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Online Misogyny: Why Women Are Forced To Leave The Internet
Male hackers have attacked me in ways that make it nearly impossible to maintain a career.
24/09/2024
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
In a recent attack, a hacker reduced the number of views on my YouTube videos, making them appear lower than they were the day before. This has happened for several consecutive days. I believe that maintaining social media channels is futile in my case because the hacker keeps removing my followers, keeping my numbers at an all-time low. Furthermore, a hacker has compromised my Pinterest account, locking the setting to update links, preventing me from relinking to current articles, so my Pinterest posts no longer direct to the correct links.
This is just one example of the hacking attacks I’ve experienced. Other incidents include my blog being taken offline by my ex-husband, stalling my blogging career; a hacker disconnecting my blog from Google so my articles can’t be found; and a hacker changing my titles, SEO, and content while I’m working on blog posts. Recently, the hacker deleted all my pictures and media files from my blog, followed by the entire blog design being wiped out.
I am constantly dealing with daily hacking catastrophes. It feels like taking one step forward and then ten steps back because a hacker is deleting my files, disconnecting my blog from Google, infiltrating my database, and changing files, or even installing viruses on my blog.
I also edit videos and create short animations. Several times while working on videos, a hacker has accessed my Canva account, altering frames as I edited. Text was added, transitions were changed, and effects I didn’t need were inserted. One such example is my video Vienna, where he added a zoom effect at minute 0:23 of the video (I couldn’t find the setting and couldn’t delete the effect in this case, therefore the effect can still be seen in the video). While working on one frame, the hacker would secretly change others, and once I returned to those, I had to fix them. But once I had corrected those frames, others would be altered again, creating a never-ending loop! A video that would normally take three hours to create soon took three days.
This is an overview of some of the hacking incidents I’ve encountered. Like many other female bloggers, journalists, and online professionals, I have also been subjected to verbal abuse—some of it so vulgar that it makes you question the state of online behavior today.
Offline, I’ve also been verbally abused and attacked by various men in recent years, something that didn’t happen a decade ago. Some say this is what happens when a blog reaches a certain level of success. My blog is small and a niche blog, and before my ex-husband took it offline, newer articles used to get around 10,000 to 15,000 views. While that’s modest compared to more famous blogs, I believe it’s decent for a niche site.
I have experienced haters, jealousy, and greed simply because I write a blog. I didn’t start blogging to become famous; I wanted to create something meaningful. I love writing and believe a world without books, articles, and the written word would be dull. That’s why I began blogging, but I’ve been accused by jealous men of seeking attention.
This is a stereotype and one of the less severe projections I’ve faced from men who are envious of my ‘success’. I’ve encountered a lot of misogyny, verbal abuse, sexist insults, and threats, including repeated rape threats, daily, for years. This level of abuse is damaging for any woman.
My wish is to live a quiet, peaceful life, but I’ve been so violently attacked by malignant narcissists that this has not been possible. Many other women report similar experiences.
In her book Misogyny Online: A Short (And British) History, Emma A. Jane details some of the slurs women have faced online. She writes:
“At this point, a natural question arises: Are these graphic articulations of misogynist vitriol an internet phenomenon, or are they the types of things men have always said or thought about women in private? Without a skill set that includes the ability to retrospectively eavesdrop on private conversations, this query is impossible to answer. Many waves of feminist activism and theory do, however, support the contention that while the cyber medium may be new, the ‘fuck you up your shopworn ass’ message has ample historical precedent. It belongs to a far older tradition of gendered abuse and oppression—one that reduces women to their sexual, or lack of sexual, value and then punishes them for this same characterization.”
I believe misogynistic men have always existed, but the internet has provided them with an anonymous space to connect and express their hatred without fear of repercussions. Forums where groups like incels can gather have led to even more attacks. In my generation, I’ve noticed that men tend to be more misogynistic than I initially thought, often harboring a deep hatred for women. While sexism existed in my parents’ generation, I believe misogyny is more prevalent in mine. For women, this is troubling news.
Emma A. Jane discusses online rape threats against women and writes:
“As I will show over the course of this book, threats to rape women because of their supposed ‘unrapeability’ are circulating with astonishing frequency. At the same time, men enthuse about wanting to rape certain women as if this is a high compliment.”
Are these threats just words, or do these men truly mean what they say? In my experience, many men who say they’re going to rape a woman genuinely mean it. Accordingly, these threats are dangerous and should always be taken seriously.
Emma A. Jane provides several examples of women who experienced rape threats online:
“At the height of the attack, Criado-Perez was receiving about 50 rape threats an hour (Battersby, 2013). Over the course of a single weekend, police gathered enough rape and death threats against her to fill 300 A4 pages (Blunden, 2015). In June 2012, Sarkeesian logged more than 100 screenshots of abusive comments in just two hours. These represented only a fraction of the misogynist harassment she received in response to her attempt to crowdsource funds for a video series about sexism in video games (Sarkeesian, 2012a). During the vicious mob attacks on women in 2014 dubbed ‘GamerGate,’ the game developer Zoe Quinn accumulated 16 gigabytes of abuse (Jason, 2015). In 2016, Jess Phillips—the British Labour MP who helped launch a campaign against misogynist bullying—reported receiving more than 5,000 Twitter notifications of people discussing whether or not they would sexually assault her. This included 600 rape threats in just one evening (cited in Oppenheim, 2016). In many corners of the internet, graphic rape threats have become a lingua franca—the ‘go-to’ response for men who disagree with what a woman says, dislike her appearance, are unhappy with the response to their unsolicited ‘dick pics,’ or who simply believe, as one commenter recently put it on Facebook, that all women are ‘cunts’ who deserve to be ‘face-fucked until they turn blue’ (cited in Chalmers, 2015). Misogyny, in short, has gone viral. When women speak up about being attacked online, they are frequently told to stop complaining and toughen up.”
I’ve had moments when I withdrew from the internet entirely due to the bullying, threats, and stalking I experienced, and many other women have done the same. This withdrawal comes at a great cost. For those of us who write online or whose careers rely on being online, going offline can ruin an entire career. Even as a hobby, the personal toll of withdrawal can still be significant.
It’s also unfair that women are forced to make this choice, while men—who are less frequently targeted—don’t face the same pressure to leave. As a result, the internet becomes more male-dominated and less welcoming to women.
In Misogyny Online: A Short (And British) History, Emma A. Jane discusses how women are disproportionately targeted by online attacks. She writes:
“Focusing on gendered cyberhate involving male attackers and female targets is necessary because of the overwhelming anecdotal and empirical evidence that women are being attacked online more often, more severely, and in far more violently sexualized ways than men.”
Furthermore, she explains:
“…while women who withdraw from the internet to avoid threats and harassment are making a rational choice, it is not a free choice because they are being coerced into making these changes.”
This book offers valuable insights, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Have you ever experienced misogyny online?