Content Warning: This article contains mentions of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other forms of violence against women.
With the 1983 advent of the internet and the Pandora’s box-esque horrors it has brought decades after its initial creation, you no longer even need the inconvenience of going outside to be sexually harassed; you can be sexually harassed from the comfort of your own home!
The internet is flooded with misogyny — and bigotry in general. The Economist Intelligence Unit reports that 85% of women have witnessed violence against other women on the internet. Misogyny online, similarly to offline, ranges from subtleties in trends and treatment of women, to the preaching of incredibly violent beliefs. It really is a time to be alive.
When it comes to subtle misogyny, there’s been a rise of “relatable” content about women, by women. This content is far from intentionally malicious and often expresses the creators’ enjoyment of various things traditionally associated with femininity. There would be absolutely nothing wrong with this type of content, if it didn’t try to treat these personal enjoyments as the monolithic experience of all women, enforcing gender roles. It can also lean into consumerism, declaring how women as a community now collectively love the newest product of the month or all collectively love a music artist or show.
This content is very likely a response to the “not-like-other-girls” posts of the 2010’s, in which some teen girls and young women would try to separate themselves from other women — women they viewed as more superficial than them because they were “too feminine.” The “not-like-other-girls” trend was laced with sexism and internalized-misogyny. It is however, difficult to entirely place blame on them when they had only seen those women be looked down upon by men and didn’t want to become victims of the same hatred.
Many of the women and girls participating in the trend of re-branded gender roles grew up with the “not-like-other-girls” content. Initially, this trend started as a pushback against a culture of internalized misogyny. Unfortunately, it very quickly evolved into stereotyping women into traditional roles and othering women who don’t conform, while implying these women are themselves sexist for not fitting stereotypes.
The content borders on a reclamation of feminine things the creators have been discouraged from enjoying in the past, and the trendy repackaging of gender roles and subsequent rejection of women who don’t fit into those roles. It’s just as bad as the internalized-misogyny of the “not-like-other-girls;” it’s the re-branding of traditional values as somehow feminist.
Much worse than these unintentional instances of misogyny, is the purposefully misogynistic — and incredibly harmful — content that thrives online. In the last several years terms like “manosphere” and “alpha-male” have entered the mainstream internet zeitgeist. If you’re lucky enough to somehow be unaware of what an “alpha-male” is, imagine the horrifying child of incels and pickup artists.
It is easy to stumble onto the brain-murder known as “alpha-male” content creators, many of which, like the disgraced Andrew Tate — who is currently awaiting trial for accusations of sex trafficking and rape, but still retains many loyal followers — proudly and publically self-identify as misogynists and encourage followers to to do the same.
These “alpha-male” content creators prove convincing to preteen and teen boys, easily falling into their social media feeds via money-hungry algorithms, then lure them in with shiny new sexist phrases like “low-value females,” as well as pseudo-intellectualism and the promise of lavish lifestyles as long as they follow their advice. They prey on young men and boys who feel lonely and misunderstood and offer up confidence with a heaping side of — arguably, a main course of — women-hatred, then isolate them further so the ideology can become increasingly extremist with no outside forces stepping in.
The problem is exacerbated by algorithms not caring why content does “well.” It doesn’t matter if something has hundreds of comments out of appreciation or out of hatred and criticism. All interaction pushes the content, which could cause people — who possibly don’t even have views as extreme as what they preach — to create content serving as misogyny-bait specifically to get negative interaction with no care about who might take these beliefs to heart. “Kids on the internet will see that and be like ‘oh, that’s how the world works’ because they’re young and impressionable,” says Eve Gaddis, senior at Franklin High School.
Women can’t escape mistreatment when they go online. “I’ve seen specifically in the Discord server that I moderate there’s multiple men usually attacking women for some reason,” says a senior at Franklin. “I’ve had users not listen to me because I’m a woman and waited for a male moderator to come and tell them to shut up.”
Despite all of this, men are more likely than women to say they’ve experienced harassment online. In a 2021 study on online harassment by Pew Research Center, 43% of male participants reported being harassed online while only 38% of women reported online harassment. There is a nearly 10% difference between the reports that men make, compared to reports via women. More men in the study reported being called an offensive name online than women, and men were slightly more likely to report being physically threatened online than women were.
Though men reported marginally higher rates of online harassment, women were significantly more likely to be the victims of, what the study classified as, more severe forms of harassment. Namely, 16% of women in the study had personally experienced sexual harassment online while only 5% of men had. This statistic rises to a third of women when only looking at women under 35, and 11% in men under 35. The sexual harassment women face online has only gotten worse, having doubled since 2017. Women were also more likely to be stalked online.
