Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (20 page)

It may seem odd that in a chapter on gender politics on the Internet I’ve not yet mentioned pornography, which we’re repeatedly told is the root of all sexism. I don’t buy it. In online porn, as it is everywhere, sex isn’t the problem; sexism is the problem. Online misogyny, like any other misogyny, is about power, resentment and frustration, and not about sexual overstimulation, although it can be sexually expressed. Blaming the vicious woman-hatred of men using the Internet to attack women and girls on pornography is, to a very great extent, letting the perpetrators off the hook.

Social media long since overtook porn consumption as the thing most of us use the Internet for most frequently, and social media, because most of it is run by large, terrifying companies with large, terrifying legal teams, is terrified not just of pornography but of sexuality in general. Considering the imperial fuckton of porn available on the Internet, the surprising thing isn’t how much it crosses over into our everyday lives, but how much it doesn’t. Online and IRL, sex and gender still inhabit two separate worlds. One is a sanitised, sterilised, buttoned-down world of ‘professional’ conduct where we edit our extracurricular activities for the benefit of our employers and panic over our children being exposed to an accidentally flashed nipple. The other is a rabbit-hole of hardcore heterosexual fucking that relies on its guilty, semi-legal status to disguise the fact that a depressing amount of its content is boring at best and violently misogynist at worst. It’s a curious, schizophrenic splitting of sexuality from surface in culture that is supposed to be all surface. Sex, as ever, isn’t the problem. People’s inability to deal with sex in a way that is not violent, guilty and contemptuous of women and girls is the problem.

For as long as there has been pornography on the web, there have been calls to give state censors the power to shut it down. Blanket censorship of pornography, particularly ‘for the sake of the children’, would be a poor answer to the sexual dysfunction of our society even if it were possible. For a start, pornography, along with info-piracy and terrorism, has long been used to justify restricting access to the network as a whole, giving governments the power to control what can be seen by whom. It’s not about protecting women. It’s about controlling people, and so is the crackdown on women’s freedom online.

In 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron initiated a mandatory filtering system for ISPs, obliging every household to ‘opt out’ of ‘violent pornography’ and child pornography, and banning certain search terms. It quickly emerged, however, that the filtration system would also block ‘violent material’, ‘extremist’ content, ‘terrorist-related’ content, ‘web forums’, ‘esoteric material’ and, of course, ‘web-blocking circumvention tools’ – a checklist so broad that it would give the state, in cooperation with ISPs, the power to block almost any website.

Note that while using the ‘protecting women from harm’ line to promote the type of porn-block designed to appeal to swing voters, the same coalition government was kicking single mothers off welfare and stripping funding from domestic violence shelters all over the country.
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A great deal of harm is done in the name of saving people from themselves, and there is a very real risk that feminist rhetoric will be coopted by people who have no real care for women to push an anti-sex, anti-transparency agenda.

It is terrifically difficult to achieve radical ends by conservative means, and censorship is invariably conservative. Personally, I’m always suspicious of any project that seeks to restrict women’s freedom in order to ‘protect’ us, just as I’m suspicious of any project that seeks to prevent children from finding things out before adults decide they’re meant to. Censorship of the Internet is surely not the answer, because the Internet is not the reason for the supposed tide of filth and commercial sexuality we’re drowning in; in fact, as I mentioned earlier, young people today have less sex than their parents’ generation did at the same age.

One has to ask when, precisely, was the period of human history when the spectrum of sexual adventure from marriage to mud-wrestling was not in some way mercenary, in some way manipulative; if there has ever truly been a time when people got into bed with one another without preconceptions or agendas, when abuse and violence did not take place, when women were not brutalised, when children were not taken advantage of. These things did not begin with the Internet, and the Internet, if anything, is helping us to understand and talk about them over networks of intimacy and anger that did not exist twenty years ago.

