All in a day's work for a female blogger: rape threats

ONE OF the internet's dirty little secrets has been revealed as women journalists and bloggers come forward to tell of the rape threats and other sexual abuse they receive from anonymous online commentators on a daily basis.

Columnist Laurie Penny stepped forward with a piece for the Independent on Friday in which she revealed she had been told she ought to "fellate a line of bankers" for her views on the economy – and now other writers including the New Statesman's Helen Lewis-Hasteley have told The Observer they suffer from equally vile attacks.

Caroline Farrow, who as a blogger for Catholic Voices has little or nothing politically in common with Penny or Lewis-Hasteley, quotes a recent commenter who told her: "You're gonna scream when you get yours.

"Fucking slag. Butter wouldn't fucking melt, and you'll cry rape when you get what you've asked for. Bitch."

These threats of rape are in themselves a form of attack, says Susie Orbach. The psychoanalyst and writer told The Observer: "The threat of sexual violence is a violence itself, it's a complete violation and it's meant to shut the people up."

Penny believes there's nothing new about the savage misogyny behind this online 'trolling'. She believes sexualised abuse "has been used to shame and dismiss women's ideas since long before Mary Wollstonecraft was called 'a hyena in petticoats'".

What is new, arriving with the internet, is the directness of communication between the un-named abusers and the women they target. Journalist Linda Grant says she has stopped writing online because of the abuse – in the days of print, "the worst letters were filtered out before they reached me and crucially they were not anonymous".

And Grant is not the only woman who has been prompted to self-censorship for fear of trolling. Feminist writer Natasha Walter says she is "less happy to do as much journalism as I used to" because of the "tone of the debate".

Read the article in full at The Observer. ·