Men who hate women on the Web

And the women (like me) who try to ignore them. Or at least I did -- until the Kathy Sierra affair.

By Joan Walsh

Read more: Joan Walsh, Women, Feminism, Book Publishing, Opinion

Photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media

Kathy Sierra at the 2006 OSCON conference July 24-28 in Portland, Ore.

March 31, 2007 | Is there really any doubt that women writing on the Web are subject to more abuse than men, simply because they're women? Really? I've been following the Kathy Sierra blog storm, thinking I had nothing new to say, but the continued insistence that Sierra, and those who defend her, are somehow overreacting, or charging sexism where none exists, makes it hard for a mouthy woman to stay silent.

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.

Next page: Have I been telling women writers to stop wearing such provocative outfits online, lest they get what they deserve?