“You wouldnt look so smart wit my dic in your mouth.” – Anonymous, sent to me on Tumblr
I am female on the Internet, an occupation that comes with near daily comments like the one above. I have so far not received any death threats, only demands of a sexual nature, critiques of my physical appearance, veiled threats of rape, and reminders that my content would be more popular if I would just wear a low cut shirt. It’s nothing new; women get harassed, trolled, demeaned, belittled, and objectified online.
If you need numbers to reassure you that women’s online lives are being riddled with disrespectful harassment at a disproportionately high rate compared to men, Amanda Hess’ piece in Pacific Standard is a great place to start. She confronts online harassment and her own experiences with law enforcement officers unwilling to take threats seriously because they were on Twitter. Hess documents the game of hot potato played by police and the companies that host threatening comments regarding who should be responsible for action.
It’s not like this treatment is actually deterring women from creating content and living publicly online, right? According to Emily Graslie, host of The BrainScoop, a YouTube channel focused on natural history from the Field Museum in Chicago, “While there are at least 13 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) channels hosted by men with over 400,000 subscribers and 7 of those 13 which have topped a million, there are only four channels hosted by women that have even 160,000 subscribers.” So female producers can expect both lower viewership and more harassment. What fun!
And STEM women may have a particularly uphill battle. As a fellow female STEM YouTuber — the writer and host of an educational show about technology — I draw a nearly 75% male audience according to YouTube’s internal statistics. And, as Whitney Phillips said in her TED Talk on subcultural trolling, the demographic of trolls is “males, between the ages of 18 and 34-ish, predominantly white, and predominantly English speaking.” Even though many men online are active supporters of female content creators, and the actions of a few should never disparage an entire gender, I still currently employ censorship just to keep the comments on my educational channel civil. The functionality is a great improvement to what has long been known as the worst comments section on the Internet, but this type of censorship is a poor weapon against trolling. Censored words are easy to get around and often give bullies the incentive to be more creative in their wording.