On harassment, when the “women most able to tolerate it are the ones capable of shutting parts of…

On harassment, when the “women most able to tolerate it are the ones capable of shutting parts of themselves down”

In case you missed Jill Filipovic’s chilling follow-up to Amanda Hess’s “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet,” it’s up at Talking Points Memo, and starts in 2006, the first time she found strangers on the Internet saying things like “I’m 98% sure that she should be raped”:

I spent hours reading posts that extended beyond commenting on my rape-ability into users posting dozens of photos of me, commenting on my body, rating my physical attractiveness and listing my contact information. And halfway down one of those threads, I got to this: “I actually happen to have met her before. She’s extremely pretty in person.” It was an innocuous comment, even a kind one. But more followed, in other threads — people who claimed to know me in real life, or said they had at least met me, or seen me, or maybe talked to an ex boyfriend of mine. They had details about what I wore to class and what I said. I felt very suddenly like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room to fill my lungs.

Her piece makes Hess’s point even clearer: online harassment is quick to show up in the form of immediate potential violence in real life (“He was a big dude and he was blocking the doorway”) and recourse is often difficult to come by (“I became more careful about locking the door”). The ending is very, very real:

But what about the things you can’t put a price on? How many stories weren’t written because the women who could best tell them were too afraid? How many people like me, damaged and lashing out, paid their online cruelties forward? How many women look back at the person they were before their skin thickened, before they learned how to deal, when they were a little more sure-footed, and how many of them grieve a little bit for all the good things that got lost in the process of surviving?

What does an online landscape look like when the women most able to tolerate it are the same ones who are best capable of bucking up and shutting parts of themselves down?

[TPM]