack of civility on the internet. People - presumably because many of them can be anonymous, or are so far apart that they fear no repercussions for their words, are inclined to be insulting and vicious. When I skim through the comments section of any website, I am often amazed, and depressed, to find so many people attacking others for no good reason. This aspect of the problem has nothing to do with gender. However, this lack of civility is taken up several notches when the object of attack is a woman. Individuals who are already inclined towards being vicious and abusive on the web have access to a whole other world of vitriol when their target is a woman.
I suspect that the general misogyny on the web is greatly aided by the fact that so many websites are pornographic. I don't want to carry this too far without real evidence, but I strongly suspect that a general disrespect for women is reinforced among webheads by their constant and easy exposure to the dehumanization of women, in graphic terms, every time they start up their computers. For a time, until my university improved its filters and I set up a spam box, I could not go into my email without being inundated by pornographic emails depicting the degradation of women.
As part of the solution, may I suggest that anonymous postings to Salon no longer be accepted. Regular newspapers do not publish letters under pseudonyms; I don't think that Salon should do so either. That may go some distance towards weeding out the flamers. I also applaud the idea of getting rid of letters that are ad hominem/feminem attacks and, possibly, warning letter writers who do that kind of thing that their letters may be rejected in the future. As a final suggestion, maybe you should restrict letter writers to subscribers to Salon - i.e., people for whom you have full records and who can be held to account if they are abusive. Alternatively, make it so that anyone submitting a letter to Salon has to login and provide verifiable personal information. I don't know if that is the case already, given that I am a subscriber, but this may also help to limit irresponsible emails.
Sincerely,
Shaun Narine