It is also important to note that of men harassed online, men of color were more likely to be harassed online compared to white counterparts. Additionally, since racism also thrives online, women of color experience significantly more and worse harassment than white women do. An Amnesty study found that in the U.S. and UK, politicians who were Black women were 84% more likely to be subjected to abuse on Twitter compared to white women. And while the Pew Research Center study didn’t separate this finding by gender, Hispanic people experienced sexual harassment at the highest rates.
Social media was the most common place for internet harassment to occur for women and men, but women had a higher chance of being harassed on social media than men did. Men also had a higher chance of their harassment occurring while using an online forum or while gaming than women did.
Based on the usages of each of those platforms, it could be inferred that men could potentially be inserting themselves into or cultivating situations in which they are more likely to be harassed. It should also be considered that the participants’ personal definitions of the varying kinds of harassment the study looked into could have varied. What is and isn’t harassment is subjective.
The consequences of women’s harassment carries a heavier weight as it stems from and feeds into a pre-existing culture of patriarchy. This harassment leads to women feeling unsafe and belittled. “[Sexism online impacts] women’s self esteem because everything is online nowadays so if you see that it’ll have an impact on you,” says Gaddis.
The harassment women experience online can lead to self censorship. A UNESCO study found that 40% of female journalists avoided reporting some stories to avoid abuse online. And in a study published by The Economist Intelligence Unit, it was found that after experiencing harassment online women might reduce their online presence and, at times, even stop using that online platform entirely.
On top of women having to censor themselves on the internet, women are already more sparse than men online — globally, 259 million fewer women have access to the internet compared to men — so men’s voices are disproportionately shared and arguably overshadow the voices of women.
All of this leads to the question: why is the internet so sexist? The largest factor and easiest explanation is that we already live in a deeply patriarchal society. It isn’t that the internet alone is sexist; the world at large is sexist. Globally, 81% of women have reported being sexually harassed or assaulted in their lifetime. This doesn’t account for women who may have been sexually harassed or assaulted but unable to label it due to stigma or a lack of education surrounding these experiences.
So of course, an extension of a sexist, patriarchal society is going to reflect those views. However, one difference with the internet and real life is that the internet grants anonymity, meaning actions have less consequence.
People who in their personal lives might be inclined to keep extreme hateful beliefs more discreet because there could be real-world consequences; in their real lives people might call them out, they could lose a relationship, or even a job, and there’s the possibility that they could just be unlikable. When online, no one needs to know who you are and you can easily enclose yourself into an echochamber with other people who choose to spew the same beliefs; online, there are minimal repercussions to your actions.
It’s much easier to harm someone when they don’t know who you are. Many studies support a link between internet anonymity and aggression, such as a 2015 study published in Computers in Human Behavior that observed participants assigned to make sexist tweets conveyed significantly more sexist views while anonymous compared to participants who weren’t anonymous.
In an ideal world, the emergence of new technologies would aid in protecting women and other marginalized groups online, but sadly we are still far from this becoming a reality. New technological developments seem to make things far worse. The advancements in video and photo fabrication technology make it easier for the average person to create altered and generated imagery which has led to non-consensual nude imagery of women being created.
Deepfakes are a type of altered video content in which someone’s face is edited over someone else’s face in a pre-existing video using deepfake software. It is estimated by Sensitivity AI that 90% to 95% of the deepfake content is non consensual porn, 90% of which depicts women.
While current deepfake technology has existed for several years now, AI technology has rapidly developed and entered the mainstream over just the last couple of years. AI image generation allows creeps online another and quicker way to generate nude imagery of real and non consenting women.
Sexism online isn’t something to be laughed at or brushed off; it has real world consequences. Of women who experienced harassment online, 10% experienced harm in real life as a direct result. Misogynistic beliefs online also lead to the spread of misogyny offline. Additionally, it just isn’t fair that as a woman, no matter where you go, you might never feel truly safe, since these issues lead to even more harm offline.
While countless women have been harassed online, the internet has also proved a great tool to amplify voices and social movements. Think of the traction the MeToo movement gained due to its prevalence online. Not that women never talked about experiences with sexual assault and harassment before MeToo, but MeToo created a cultural shift. It shined a light on rape culture, showing people that they are not alone in their experiences and fostered a supportive community — in spite of backlash from some groups of men. People amplifying their voices online does have an impact on the outside world as well. As a direct result of MeToo, a couple hundred powerful men lost their jobs and in the years following the peak of the movement, legislature against work-place harassment has passed. The internet is a tool used by misogynists, and a powerful one at that, but it has also been a tool to progress gender equality.
While the internet has been a tool to spread great harm, we can only hope that its ability to champion social change and gender equality will improve as quickly as technology does. The internet’s existence provides entertainment, social connection, and access to information, but alongside these changes is also the potential for the spread of misogyny and biased misinformation. It is a transparent reflection of the subconscious of our society and everything wrong with it, but also can be one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to push for these wrongs to be addressed.
