Men who hate women on the Web

The fact is, I've never experienced the violent threats Sierra has online -- and I don't think any woman has on Salon -- and so I can't really judge her reaction. I'd like to think I'd just go on with my life, but I don't know. And maybe I was a little bit more chastened by what Sierra experienced because I started my own blog last week, and two days later, I interviewed our former columnist Anne Lamott. We got no violent threats, just 300 letters or so, many of them quite nasty.

I don't want to compare that thread to what Sierra suffered; there were no threats of violence and no particularly sexual insults. But boy, there were plenty of insults, and most of them had to do with us as women -- as mothers, as sexual objects, as writers, as professional women in the world. To boil it down, we're wrinkly old hags (even though Lamott said my neck looks good! WTF?); we're narcissists and bad mothers, and worst of all, for writers, we're really bad writers, and terribly stupid. But mostly we're just bad women. Bad, bad women. And did I mention ugly and wrinkly?

To be fair, some thoughtful readers came to Lamott's and my defense. I particularly appreciated a letter from a reader who described herself as having been "infuriated" by things I've done as editor of Salon, who nevertheless suggested sexism might be behind the vitriol in my Lamott thread. "I haven't read all of the letters that pass through Salon, but I wonder about certain patterns. Oprah, Camille Paglia, Joan Walsh and Anne Lamott have one thing in common. I will sound very P.C. saying this (as Bill O'Reilly would be the first to note) but do we just find it easier to bash women?" No, replied one writer: The problem was "the kind of woman writer Salon has been fond of publishing in the last few years ... Smug, self-satisfied, without any kind of real difficulty except their sad inability to make the rest of the world understand, and so appreciate, them for who they are," and then he went on to name a lot of us. Glad we cleared that up.

Reading that thread made me realize the warped, and warping, experience of Salon letters for many women writers: It's like seeing everything awful you've ever thought or feared about yourself -- but said out loud by someone else, for thousands of people to hear. It lives in your head longer than it should, and then you beat yourself up for giving it space, for not being tougher. The Broadsheet thread about Kathy Sierra was in many ways worse. Not about writer Lynn Harris, thankfully, but about Sierra, as well as women posters who came to her defense. This is how it got started:

Bullsh*t

Anyone on the internet is subject to all sorts of threats. It has nothing to do with being a woman.

The lady is a loser

Ms. Sierra also fabricated some of threats. This has been proven and established.

That poster pointed to Chris Locke's "Rageboy" blog as evidence Sierra was lying, but in fact Locke didn't claim she fabricated the threats; he merely insisted he's not to blame. And on it went. A charming Broadsheet regular told a woman who disagreed, "Trying [sic] verifying rather than just opening you fat piehole and spewing bile," and later, "Now I know you are a fattie and single." It was a petri dish of online misogyny. We left it unmoderated as a science experiment. And I feel a little sick now that I've read the whole thing. Yes, sick.

So what is the answer?

I'm left with a lot of my initial reaction: Attitudes toward women have improved dramatically just in my lifetime, but still the world has too many misogynists, and the Web has given them a microphone that lets them turn up the volume on their quavering selves, their self-righteous fury, their self-loathing expressed as hatred of women. And yet, mostly, women on the Web just have to ignore it. If you show it bothers you, you've given them pleasure. Life is too short to think about Broadsheet trolls.

But it coarsens you to look away, and to tell others to do the same. I've grown a thicker skin. I didn't want skin this thick. And what does it mean that women writers have to drag around this anchor every time they start to write -- that we reflexively compose our own hate mail, and sometimes type and retype to try to avoid it? I can honestly say it's probably made me more precise and less glib. That's good. But it's also, for now, made me too cautious. I write less than I would if I wasn't thinking these thoughts. I think that's bad. I think Web misogyny puts women writers at a disadvantage, and as someone who's worked for women's advancement in the workplace, and the world, that saddens me.

I truly believe misogynist trolls are only a tiny sliver of the Web population. But I can no longer say they don't matter, or they do no real harm. We have them here at Salon in politics and relationship threads; Sierra has them in the world of tech marketing. They're probably not the same guys. That's disturbing. What's unique to the Web is that they can easily collaborate: A vicious prankster who'd like to rattle Sierra can make threats or even find and publish her address, and he might only want to scare her, not do her real physical harm. But he can be joined by an unhinged person who takes the address and acts on it. And who's to blame?

I don't have an answer to that question, or a solution. All I can really do is promise to think and talk about it more, and not dismiss other women's -- and some men's -- complaints about what women suffer online as easily as I have in the past. I chide myself for cringing, at first, at Kathy Sierra's response to her threats. I still wish she'd gone to ETech and given her tormentors the finger, but I can't say with certainty I'd have done so in her shoes. I do know that in the Nick Denton/Chris Locke vs. Kathy Sierra/Robert Scoble smackdown, I am firmly on the side of Sierra and Scoble. As a woman writer friend e-mailed me after reading Denton's fierce defense of Locke on Valleywag: "There is nothing like hysterical masculine self-pity posing as righteous indignation." I couldn't put it any better than that. Man up, fellas!

And at Salon, we have been promising better tools to moderate and control our letters and comments; we will finally be rolling them out in the days and weeks to come (not as a reaction to the Sierra situation; it's just coincidence that we're on the verge of having some features ready we promised readers months ago). We will also start to take a tougher line on serial abusers, deleting more posts that are simply ad hominem, or feminem, attacks.

I'm not sure what else there is to do, but I'll keep thinking about it, and listening to suggestions. And in the meantime, I'll give Anne Lamott the last word. She advised me to look at nasty letters threads as a "workshop, a workshop on your own self-doubt." Some people pay money for that sort of thing; women writers at Salon get paid for it. Yes, I'll keep trying to find the bright side of online misogyny, while doing what I can to make it go away.

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