3 ms·
It's demonstrably false that when someone is targeted for harassment, their gender doesn't matter "that much." Emily Kager's post highlights how gendered the ha
by rainonmoon 6y ago
It's demonstrably false that when someone is targeted for harassment, their gender doesn't matter "that much." Emily Kager's post highlights how gendered the harassment is. Here's one citation stating "one in four serious and violent threats directed at women were related to their gender, compared with one in 16 for men." [0] Here's an analysis of comments towards female vs male athletes finding that abuse towards female athletes is three times more likely. [1] Here's another finding that half the women surveyed categorised their abuse as misogynistic. [2]
To clarify, I'm not saying women are "harassed more frequently." That seems not to be the case, and yet here's a study that "showed that while male celebrities, female journalists, and male politicians face the highest likelihood of online hostility, women are significantly more likely to be targeted specifically because of their gender, and men are overwhelmingly those doing the harassing." [3]
The types of online harassment are multiple and varied; we could equally single racist, fatphobic, and, as the earlier comment mentioned, antisemitic abuse out as well. We can even talk about the abuse faced by men -- I've been active online for 30 years, I'm a male, I'm not blind to it -- but that is not what this post is about. It's about the specifically gendered nature of abuse faced by women online. So I reiterate my point that "well, actually"-ing about other kinds of abuse only distracts from the salient topic and undermines what women like Kager are trying to highlight.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/06/higher-proportion-of-men-than-women-report-online-abuse-in-survey https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/06/higher-proport...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-24/women-receive-three-times-the-abuse-on-social-media-study-says/11039118 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-24/women-receive-three-t...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-violence-against-women-chapter-3/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-vi...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-unsafety-net-how-social-media-turned-against-women/381261/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-u...
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