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Alison Piepmeier

My life is all about bringing down the patriarchy. I write books and articles about feminism, and I also teach and direct the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston....

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Sexism online

On Tuesday, the Post & Courier discussed some of the truly offensive comments that are made on their website, Charleston.net, and exposed one of the people who made such comments.  He believed that he was protected by the invisibility and anonymity of the internet.

It amazes me what people will say on the internet. If folks believe that as a society we’ve really moved beyond sexism and racism, the internet proves otherwise. Not often, but regularly, I get nasty, vitriolic, sexist hate-mail on my primary blog. People say things to me there that they would never say to my face. And it’s very revealing.

A friend pointed me to the Feminist Law Professors blog, to a posting by the University of South Carolina’s Ann Bartow, in which she shared a repo­rt on the hateful misogyny directed toward Hillary Clinton on the web. In particular, the article noted that Facebook groups—one with 23,000 members—call Hillary the c-word and fantasize “about Clinton being raped by a donkey.”

Facebook is interesting to me because it’s below the radar of many adults, but I think every college student in the country is on it anytime they’re not in class.And it offers students that sense of internet anonymity, so they’ll say things there that they might think twice about sharing in a venue that they recognized as public. And what this particular set of Facebook sites reveals is that, no matter what our official societal rhetoric would suggest, a woman running for President faces a very different set of challenges than a man. I don’t care what anyone’s politics are—if a female political figure is being attacked and ridiculed because she’s a woman, then I’m affected and it’s my job to speak out against that. That was the case when Katherine Harris was being lampooned for the amount of make-up she wore during the 2000 election fiasco, and it’s true for Hillary Clinton.

In some ways, I’m kind of glad folks are saying these terrible things online, because it least that lets us know what we’re up against.­