The Kathy Sierra Effect?
The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the harassment of female bloggers.
A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to “sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms.”Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, “it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men.”
...snip…
Herring said the decline in women’s participation in chat rooms was ominous. “If we see a lot of harassment in the blogosphere, will we see a decline in women blogging? I think we will.”
What do you all think?
I used to love Yahoo! chat. What killed it for me was the spam bots. It got to where there were more spam bots than humans in any given chat. There were a lot of unsolicited a/s/l requests, yes, but… I guess those never really scared me. I probably still have a huge ignore list on that Yahoo account.
I have had the occasional Sticky Blog Troll in the past. But, really, given the, um, vehemence of my opinions, I feel like I’ve dodged the bullet when it comes to online harassment. I don’t get much in the way of threats.
It’s either luck, or I stumbled into “good” habits. I dunno.
Maybe I should knock on wood.
I do wonder if there has been a real, proportional increase in the amount of harassment of women, or if it’s just an increase in straight numbers? It’s really hard to tell, because there are so many more blogs nowadays, and because shitty internet trolls are just so common in general.
Are we on the cusp of a female blogging exodus?
Link via A Blog Without a Bicycle.
tags: feminism, internet
I don’t see an exodus happening. I think the BS has always been there, people are just now more aware of it.
— RenegadeEvolution Apr 29, 04:50 PM #
I’ve never been harrassed via my blog but I’ve been called plenty of names, and heard plenty of personal insults, on other people’s blogs. The net result? Don’t care. Those people make good target practise.
However, I can see that repeated threats via e-mail, for example, might make a person stop blogging. I think it’s too soon to say that there’s an exodus, though.
— CassandraSays Apr 29, 05:55 PM #
Yeah, what RE said. Exodus—I dunno, that would tend to imply a much more unified “blogosphere” than there actually is. I’m not feelin’ it, but what do i know. I think this is more a how you say consciousness awareness moment.
— belledame222 Apr 29, 07:09 PM #
I kinda doubt we’ll see a female blogging exodus because it’s hard to compare the chatrooms and the blogs.
The chatrooms were fun, but had virtually no investment. You could opt in or opt out. When faced with the ever increasing number of spam bots which finally ran off all but the really bored or really horny men, it was easy for the normal user to just opt out of the process because there really wasn’t a point.
With a blog, you invest yourself in it. You spend a lot of time on it and a lot of time devoted to the the ancillary reading that comes with it. Opting out becomes much more difficult because there is a real “loss” there.
But, what the number of threats against women on the blogs DOES indicate is that blogs have become a bit more mainstream. The casual asshole who feels protected by the anonymity the internet provides them now knows and uses blogs. In other words, they aren’t just for the early adopters anymore (who are always the ones who are around when any internet invention is the most fun, anyway).
— Dylan Apr 29, 10:03 PM #
I used to go to the chat on excite, and I got alot of those private messages from horny men too, but there was also some fun people there and I still miss that chat even now, years after they shut it down.
I haven’t had a blog long enough to attract trolls or harrassers and I hope I never do, the worst I have had on my blog so far is maybe 4 or 5 asshole racist comments which I just deleted and moved on.
My worst experience online was a female stalker and she did run me off a messageboard. It just got too hard fighting her lies and bullshit that it wasn’t worth it to go there anymore. I know I let her win, but it wasn’t a major loss to me either. I probably would have fought harder against her to stay if it mattered that much to me. But, you notice, she didn’t run me off the internet, just that one messageboard. There are lots of places for us to go and lots of communities to learn and make a difference. If you aren’t comfortable with one you can always find another.
I don’t think there will be any exodus. I do think that some women who feel like they are threatened in the real world will quit blogging, or might, like me, leave certain communities or blogs if they feel like it isn’t worth their time to fight off the malicious weirdos, but I also think that with women making up half the population and more and more of us getting comfortable with computers, the internet, and blogs, we will continue to grow instead of leave in some sort of exodus.
— Donna May 2, 07:36 AM #
http://sensualwriter.blogspot.com/2007/05/rthyatt-author-targeted.html
What’s the feminist blogger crowd think about that?
— Sam May 2, 12:27 PM #
I dunno what “the crowd” thinks. It’s par for the course in Romanceland, though. The RWA committees have the same sort of drama that Southern school boards do—a certain Jesusy crowd has tried to stack the deck so as to define “romance” as between a man and a woman, so that the conferences will stop featuring same sex romance/erotica.
— Veronica May 2, 01:05 PM #
Looks like in this case it’s nothing to do with the Powers That Be in Romanceland so much as some asshole running the Hyatt there, though.
and, well: this feminist thinks it’s homophobia 101, and it bites.
— belledame222 May 2, 07:50 PM #
Oh, there have been a couple of HUGE fights over homosexual titles in Romanceland. That specific incident may just be Hyatt Managers fault, but it’s part of a larger pattern.
— Veronica May 2, 09:04 PM #