Trolls try to turn Twitter into a trial
I remember the first time someone harassed me on Twitter.
It was a small thing, so small that I didn’t think until later to block the user who had taken time out of his day to make mine worse. I had written about The Flash, and this person thought the best response would be to tell me I didn’t have any right to talk about the show because I’m a woman. It wasn’t the last time something like this happened.
Being a woman online, especially a woman with an opinion, is dangerous. As a self-proclaimed nerd who writes for USA TODAY, I have come to expect to be harassed any time I express an opinion on Twitter — a site I both enjoy and am required to use for work. I expect it after personal experience and watching other women deal with harassment on a nearly daily basis. I expect it after Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner called Scarlett Johansson’s Avengers character a “slut”; even after both apologized, Renner felt the need to say it again.
Sexist harassment on Twitter has flitted in and out of the news recently. There’s “Gamergate,” a troll campaign that viciously targets women in the video game world. Ashley Judd received threats after tweeting about March Madness. Most recently, Avengers: Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon deleted his Twitter account, and many blamed harassment by feminists, though he said that isn’t why he left.
The reaction to Whedon quitting Twitter disturbed me. The aftermath has lumped women voicing an opinion about sexism in a movie — something we should discuss in a movie this huge — with people who threaten others.
Still, this isn’t about Whedon or The Avengers. This is about a much larger issue: how women are treated online.
The women at the center of Gamergate, Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, have experienced harassment on a scale that is unimaginable. In “5 Things I Learned as the Inter- net’s Most Hated Person,” Quinn describes people calling her father to say she’s a “whore.” In a Bustle article with the similarly alarming title “I’m Brianna Wu, and I’m Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate,” Wu describes a YouTube video featuring a man outlining his plans to murder her. Sarkeesian had to flee her home after a Twitter user posted her address and threatened to kill her.
Being a woman and a nerd and — more important — speak- ing publicly about it, is not an easy thing, what with huge movie stars who think it’s OK to casually call female characters “sluts,” the threat of sexual harassment at conventions and simply defending the right to enjoy the kind of art you enjoy. There are men in the geeky community, this subculture that is supposed to be a safe space, who don’t want women there at all. It is by no means all of the men who call themselves nerds, but it is a very, very loud minority.
Before I decided to write this column, there was a moment when I thought I shouldn’t. I feared what would happen afterward, that I would open Twitter and find rape threats, that someone would call my father and tell him I’m a whore, that I could be physically harmed. To be honest, I’m still afraid.
That fear is as much a part of the harassment as the tweets themselves, but it shouldn’t stop women from sharing their experiences. We need to talk more about online harassment. Because harassment is not something that happens only to nerdy women or even women at all. It is something that happens every day to all kinds of people.
And that is really not OK.
Being a woman and a nerd and — more important — speaking publicly about it, is not an easy thing. Scarlett Johansson and director Joss Whedon work on the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron.