The infamous Gamergate controversy made headlines in 2014 when prominent feminists — including Anita Sarkeesian, Zoë Quinn, and Brianna Wu — received vicious misogynistic backlash for their work. These attacks ranged from derogatory insults to death, rape, and bomb threats. It got to the point where people like Sarkeesian canceled speaking events and contacted the FBI out of fear for their safety. In a disturbingly ironic way, these attacks just further proved why we still need feminism today.
Another misogynistic online campaign reared its ugly head in 2022 during the Depp vs. Heard trial. After Amber Heard wrote an essay about her abusive relationship (which never mentioned Depp by name), he sued her for defamation. Depp took it a step further by implementing the abusive DARVO technique, convincing the public that he was the victim and Heard was the abuser. At large, the internet sided with him, viciously mocking Heard online and making memes and jokes about her pain. Things only worsened when the defamation trial was live-streamed. Despite the clear evidence of Depp abusing Heard, people gleefully humiliated and shamed Heard. This case demonstrated that people don’t care about male victim-survivors (or any victim-survivors) of domestic abuse; they only care about dragging women down.
In 2023, a study found that over 90% of women surveyed had experienced sexual harassment on LinkedIn. Never mind that it’s a social media platform for professional networking — the fact that so many men inappropriately propositioned women is frustrating and disturbing. When I started using LinkedIn, I also experienced this harassment, and I’m angry that this isn’t out of the norm. Men have made their message loud and clear: they feel entitled to women, and they don’t care about respecting their boundaries online.
This is just one example of the everyday misogyny women face online. I’ve seen too many social media posts full of casual misogyny, from memes about “nagging” wives to rants about “crazy” ex-girlfriends to blasé comments about wanting to “smash” women. Unfortunately, I don’t know of anywhere online where I can avoid such comments. Whether it’s Reddit upvotes or Twitter memes, we can’t escape misogyny.
Of course, it’s not that the internet itself invented misogyny; but the internet makes it easy for people to build echo chambers, anonymously sharing their opinions about whoever they want — especially women. Since many of us have access to devices 24/7, we can’t get away from this hatred, save by doing a social media detox now and then. But with how ubiquitous the internet is, we’ll always run into it at some point in our lives — and likely too many times.
A disturbing amount of alt-right, patriarchal communities have gained traction over the past decades. There are Reddit spaces for men’s rights activists who take every chance to put women down; conservative women are promoting the traditional (“trad”) wife lifestyle on YouTube and insisting that feminism goes against a woman’s “instincts”; and there’s the occasional online misogyny campaign targeted at a few prominent individuals who simply shared their opinion.
And the worst part? These attacks increase as more feminists speak out. Misogynists feel threatened by feminism, by the fact that women are daring to demand better treatment, and they’re doubling down as a result. I’m beyond thankful that feminism has made such strides over the years, and I’m disheartened and angry to see so much pushback against it. For a group that regularly insists “political correctness” is censoring their speech, they sure do have a problem when women use their voices.
Women are human. I don’t know how many times I need to say that, and I shouldn’t have to say it in the first place. But from the way I’ve seen men talk about women, you would think they’d never met a woman in their entire life. They truly do not see us as people, and that makes it okay for them to say or do all sorts of things to us. And when we fight back, they get angry that their entitled beliefs are challenged — and the backlash is twice as bad.
I don’t expect speaking about misogyny and its omnipresence online will magically end it. That’s not how activism works, as much as I wish it could. There will always be prejudice and discrimination in the world, and misogyny is one of the oldest forms of that. But I do expect that I — and many others — will not stop speaking out despite the backlash. In fact, the backlash means that we’re making progress, and the last thing we need to do is stop that momentum.
Now more than ever, we need to support women online. We need laws that protect women from being attacked online, from being doxxed and threatened with rape and other gendered violence. We need more men to speak up against misogyny and do their part to make the online world a place that is not viciously hostile to women.
Ultimately, we need to give women the same humane treatment that we so readily offer men. That’s the ultimate goal of feminism, and it’s never something I’ll stop fighting for.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
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