Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (21 page)

Not all online sexism is intended to hurt women. Some of it is intended to impress other men, with hurting women as a regrettable but necessary side-effect. A great deal of misogyny has always been a matter between men, performed by men and boys to impress those they consider peers, and forums, games and blogs are no different.

When men say that casual online sexism, as separate from the personal femicidal misogyny that many women receive when they venture into online spaces men think are theirs alone, is ‘just banter’, they really mean it. 

Germaine Greer once wrote that women had no idea how much men hate them.
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Well, now we do. The Internet has a way of making hidden things visible, of collapsing contexts so that the type of banter that might once have been appropriate at a frat party exists on the same Twitter feeds where fifteen-year-olds are starting feminist campaigns. Combine that with the disinhibition provided by time-delay and anonymity and you have a recipe for the sort of gynophobic, racist and homophobic rage that women and men who are its targets often find incredibly frightening.

Parts of the Internet still behave like men-only spaces, even though they almost never are. Misogyny, as well as racism and homophobia, is played as a shibboleth, a way of marking out territory, not necessarily to keep women away, but to scare off anyone considered too easily offended, which in practice rarely includes men. It’s a joke, certainly, the kind of weak, cruel joke whose humour revolves around exclusion, the kind of joke one is meant to ‘take’ (can’t you take a joke?) in the way one takes a punch. It’s the way men have always spoken about women in private, and the reason it looks new is that women have never had so much instant and intimate access to those spaces before, where we could observe men speaking about us as they have for centuries when they thought we weren’t watching. The power to watch men back is something the web affords women, but men haven’t quite realised that yet.

Right now, the beginning of a backlash against online misogyny is under way. Women and girls and their allies are coming together to expose gender violence online and combat structural sexism and racism offline, collecting stories on hashtags like the #Everydaysexism and #Aufshcrei and #Solidarityisforwhitewomen. Projects like this turn sexism and racism from something you have to sit and experience alone into something that can be turned back on your attackers, forcing men who really aren’t as ignorant as they’d like to be to understand women’s experience in a new way, to understand that the stories they grew up hearing about how the world worked might not be the only stories out there. When bigotry is forced to see itself through the eyes of another, the reaction can be grotesque.

In 2012, the blogger Anita Sarkeesian launched a crowdfunding project to create a short film series,
Tropes vs. Women
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which set out to explain the basic, lazy sexist plotlines of many videogames. The self-satisfied geeksphere exploded with rage; one user even created a flashgame called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, where users could click on her face and make blood, cuts and bruises appear. Sarkeesian faced down her abusers and made the series anyway. It was a hit.

Six months later, when feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez successfully campaigned to get a woman’s face featured on British banknotes, she was inundated with rape threats on social media.
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She shared examples of the messages she received from sexist trolls over five days: ‘Everyone jump on the rape train > @CCriadoPerez is conductor’ was one; ‘This Perez one just needs a good smashing up the arse and she’ll be fine’ was another. Criado-Perez decided to stand up and fight back, demanding that Twitter take more responsibility for abuse on its platform and starting a global conversation about the normalisation of violent misogyny online. Technically, threats of rape and violence are already criminal, and many social media companies, including Twitter, already have rules against abuse and harassment. Just like in the offline world, however, there is a chasm of difference between what is technically illegal and what is tacitly accepted when it comes to violence against women, and the fight back is less about demanding new laws than ensuring existing ones are taken seriously.

Some people claim that the fight back against cybersexism is itself ‘censorship’. Some website owners claim that promoting and publicising sadistic misogyny is merely respecting the ‘freedom of speech’ of anyone with a lonely hard-on for sick rape fantasies. That sort of whinging isn’t just disingenuous, it’s terrifically offensive to anyone with any idea of what online censorship actually looks like.

As I write, there is a real fight going on to keep the Internet as free as possible from government interference, a fight to free speech and information from the tyranny of state and corporate control. Without going into it too much here, the Internet is full of people who have spent their lives, risked their lives and even lost their lives in that fight. To claim that there’s some sort of equivalence between the coordinated attack on net neutrality and digital freedom going on across the world and the uninterrupted misogyny of comment-thread mouth-breathers doesn’t just take the biscuit, it pinches the whole packet and dribbles ugly bile-flecked crumbs into the keyboard.

According to the current logic of online misogyny a woman’s right to self-expression is less important by far than a man’s right to punish her for that self-expression. What appears to upset many of these people more than anything else is the idea that any woman or girl, anywhere, might have a voice, might be successful, might be more socially powerful than they themselves are – at least, that’s the message I get every time I’m told that I’ve got a lot to say for myself, and my silly little girl’s mouth could be more usefully employed sucking one of the enormous penises that these commentators definitely all possess. In 2011 I wrote that a woman’s opinion was the mini-skirt of the Internet; if she has one and dares to flaunt it in public, she is deemed to deserve any abuse that comes her way – she was asking for it.
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Since then, the situation appears to have deteriorated, not just for women in public life but for women in public full stop. The Internet is a many-to-many medium. It gives readers and audience-members a right to reply to those writers and politicians who, in the pre-digital age, enjoyed the freedom to expostulate and make pronouncements without having to listen to their readers or listeners beyond the odd angry letter in the paper. And that’s great. I remain glad that I grew up as a journalist in the age of the Internet; I am used to writing for an audience that is responsive and engaged, to listening to constructive criticism and acknowledging it where it’s appropriate. There’s a world of difference, however, between the right to reply and the right to abuse, threaten and silence.

