Men Call Us Things

I've become jaded to the taunts of "bitch," "fat", "slut," "whore," and "dyke," that are part and parcel of being a woman with an online life, and I've been quite lucky that I've never truly felt threatened online. But it has happened to other women -- a lot of them. And it's disheartening that the usual gamut of name-calling has gotten so commonplace that we are numb to it.

Sady Doyle from Tiger Beatdown has launched the Twitter hashtag #MenCallMeThings, which focuses primarily on the harassment women who write about feminism and politics face, but it easily spills over into our off-line lives and interferes with our everyday interactions:

To you, my friends, I say: Fuck that noise. All of this matters. A hostile work environment matters. Being afraid of your own in-box matters. Deleting your blog because that’s the only way for you to have a normal, non-hate-filled life matters. “Accepting” that continual, virulent, hateful misogynist abuse is a pre-condition for being a lady who talks about thing, or for challenging sexism in any way, no matter who you are: That matters. And if you think we’re fragile, well. LET US COUNT THE WAYS we have hacked it, under conditions your pampered manly self just cannot imagine. LET US DEMONSTRATE FOR YOU the shit we wade through, every day, in order to talk about whether or not we liked that one “Community” episode or Lady GaGa album. LET US JUST TELL YOU what we put up with, what we’ve been strong enough to endure, and even knowingly court; the given consequences we face for being anti-sexist and/or ladies on the Internet, which we’ve all put up with, without crumbling. And then you can decide whether we’re wimps or not.

I've never had to deal with the egregious brand of harassment some of the more visible bloggers have. I've never been called a name outside the trifecta of bitch/fat/dyke. (It's times like these I thank my lucky stars for my nearly non-existent audience.) Most of the online communities I've been a part of have been mostly women, or keep a comment policy that's so draconian nothing slips by the mods. This isn't a bad thing, but I realize I've been relatively sheltered from the worst of it. The examples that stick with me, though, are the things guys who were purportedly my "friends." I can boast no taunts of "lesbian hambeast, " but I've been told I have "hillbilly DNA," whatever that means. (Even under the best circumstances, that's pretty classist.) I've been called "abnormal," and my favorite, "You know, for someone who reads a lot, you're pretty stupid." On the surface, those things don't sound particularly gendered, but when you're one of few women in a community, and you've seen yours and the contributions of other women go unrecognized or dismissed, it becomes really suspicious.