I say this as a mouthy woman who has tried for a long time to pretend otherwise: that Web misogyny isn’t especially rampant — but even if it is, it has no effect on me, or any other strong, sane woman doing her job. But I wasn’t being honest. My own reactions and those of others to the Sierra mess served to wrestle the truth out of me, and it wasn’t what I hoped.

The facts are these: Sierra, a software programmer who runs the site Creating Passionate Users — or ran it; she seems to have put it on hiatus, with no new posts since last Monday — was subjected to verbal abuse in the comments section of her own blog as well as other blogs. It ranged from banal putdowns to crude sexual garbage, and then, Sierra says, the sexual garbage turned violent, including posts like this: “fuck off you boring slut … i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob.” On a now-shuttered blog established at least partly to make fun of Sierra and others who complained about viciousness on another blog, someone posted a photo of a noose next to Sierra’s head, and someone else commented: “the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.”

Sierra went to the police with the posts, and went public with her complaints on her blog. When someone posted her home address in her comments thread, she shut down comments and stopped updating the blog, and friends, including PodTech.net’s Robert Scoble, began taking up her cause. “It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop,” Scoble said, noting, “Whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man.” Scoble declared a weeklong blog strike in solidarity with Sierra and banned anonymous posters from his comments section.

Then came a sort of backlash. The founder of one of the blogs that hosted the vicious comments, renegade marketing guru and “Cluetrain Manifesto” co-author Chris Locke, aka “Rageboy,” said he lamented the threats to Sierra, but insisted he didn’t see them as literal threats of violence — and he seemed to lament Sierra’s criticizing his role in the attacks even more. “I’ve already been judged by the angry mob out there,” Locke complained on his blog. Nick Denton’s Valleywag took up his cause, with a post “In defense of Chris Locke,” suggesting that Locke’s critics had a problem with free speech. “The bloggers are behaving like a lynch mob, or a US president, looking for someone to string up, or a country to invade. Sierra is upset, traumatized, even; but it’s Locke’s reputation which will be, possibly quite unfairly, soiled by her accusation.” Kathy Sierra as George W. Bush? That’s really mean! And dumb. (Also, how a guy who calls himself “Rageboy” can have his reputation harmed by Sierra’s complaints kind of escapes me, but Locke is entitled to his hurt feelings.)

The busy Denton himself even went into the comments thread on the same blog post to fight it out with those who disagreed, including Robert Scoble. “So far, I haven’t read anything that proves Locke’s complicity in this incident,” Denton wrote. “And, if it was a crime merely to be considered a prick, the jails would be full.” But most Valleywag readers who commented disagreed with Denton and Locke: “When the free speech is directed in [Locke’s] direction, it becomes character assassination?” wrote a poster with the screen name WendySharp. “That’s really rather beautiful hypocrisy in action.” A similar but uglier battle raged in the Broadsheet comments section when Lynn Harris wrote about Sierra earlier this week.

And on and on it goes: Is Sierra another woman silenced by vicious online sexism, or just a wuss? Were the threats of violence real? Or is she the real bully, organizing a “lynch mob” to win her blogosphere battle?

I avoided writing about the mess for a day or two because I had mixed feelings about it. Ever since Salon automated its letters, it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men — sometimes nakedly sexist, sometimes less obviously so; sometimes sexually and/or personally degrading. But I’ve never admitted the toll our letters can sometimes take on women writers at Salon, myself included, because admitting it would be giving misogynist losers — and these are the posters I’m talking about — power. Still, I’ve come to think that denying it gives them another kind of power, and I’m trying to sort that out by thinking about the Kathy Sierra mess in all its complexity.

When I first heard about the Sierra mess, I confess to skimming the final post on her blog, and fixating on these words:

“I have cancelled all speaking engagements.

I am afraid to leave my yard.

I will never feel the same.

I will never be the same.”

And I cringed. It felt over-the-top to me. I had a comparable reaction to the controversy over Harvard’s Lawrence Summers’ ditzy and wrongheaded observations about women lacking “some of the necessities,” to use Al Campanis’ language about blacks managing baseball, to excel in science. Summers was an idiot to say what he did, but the reaction of certain female professors disturbed me, too. Nancy Hopkins famously told the media that if she hadn’t walked out, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” That bothered me. If I blacked out or threw up every time I experienced sexism in my career, I’d be in a hospital, not working in journalism. I don’t think we can be fragile flowers about workplace sexism. Fight it, but don’t take to your bed over it.

I’ve had a comparable reaction to the storm of sexist commentary Salon unleashed when we started letting our users post letters to the editor themselves in October 2005. Let me be clear: We have the smartest audience in journalism. Our letters have by far been a net gain for Salon. The vast majority are either smart, serious or harmless. A small minority pollutes letters and blog comments, and I’ve mostly chosen to ignore them. I’ve known they were disproportionately vicious to women. The fact is, in my nine years here, I’ve learned misogyny grows wild on the Web.

When I joined Salon in 1998, I had no idea what was about to hit me (figuratively, folks, I’ve never been hit). I had written about controversial topics for newspapers and magazines — race relations, affirmative action, women’s rights, Israel and the Palestinians; every kind of politics, state, local and national. My edgiest work had been the target of nasty letter-writing campaigns, even protests. But I’d never been truly, viciously attacked, in terms relating to my intellect, my appearance or my sexuality, and I’d never experienced a personal threat — to anything other than my future employment at a given publication, if it caved to outside pressure.

But once I joined Salon I started receiving the creepiest personal e-mails about my work. Anything I wrote that vaguely defended President Clinton or criticized his attackers, in particular, would get me a torrent of badly spelled e-mail, often from Free Republic readers and posters. There were themes: A significant subset tended to depict me in a Monica Lewinsky role, often graphically. Like Kathy Sierra, I endured too many references to “cum” in those e-mails. I’ll forgo other details for the sake of brevity and discretion.

But it was hard to know for sure how much had to do with my gender. David Talbot was regularly attacked by wingnuts as a Clinton “butt-boy,” so it was impossible to say it was all about my being a woman. It still seems that when a man comes in for abuse online, he’s disproportionately attacked as gay — and if he is gay, like Andrew Sullivan, who wrote a column for us for a while, his hate mail at Salon is likely to be comparable to mine: heavy on sexual imagery and insult, sometimes bordering on violence. Yuck. I couldn’t see into anyone else’s in box to be sure if the abuse I was getting was disproportionate, but I suspected it was. Mostly I just ignored it.

When Salon automated its letters, ideas that had only seen our in boxes at Salon were suddenly turning up on the site. And I couldn’t deny the pattern: Women came in for the cruelest and most graphic criticism and taunting. Gary Kamiya summed it up well in a piece on overall online feedback, noting “an ugly misogynistic aspect” to the reaction to women writers. One thing I noticed early on: We all got nicknames. I’m “Joanie,” Rebecca Traister is “Becky,” Debra Dickerson is “Debbie” and on and on. There are lots of comments about our looks and sexuality or … likability, to avoid using the f-word, a theme you almost never see even in angry, nasty threads about male writers. Most common is a sneering undercurrent of certainty that the woman in question is just plain stupid; it’s hard to believe we have jobs at all. (But then, since a woman is, unbelievably, the clueless, incompetent boss of Salon, it makes a certain kind of sense.)