I want to come right out and fly the flag for sex, for fucking and for love online. I am a digital romantic. Because sex online is real sex and love online is real love and everything in between is real, too, as real as your hand down your pants, your heart in your mouth. I say this for all of us who’ve ever felt our breath quicken when a particular userpic pops up on screen. For everyone who marvels that you can use a keyboard to construct a perfect rose that will never have the decency to decay. For the kids sexting each other on sticky smartphones while their parents sleep. For the fan fiction writers sending their horny fairy tales out into the dark like perfumed letters. For the student staying up late to hump a camera for her girlfriend in another timezone. For the Craigslist missed connections and the Chatroulette strangers. For the transsexual teenagers whispering lust and learning in chat rooms while small-town bigots drive drunk through their disappearing fiefdoms. For the World of Warcraft lovers. 

Sexuality online is real sexuality, and it’s about far, far more than porn. It’s the children who meet each other on self-harm forums whispering their most painful everyday secrets until the night when one of them posts in crisis and the others call from across the world in voices so familiar they forget they’ve never heard each other speak before. It’s OKCupid and Fetlife. It’s the camgirls and the cryptic personals and the amateur pornographers. It’s passive-aggressive status updates, untagging and defriending and broken-hearted blogging. It’s the second-dates who tease each other with hyperlinks and the couples who send each other cat-gifs at work. It’s every neck-down naked picture I’ve ever sent to a boy I wanted to screw.

It’s the hours positioning yourself on the sheets for the blink of a camera and touching yourself gently when the laptop shuts. It’s the shy intellectuals spinning out messageboard chats into something seductive, it’s all of us who understand that how you fuck can be less important than how you talk about fucking. It’s the lonely bedroom blogger flirting with a spambot. It’s the bots who want to be loved and the lovers who want to be robots. It’s the perverts, the dreamers and the shy, reaching out across the ether and running chilly fingers over each other’s forebrains, and it’s complicated. It’s always complicated. But that doesn’t mean it’s not human.

SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET

‘There’s nothing wrong with [her] a couple of hours of cunt kicking, garrotting and burying in a shallow grave wouldn’t sort out.’ 

Like many women with any sort of profile online, I’m used to messages of this sort – the violent rape and torture fantasies, the threats to my family and personal safety, the graphic emails with my face crudely pasted on to pictures of pornographic models performing sphincter-stretchingly implausible feats of physical endurance. This one appeared on a perfectly normal weekday on a racist, misogynist hate-site based in the UK, dedicated to trashing and threatening public figures, mostly women. ‘The misogyny here is truly gobsmacking [and] more than a few steps into sadism,’ wrote Mary Beard, a television historian who was also hounded by users of the site, Don’t Start Me Off. ‘It would be quite enough to put many women off appearing in public, contributing to political debate, especially as all of this comes up on Google.’
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That, of course, is the point. It doesn’t matter if we’re young or old, classically attractive or proudly ungroomed, writers or politicians or comedians or bloggers or simply women daring to voice our opinions on Twitter. Any woman active online runs the risk of attracting these kinds of frantic hate-jerkers, or worse. I’m not the only person who has had stalkers hunting for her address, and not so long ago I needed a security detail after several anonymous trolls threatened to turn up to a public lecture I was giving. I could go on.

It’d be nice to think that the rot of rank sexism was confined to fringe sites. The truly frightening thing, though, is that the people sending these messages are often perfectly ordinary men holding down perfectly ordinary jobs: the person who wrote the drooling little note to me above and ran the site it appeared on was an estate agent called Richard White, who lived in Sidcup, outer London, with a wife and kids, and just happened to run a hate website directed at women and minorities.
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The Internet recreates offline prejudices and changes them, twists them, makes them voyeuristic, and anonymity and physical distance makes it easier for some individuals to treat other people as less than human.

