The UK’s Guardian newspaper is in some respects the ultimate progg organ.  Its absurdities provide excellent fodder for Scott Burgess’s anti-bullshit machine, The Daily Ablution, and numerous other blogs that delineate the strange pathology of progg thought.  Sometimes, indeed, I worry about reading the Guardian, just as I would worry if I found myself purchasing a 4-DVD set of the Most Spectacular Homicides of Unsolved Mysteries.  And yesterday they published an article by Jessica Valenti of Feministing entitled How the web became a sexists’ paradise”>How the web became a sexists’ paradise.  The starting point is the Kathy Sierra incident, but it quickly devolves into a general indictment:

On some online forums anonymity combined with misogyny can make for an almost gang-rape like mentality. One recent blog thread, attacking two women bloggers, contained comments like, “I would fuck them both in the ass,”; “Without us you would be raped, beaten and killed for nothing,”; and “Don’t worry, you or your friends are too ugly to be put on the black market.”

Jill Filipovic, a 23-year-old law student who also writes on the popular blog, Feministe, recently had some photographs of her uploaded and subjected to abusive comments on an online forum for students in New York. “The people who were posting comments about me were speculating as to how many abortions I’ve had, and they talked about ‘hate-fucking’ me,” says Filipovic. “I don’t think a man would get that; the harassment of women is far more sexualised – men may be told that they’re idiots, but they aren’t called ‘whores’.”

Most disturbing is how accepted this is. When women are harassed on the street, it is considered inappropriate. Online, though, sexual harassment is not only tolerated – it’s often lauded. Blog threads or forums where women are attacked attract hundreds of comments, and their traffic rates rocket.

Is this what people are really like? Sexist and violent? Misogynist and racist? Alice Marwick, a postgraduate student in New York studying culture and communication, says: “There’s the disturbing possibility that people are creating online environments purely to express the type of racist, homophobic, or sexist speech that is no longer acceptable in public society, at work, or even at home.”

Well, those who are familiar with the double standards regarding what constitutes acceptable speech will find this analysis rather skewed–though I and most of us here, men or women, will agree that threats of any sort on the web ought not be tolerated.  She continues:

But even women who don’t put their pictures or real names online are subject to virtual harassment. A recent study showed that when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that female user-names averaged 163 threatening and/or sexually explicit messages a day.

“The promise of the early internet,” says Marwick, “was that it would liberate us from our bodies, and all the oppressions associated with prejudice. We’d communicate soul-to-soul, and get to know each other as people, rather than judging each other based on gender or race.”

Obviously, we’d have to consider the methodology by which the U of Maryland’s study came to this conclusion, but it seems unlikely that these statistics are at all accurate.  Part of the difference might stem from what I am liable to consider as a threat.  I certainly post more often and comment more often at more sites than most people on the web, but I probably average in the vicinity of 15 to 20 messages specifically addressed to me, either in emails or comments, per day.  I doubt that even a small percentage of women bloggers or commenters receive double that number, much less 20 times it, and hostile to boot.

Then, of course, there is the fact that insults directed almost exclusively toward men, such as “fuckhead,” “prick,” “buttfucker,” “assmonkey” and the like seem somehow so much less insulting than those flung at women.  And the idea that someone can communicate soul-to-soul while shackled with the preconceptions of gender feminism and its self-serving critique of identity construction, diligently policed, seems incongruous.  Indeed, the idea of soul-to-soul communication requires the generosity of intentionalism, to revert to one of Jeff’s themes.  Instead, gender feminism and other identity philosophies that are at root paranoid in the Aristotelian sense posit that the speaker doesn’t understand his own constructedness, and therefore must be educated to understand the bias out of which his thoughts and attitudes, reflected in his “speech,” derives.

She ends this way:

It won’t mean the end of misogyny on the web, but it is a start. Such campaigns show that women are ready to demand freedom from harassment and fear in our new public spaces. In the same way that we should be able to walk down the street without fear of being raped, women shouldn’t have to stay quiet online – or pretend to be men – to be free of threats and harassment. It is time to take back the sites.

Nor should men have to put up with having their voices taken from them, or walk on eggshells, or misrepresent themselves in order to curry favor with people who despise them. For that matter, does the woman represented in the first of the images in this Iowahawk post deserve to be conferred the status of an authentically constructed woman?

The web has never been any kind of a paradise, which is a concept, at any rate, in which only benighted Godbags believe.