Men who hate women on the Web

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.)

Still, I've taken the position that yes, women have it harder, but most letter writers aren't misogynist, and sometimes their criticism has made valid points: our writing could be clearer, our reporting stronger, our analysis crisper. I know that's been true in my case. I've mostly told Salon's women writers who are upset about their mail either to get a thicker skin -- I grew one over the years -- or to stop reading it. Basically, I told them to man up. Sometimes I was right. Sometimes my reaction amounted to telling them to stop wearing such provocative outfits online, lest they get what they deserve.

So when I first read Sierra's complaints, my knee jerked with my conditioned reaction. I focused on what seemed to be her over-the-top response, quoted above, as well as her decision not to attend the Emerging Technology conference this week in San Diego because of the threats. I thought: If you curtail your activities or your speech, Kathy, the bad-boy terrorists have won. And then I read the graphic, threatening posts on Sierra's blog and elsewhere, and I felt a little less sure of my reaction.

Next page: Hysterical masculine self-pity posing as righteous indignation