Online Sexism

(probably triggering for women who've had to put up with horrendous online sexism)

I don't know how many of you regularly browse Reddit, but a recent, sadly typical incident really stood out to me as an example of online misogyny and I wanted to share it with you. Why? So that the next time someone asks why feminism even exists in this day and age, in this our enlightened democratic equal western culture™, you can point to asshattery like this and be all like YO CHECK THIS OUT YO. And maybe throw in another YO for emphasis if you're feeling up to it.

A brief introduction. My own personal viewpoint of Reddit is that it's a great place to have good communities. I visit a bunch of excellent subreddits, such as doctor who (what it says on the label), two X chromosomes (place where women can generally post without getting harassed), one Y (place for men that tries with varying degrees of success not to descend into men's rights or pick up bullshit, crosses over with 2X), crappy design (mainly for the lols) and many others.

As well as these more focussed subreddits (because a place for women is so niche, *cough*) there are several very open forums for things like pics, videos, funny things found on the internet, and so on. As you may expect, these forums are dominated by a loud privileged majority, who much like I imagine the Anonymous forums act, very quickly eviscerate or give kudos to other members as the mob dictates.

Soooo it's into this atmosphere that a young woman decides to offer up a picture, showing herself with a teeshirt print that she made that has the reddit logo on it. The image has an accompanying reddit discussion page which is of course where things get ugly really quickly. The equation is beautiful in it's moronic simplicity: girls are for guys to look at, therefore any photo of a thing that also contains a girl's face is therefore pandering to the beardy masses in order to get upvotes.

The top ranking comment is a link to this image, which summed up the feelings of many other commenters on the discussion thread. It gets worse. So, so much worse.

• Yes, you're attractive. Are you validated now?
• AKA. i am kinda hot, please reaffirm this.
• I think I love you.
• My reddit shirt is better. Fuck you, karma whore.
• fuck you.
• You made something that covers your boobs. Downvoted.

People of course stepped in and either apologised to the poster on behalf of the community or got into flamewars with the offending commenters but frankly the whole thing was a completely depressing clusterfuck.

The next day, the guy who wrote many of the more vitriolic attacks against the sexist commenters made a post summing up his feelings on the event (you can see the image he made by clicking on the link at the top). I suspect that his submission did well because a) he approached it in a humorous way (easy to do when one isn't the target) and b) he's clearly male and it's often easier for men to get behind another man sticking up for an attacked woman than it is to get behind a woman who's trying to stick up for herself.

As for the poster of the original image, she had this to say in the comment thread of the second discussion. I almost missed it since she only had 2 upvotes, compared to the 550 garnered by the man who was sticking up for her.

So yeah, there you have it. Congratulations if you made it this far down and through all those links. I apologise for the convoluted nature of this post, but I think it's a really good example of what we men put women through on a daily basis. You don't have to be all activisty to want things like this to go away, and I think the best thing we (especially men) can do is show it up when it happens and not let people (especially men) claim that there isn't more discussion, reflection and action to be had.