But it’s not just individuals having horny fun trolling anyone who seems like they might react. It’s not even just those outside the so-called ‘professional’ sphere of online commentary and debate. In recent years, violent misogyny in comment threads and blogs has become an everyday feature of political conversation on the web. Here are just some of the things that have been written about me personally in the past few months in the comments section of the website Order Order, a blog followed by politicians and journalists across the country, whose editors are considered part of mainstream political debate in the UK. These are a selection from the comments that the editors did not deem worthy of deletion at the time:

Perhaps Sharia might be a good thing after all, if Ms Penny was not allowed out without a member of her Family and we did not have to look at her face, also we could stone her to death, my favourite though would be a Public Hanging or Decapitation, all judging by her views, to be acceptable behaviour. Perhaps she should be Circumcised, only sew up her mouth.

Call me old fashioned bt this young lady shouid [sic] be whipped through the streets of London before being made to suck Ken Livingstones cock as people throw shit at the pair of them.
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The person who wrote the latter is clearly a seventeenth-century burgher, which makes you wonder what he’s doing in the onanistic comment threads of British political wonk-sites, and it’d be funny if there weren’t hundreds more just like him.

It’s important to stress that I’m no outlier in having this experience – although I did work as a political journalist in Britain at a time when certain women and girls were singled out to be made examples of by the angry old men in cardigans running most of the dead-tree media. It’s not every woman who writes online or runs a blog or plays videogames, but it’s many of us, and it could be any of us. And threats to hurt and rape and kill are not always less distressing when they don’t come with an explicit expectation of follow-through in physical reality.

These messages are intended specifically to shame and frighten women out of engaging online, in this new and increasingly important public sphere. If we respond at all, we’re crazy, hysterical overreacting bitches, censors, no better than Nazis, probably just desperate for a ‘real man’ to fuck us, a ‘real man’ like the men who lurk in comment threads threatening to rip our heads off and masturbate into the stumps.

The idea that this sort of hate speech is at all normal needs to end now. The Internet is public space, real space; it’s increasingly where we interact socially, do our work, organise our lives and engage with politics, and violence online is real violence. The hatred of women in public spaces online is reaching epidemic levels and it’s time to end the pretence that it’s acceptable and inevitable.

The most common reaction, the one those of us who experience this type of abuse get most frequently, is: suck it up. Grow a thick skin. ‘Don’t feed the trolls’ – as if feeding them were the problem. The 
Telegraph
’s Cristina Odone wrote that ‘Women in public arenas get a lot of flak – they always have. A woman who sticks her head above the parapet is asking for brickbats.’
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Asking for it. By daring to be visibly female in public life, we’re asking to be abused and harassed and frightened, and so is any person with the temerity to express herself while in possession of a pair of tits.

It’s an attitude so quotidian that only when you pause to pick it apart does its true horror become apparent. I am contacted, not every day, but most weeks, by young women who want to build lives as journalists or activists but are afraid of the possible backlash. Every time I receive one of these letters, I get a lurch of guilt: should I tell them the truth? Should I tell them that sometimes I’ve been so racked with anxiety by the actions of trolls and stalkers that I’ve been afraid to leave the house, that I’ve had to call in the police, that there’s every chance they might too? Or should I tell them to be brave, to take it on the chin, to not be frightened, because their fear, their reticence to speak, is precisely what the trolls want to see most of all?

I always hesitate over whether or not to speak about this. For one thing, I don’t want to let on just how much this gets to me. Nobody does. It’s what the bullies want, after all. They want evidence that you’re hurting so they can feel big and hard, like Richard White in his ridiculous Twitter profile picture, which shows him with beefy arms aggressively folded and his face obscured by a cross. Nobody wants to appear weak, or frightened, or make out that they can’t ‘take it’ – after all, so few people complain. Maybe we really are just crazy bitches overreacting?

And so we stay silent as misogyny becomes normalised. We’re told to shut up and accept that abuse of this vicious and targeted kind just happens and we’d better get used to it. While hatred and fear of women in traditionally male spaces, whether that be the Internet or the Houses of Parliament, is nothing new, the specific, sadistic nature of online sexist and sexual harassment is unique, and uniquely accepted – and it can change.