Online verbal abuse of women: is it misogynist?
Answer: No more than normal conversation is.
Louise Mensch is a truly terrible human being. Callous, vindictive and bigoted, she's led a sustained attack on women's rights and promoted Tory ideals which disproportionately hurt women and the poor. She doesn't get to use the hashtag
#feminism (as she did this week) for any reason, until she's spent some time undoing the damage to feminism that she's worked hard at achieving so far.
However, no-one should be called a 'whore' for having political opinions. As usual when this happens, the entire internet blames it on 'misogyny'.
Except...
It's not
primarily fuelled by misogyny, because the push to insult Ms Mensch did not come from a hatred for women or the fact she is a woman.
1) This is the internet. Calling someone a "motherfucking sewer-festering cuntbubble who should have their face eaten by rats" is *a normal Tuesday morning*. It's not emotionally damaging abuse. It's not signifying a real-life intent to harm. It's the internet. Even worse, it's Twitter: one step up on the detritus ladder from 'Youtube comments'. Rape- and death-threats in response to political comments online are so commonplace they were parodied in a public service announcement by RedVsBlue many years ago and were already old then. I've seen them as a typical response on politics forums for way over 10 years.
2) When men are threatened in the same way, the insults are
less sexual. They are death or violence threats instead of rape threats. There are reasons for this, and they are not
primarily due to misogyny in action either. The reasons are:
a) Men do not use sexual insults against men. It leaves them open to the reply that the attacker is gay, which immediately puts him at the bottom of the masculinity Status ladder. Men have grown up not using sexual threats or insults against men.
b) Men DO easily use sexual insults against women, because it makes the attacker look sexually dominant and society constantly tells men to see women in a sexual context at all times. To insult a woman as less sexually attractive is much more effective in our fucked up culture than calling her less intelligent. It's not hatred which sexualises it, it's society's standards for appearing 'strong'.
In other words, when looking to insult or threaten someone, the insults to men will be about their masculinity and to women will be about their sexual appeal. The fact that these are different IS sexism, but only of a general everyday kind.
What is NOT happening is that the commenter thinks "I disagree with her, and since I hate women I'm going to use sexual insults."
Many of the threats that Louise Mensch is listing were non-sexual violent ones which had nothing to do with her gender and were not unusual in number or extent. However, she was also called 'Whore' several times, and judged on her beauty.
No-one making these statements is motivated by a vague hatred of women, even when those women are threateningly powerful and intelligent. People hate Louise Mensch specifically for
what she does and says, which is bad enough solely on the evidence. Their reaching for gendered or sexual insults is *nothing to do* with being personally anti-women: they go looking for the insults they believe will hurt the most, and we're taught that those are sexual. We're allowed to go further with sexual judgements on women before it's inappropriate, so by the time it IS inappropriate the comments are off the scale. Their target could have been a man, and their methods would then have been less sexual, but not because they hate the person less or more - just because of how society judges strength. They need no feelings on women as a whole or anger at the fact she is female. It merely channels the insult into the usual form. The levels of non-sexual violence (which she is claiming are also due to misogyny) would be just as high aimed at men.
HOWEVER...
The idea that women are easier targets, that sexual language can be taken further with them, that the frequency of insults online is sometimes higher, and that threats of sexual violence are more acceptable IS misogyny. And it's not harmless. All the sexualising DOES lead to more physical sexual attacks.
It's just general, culturally-pervasive misogyny as opposed to anything special on the internet. You don't get to start a crusade as though it only happens online, or that by removing the sexual element you're doing much for feminism. It does NOT mean the commenter who follows society's averages is 'a misogynist' or that the internet has a misogyny problem - they are a totally average member of the public.
The comments are different in theme and sometimes scale to those men get, because women are seen as less threatening (and more damaging to a man's image when they turn out to be a genuine threat, so the response is nastier). This is all general. It is background noise. Someone following it is not 'fuelled by misogyny', and does not feel hate for 'women'. They are simply using the normal themes and normal levels of insult/threat which the anonymity and distance of the internet has made typical. They found something they didn't like, and responded to it along absolutely average lines, with no special hatred of women. The comments have a reason, they cannot be blanket-dismissed as mindless misogyny.
Threats against women can be misogynist if they are generated from a general hatred of all women, from anger/fear at her having a political voice, or if the extent of the threat is increased because of hatred for women. Anger at what was actually said, who she is and what she stands for does not qualify. The increase in aggressive tone can be due to the inequality of how much of a threat women are perceived to be in return, but that's not hatred. It's not based on women being inherently worth less than men (the misogyny which frequently comes from religions) - it's from the playground. With threats of violence/posturing, men are taught they must threaten women far more and accept no comeback or they will lose all standing. A threat of violence on the internet is as common as breathing, and is sent to women and men indiscriminately.
Louise Mensch can go die in a fire. She causes enormous harm to feminism, politics, people's lives, the image of every woman in politics, and more. She's vacuous, despicable and spiteful, and in a position of power this makes her dangerous. The idea that she could claim to represent feminism or dismiss the anger against her as 'misogyny' is ridiculous.
But misogyny DOES pervade ALL insulting of women, because in gauging the level of insult we assess how far we are allowed to go differently than for men. Hatred (and even fear) of women was not the original cause of the anger here, or the sexualising of the comments, or the level of violence in the threats. It's just how insults are everywhere... with added internet bravery.
Anger at a woman isn't hatred of women, or sexism, especially when the non-sexual threats are *precisely* the same as men would get online. The argument is whether sexualising at all is anti-women, as opposed to being an artifact of posturing. Yes, there's some misogyny in how all women are viewed by society at all times. That doesn't make this very normal treatment of a contentious political voice online particularly sexist. 'Whore' as an insult is gendered, and wouldn't apply to men (they'd get 'you're a pussy' or homosexual slurs) but the engendering doesn't say ANYTHING about the speaker's attitude to women. It's just the relevant tool.
We need to stop this divide in how we treat others, yes (and preferably raise the respect for other human beings, but on twitter and youtube that's gonna be a long process). While it's generalised misogyny, it's not any *special* abuse that only happens online, or at a level which is only invoked because of hatred for women. Sexual threats to women often aren't deliberately sexual threats - they're just threats. If they were towards men, the speaker would find a way to increase the intimidation without involving sexual themes.
Rape threats are not okay. We need to sort out society's misogyny. Neither of those things mean that women get any harder time online than men do with the famous verbal fearlessness that the internet gives people. There is no online problem, and no army of misogynist individuals. There's just the general problem of the whole of society.
The idea that we must have 'zero tolerance for online sexist abuse' is ridiculous. You can't separate the sexualised language from the general level of abuse to men and women, until you separate it in the rest of society.
Abuse of a person who happens to be a woman isn't misogynist.
Sexual threats happen to men and women, and don't automatically make it misogynist.
The double-standard that rape-threats are more applicable to women comes from misogyny, but usually not from the feelings of the individual at the time.
There's a terrible trend of using 'misogyny' to explain any sexism, an emotional hatred of women along the same lines as terrorists who 'hate our freedom'. It's overused. Insults and physical threats on the internet often have nothing to do with the gender of the person other than to choose which pile of words to pick from. Historical hatred of women played a part in forming that pile, but active hatred today isn't behind its use.
(Apologies, have edited the entry and lost the previous comment).
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