To be human is, in almost every case, to crave two things above all else: intimacy and information. The Internet offers us a superabundance of both, which is one of the reasons it sends existing power structures into a panic. Whether it’s women and minorities fighting for the right to be understood as fully human, or citizens fighting for access to information they’re not supposed to have, the impulse is always to censor, or to attempt to censor. It is extremely ironic, then, that when misogynist trolls are called out on their behaviour, they claim that it’s an attack on their ‘freedom of speech’.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, brain-aching. These people talk without irony of their right to free expression while doing everything in their power to hurt, humiliate and silence any woman with a voice or a platform, screeching abuse at us until we back down or shut up. They speak of censorship but say nothing of the silencing in which they are engaged. I have even been told, with apparent sincerity, that using the ‘block’ button on Twitter to prevent anybody who has posted threats of violence against me is actually an attack on the troll’s freedom of speech – no apparent distinction being made between the right to express your views and the right to have your ugliest half-thoughts paid attention to.

The Internet has pressing, urgent problems with freedom of speech, and none of them have anything to do with men’s right to harass and threaten women with impunity. ‘Imagine this is not the Internet but a public square,’ comments the writer Ally Fogg. ‘One woman stands on a soapbox and expresses an idea. She is instantly surrounded by an army of 5,000 angry people yelling the worst kind of abuse at her in an attempt to shut her up. Yes, there’s a free speech issue there. But not the one you think.’
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Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to abuse and silence others with impunity. It doesn’t even include the right to be paid attention to. Imagine that that was ‘real life’. Imagine that any woman standing up in parliament, or in a lecture theatre or in a room full of her friends to talk about her own experiences learned to anticipate violence, threats and taunting if she happened to upset the men. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, because that still happens every day, even in the nominally liberated West. Everywhere, people in positions of privilege warp and misuse the idea of ‘free speech’ to shut down and silence everyone else’s right to speak freely. Freedom of speech, for so many people used to the comfort of not having to examine their lives, simply means freedom from criticism and responsibility.

In the case of cybersexism, it is deeply offensive to the many, many activists, hackers and developers who have given their time, imperilled their jobs and sometimes risked their lives to keep governments like the United States from clamping down on free Internet usage to describe women speaking about feminism online as a threat to ‘freedom of speech’.

The whole point of the Internet is that it allows many voices to speak at once. That’s what the network is. The sudden presence of women in great and vocal numbers online doesn’t prevent men from using the Internet, because this isn’t primary school, and nobody is actually allergic to girls.

AND THE GEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

This is what I want every nerd boy in my life to understand: we were there too. The other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night with our faces uplit by humming screens looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn’t see us, because we were girls. And the costs of being the geek were the same for us, right down to the sexual frustration, the yearning, the being laughed at, the loneliness. And then we went online, which was supposed to be where nobody could tell that you were a shy, speccy loser with no friends, only to find ourselves slut-shamed and screamed at if we gave away that we might be female. For us, there was no escape. We had to fight the same battles you did, only harder, because we were women and we also had to fight sexism, some of it from you, and when we went looking for other weird kids to join our gang, we were told we weren’t ‘real geeks’ because we were girls.

Geek misogyny is its own special flavour of bullshit, and it’s part of the infrastructure of how gender works online. I’m using the terms ‘nerd’ and ‘geek’ interchangeably, in part because a great many people who are both have clear ideas on the distinction between the two, and everyone has different ideas about what that distinction is. In the 1900s, a ‘geek’ was a member of a travelling circus who bit the heads off live chickens to entertain local yokels. Today it’s more likely to be a person who works with computers and gets very excited about comics. What unites the two, and what’s important about geeks and nerds, is a sense of being an outsider, a fascination with learning, and specialist knowledge.

That specialist knowledge could be coding, or it could be literature, or it could be where exactly to bite down on a cockerel’s spine to make the arterial blood gush most gruesomely over your shirt. Either way, it’s probably something your parents don’t really understand.

The idea that women can’t ever be proper geeks or ‘real’ nerds is perhaps the most insidious part of the misogynist defence of geek space. It’s what leads to terms like ‘fake geek girl’, to the assumption that women who like science fiction or comics or gaming or technology don’t really know what they’re talking about. A close friend of mine who works as a senior editor at a major science-fiction publishing house is regularly assumed to be somebody’s girlfriend – or a promotional ‘booth babe’ – at conferences and conventions.

We have to take back the word ‘geek’, not just women and girls, but anyone out there who is fed up of the assumption that being a geek means sitting in your parents’ basement in a failed start-up hoodie, hating women. One of the most upsetting things about the way nerd culture has been incorporated into the mainstream, quite apart from personal childish annoyance when something you’ve been into for ages becomes cool, is the absorption of many of the radical, egalitarian impulses of traditional nerd culture into a stereotype. It’s doubly upsetting when that stereotype has some basis in truth.

The social narrative of the successful geek has become the twenty-first century’s Horatio Alger tale of the victorious underdog, the outcast made good, but the one mode for triumph in this story is acquisition – specifically, acquisition of hot chicks and a pile of money. 

This is the story of Geek Triumph. It’s a short story, and you can find it in every comic shop, DVD aisle and entrepreneurial business memoir. The Geek Boy has an awful time at school. He is lonely. He has no friends, or few friends, and is bullied. Nobody understands his special genius, and the hot, popular girl who is the object of his late-night tissue-box fantasies won’t even look his way. Geek Boy, however, has a way to escape this otherwise Dantean nightmare of post-pubescent torment: he is smart. He is really smart. He uses his smartness to make a pile of cash and get the girl, becoming the ultimate neo-capitalist patriarch without even having to change out of his slogan T-shirt.