![]() There’s also the fact that culturally speaking, women are burdened with a larger number of things they are made to feel bad about, things that men don’t have to bother with. Cowards pick what they consider soft targets and use anonymity and/or the distancing effect of the Internet to avoid the actual and humiliating judgment of real live humans that they’d have to receive out in the world. Why do women bloggers get more abuse than male bloggers? Oh, I think for all the stereotypical reasons, up to and including the fact that for a certain sort of passive-aggressive internet jackass, it’s just psychologically easier to erupt at a woman than a man because even online, there’s the cultural subtext that a guy will be confrontational and in your face, while a woman will just take it (and if she doesn’t, why, then she’s just a bitch and deserves even more abuse). They’re blogging about knitting, for Christ’s sake. I know knitting bloggers who have some amazingly hateful comments directed at them. And even women writing on non-controversial topics get smacked with this crap. I think bloggers who focus on certain subjects (politics, sexuality, etc) will get more abusive responses than ones who write primarily on other topics, but even in those fields, women seem more of a target for abusive people than the men are. In my experience, talking to women bloggers and writers, they are quite likely to get abusive comments and e-mail, and receive more of it not only than what I get personally (which isn’t difficult) but more than what men bloggers and writers typically get. What follows is my own anecdotal experience, but it’s also the anecdotal experience of someone blogging for 13 years and having been engaged in the online world for almost 20, i.e., decently knowledgeable. What I don’t receive, other than exceptionally rarely, is what I consider to be actual abusive commenting, where the intent is to hurt me, from people who are genuinely hateful. ![]() But these people are not fundamentally (or, generally speaking, not even slightly) hateful or hurtful people and it would be wrong to characterize them as such. And to be clear, people are annoyed with me, or may mock me, or may even call me names. So perhaps they are more inclined to be annoyed with me and they’ll become so quicker than the average person might, and thus be publicly annoyed with me at a higher frequency.īut again, they don’t do it all the time they’re not making it their mission in life to ride me. There are additionally and quite naturally people who seem to have a default dislike of me. It’s all situational, in that I’ll write something that annoys someone, they’ll be annoyed and write about it, and then it all goes away. There are constantly people annoyed with me (go search “Scalzi” on Twitter today and you’ll see some fellows mewling plaintively about me, for example it’s darling), but it doesn’t appear anyone makes a hobby out of it. What I don’t have, however, is the sort of chronic and habitual stream of abuse this blogger describes. Whenever jackholes pop up, I mallet them down, and that’s the way it should be. ![]() This is why I have a robust commenting policy and am not afraid to follow up on it. The hate mail gave me a title for a book, after all, and the obnoxious comments on the site are just part of doing business as a Public Internet Figure™. The longer answer: I do of course get hate mail and obnoxious comments. The short answer: No I don’t get those, and yes, I think it’s substantially gender-related. Over at Twitter, author Adrienne Martini asks me if I get the sort of jackassed comments and e-mails that Shawna James Ahern, a female food blogger, talks about in a recent post, and wonders if it’s a gender-related thing.
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