Megan McArdle --
Yeah, I know, it's probably pointless, but what the hey.
Megan McArdle delivers herself of a 59,000-word blog post (give or take) wherein she McSplains that while sexism exists, nobody, especially girls, should ever ever ever call anyone a sexist, no matter how sexist their behavior, because that is like shooting them with a gun, a gun that might cause hurt feelings. (Literal guns of course are harmless and everyone should have like nine of them, to go with their artisinal Moroccan fig-basters and stainless steel Syosset heritage goose denipplers.)
In our society, accusing a specific person of sexism is now a very, very powerful weapon. And there is no such thing as a “conversation” at gunpoint. You can have a conversation or you can have a forced confession. You cannot have both.
This is such horseshit. McArdle references an earlier emanation of hers, wherein she explains that it's gol-durned hard out there on the lonesome Internets prairies for the menfolk, just as 'tis for the womenfolk. She presents as Scientific Fact to support this contention a highly rigorous Scientific Study that involves her asking stupid questions of certain Internetty dimwits who unaccountably take her seriously. Her Very Scientific results, she informs us, "may surprise you, or not."
Well, not.
To back up a bit, McArdle was of course responding to Amanda Hess's article about what it's like to get lots of rape-murder threats.
So now let's fast-forward a bit, and compare exactly what Hess describes to McArdle's account of How Tough It Is based on her Science.
Hess:
I dragged myself out of bed and opened my laptop. A few hours earlier, someone going by the username “headlessfemalepig” had sent me seven tweets. “I see you are physically not very attractive. Figured,” the first said. Then: “You suck a lot of drunk and drug fucked guys cocks.” As a female journalist who writes about sex (among other things), none of this feedback was particularly out of the ordinary. But this guy took it to another level: “I am 36 years old, I did 12 years for ‘manslaughter’, I killed a woman, like you, who decided to make fun of guys cocks.” And then: “Happy to say we live in the same state. Im looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head.” There was more, but the final tweet summed it up: “You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this.”
McArdle (Long, bear with me):
But does it just appear that way? Are men getting the same kind of abuse? I asked a group of libertarian and conservative writers whom I know -- mostly men, a few women. Specifically, I asked them how often they got the following:
1. People talking about how you perform oral sex on various powerful or rich conservatives, usually the Kochs, but could be anyone.
2. People asking you how it feels to do same.
3. Being told that you should have children in order to learn compassion for others.
4. Wishes that you will have children, and then those children will die, in order to teach you compassion for others.
5. Comments on how you are so ugly that no one would ever want to marry/reproduce with you.
6. Speculation on how awful you must be in bed.
7. Comments along the lines of "I'd like to f*** some sense into him/her" or other speculations on how they might change your opinions by sleeping with you.
8. Comments along the lines of "I would never sleep with him/her, not even if I were blind and they were the last person on earth."
9. Death threats.
10. Rape threats.
11. Threatened assaults.
12. Creepy sexualized fantasies about spanking/corporally punishing you.
13. Assertions that you have only gotten where you are because you are sleeping with powerful people.
In other words, how often did they get comments that were sexualized or gender-specific? (I added in the death and assault threats because these often come up when discussing how women are treated on the Internet.) And yes, you may infer from the questions that I have gotten all of these, in e-mails, on Twitter and Facebook, and in the comments of my and other blogs. Not every day. But probably weekly.
The results may surprise you, or not. Most of the women, and a few of the men, had been accused of some sort of sexual activity with the Kochs, metaphorical or otherwise. Several men had been deluged with fond hopes that a child or someone else near and dear to them would die. Almost everyone had gotten death threats and threats of assault, along with meditations on how great it would be if someone else assaulted or killed you.
These are... not the same things.
The creepiest thing that ever happened to me personally online was someone making it spookily clear that they knew my kids' names. That was awfully disturbing, because suddenly, a very intimate personal line was breached.
But as nasty as that was, it's not like anyone ever threatened to rape me.
So let's please draw a line? "Suck Koch peeeen" is not an anapest I should ever condone (though prosody jokes are always The Tits). But it's not "I know who you are and I will rape you." Feminists (like ME) get irked at glib sexist jokes because, apart from being lame and lazy, they make it too easy to excuse abuse.
The point isn't even "well there are also Liberals who say sexist shit about Conservative women." Of fucking course there are.
The point is that it's far too easy and excused and accepted that women get rape threats.
I mean FUCK.
The other part of this that is irritating is how McArdle pulls the Althousian passive-agressive backsies:
In my experience, what’s the first thing anyone says about a woman who disagrees with them on an issue? “She’s such an idiot.” I’ll be honest and say I’ve caught myself doing it. Yes, undoubtedly some of them are idiots. But it seems statistically unlikely that all the women on the other side are idiots, and your side happened to get all the good ones. Men get accused of a wide range of sins, from deliberate mendacity to wanting to maintain their privilege, but almost all of the women are foolish and should shut their mouths. Their hysterical mouths.
But Megan McArdle is, as it happens, an idiot, a jerk, or just mendacious.
So when we get this:
This strikes me as the real problem with “women on the Internet.” We’re big girls now, and we know how to use the delete button. But we don’t have a button for the people who automatically delete us from the list of grown-ups who should be taken seriously.
"Those silly little girls who can't hack the rape threats get all the attention! But nobody likes me just because I spout fatuous bullshit!"
MAS. Apparently there is a McMegan-Althouse Blogginheads.
This is preferable.