The recent threats against actress and feminist-activist Emma Watson are only one, single example of the extreme internet harassment many female commentators face in the online world. While the threat to expose nude photos of Watson turned out to be a hoax, these threats, and others like them, are yet another (frightening) form of policing and controlling women in society today.

Some weeks ago I posted here about street harassment of women; almost immediately the issue of internet harassment came to my attention when I heard about the threats against female video game designer Zoe Quinn. Quinn has received countless threats and abuse online for releasing an online video game about depression. The threats, which she had been receiving for eighteen months, finally culminated in having her personal contact information released online this past August. Being “doxed,” or document traced, is how internet trolling and actual stalking (or the threat of it) come together in a frightening way.

Journalist Amanda Hess has also written about how internet bashing often manifests overwhelmingly against women and frequently relies on physical threats. In an article from January of this year, she details how internet stalkers created Twitter accounts dedicated to threatening her with explicit bodily violence. To read the threats is chilling. Internet trolls threaten to rape, kill, mutilate and otherwise harm female her and other journalists, bloggers and outspoken women on the internet.

Hess’s article and a more recent article on HuffPost by Emma Grey detail the many other women who have recently and noticeably been mass-attacked by internet trolls, often for writing about feminist issues.

Some notable victims of these threats have been journalist Jessica Valenti when she posted on Twitter asking if anyone knew of a country where tampons were subsidized, as well as Caroline Criado-Perez who campaigned to get Jane Austen on the British ten pound bill.

Grey explains, “A person with an opinion and a way to project it is a powerful thing, whether that platform is Twitter or the floor of the UN. But women know that when they choose to voice such an opinion, they open themselves up to the possibility of not just vehement disagreement or critique, but violence, sexualization and threats which may or may not be empty.”
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Just how women should stand up to this kind of threatening behavior is unclear. Hess writes that when she reported threats against herself to a police officer, the officer’s reaction was, “What’s Twitter?” Author and classics scholar Mary Beard has taken a different tactic: she responds personally to her detractors and trolls.

In Rebecca Mead’s profile of Beard for The New Yorker, Mead explains how Beard’s approach to internet vilification is often the opposite of what is usually suggested to internet users. Writers, bloggers, and the average netizen are often encouraged to “avoid reading the comments.” According to Mead, “Beard argues, instead, that comments sections expose attitudes that have long remained concealed in places like locker rooms and bars.” When someone sent Beard a photoshopped picture of herself with female genitals superimposed on her face, she went ahead and posted it on her blog, “and suggested possible responses for her supporters to take, such as flooding the offending message board with Latin poetry. The story made international news, and the message board soon shut down.”

Beard has also, like other vocal internet women, received internet bomb threats as well as other threats of physical violence against herself. The scholar’s usual response is to make these threats public and to shame her trolls. Often, it would seem, the trolls repent; in the case of the man who sent the doctored photo, after Beard posted the image to her blog, he wrote her a letter with an apology and now the two remain in contact.

Such stories, however, seem like they must be the exception, rather than the rule. In addition to this, few (aside from Mary Beard!) have the time and energy to respond to a thousand rude and possibly violent persons who have threatened them in creative and disturbing ways.

The profile of Mead is entitled “The Troll Slayer,” making her sound like something of a knight in a fairy tale. But there is nothing magical about the threats that women receive online every day. The anonymity that the internet offers lives alongside the publicity it offers writers, activists and commentators in frightening proximity. Of course, to stop writing, to shrink from the threats, is to give them more power. Yet how can we respond to and quash such attitudes in the future when the threats they vocalize obviously come from a much deeper, darker place in society that many of us would like to ignore?

Beard is one of few scholars who live in the spotlight of the press, making appearances on television shows and publishing articles in various British newspapers. Most scholars publish and share their ideas within a much smaller (and perhaps safer?) community of like-minded individuals. We hope that our ideas about open-mindedness, critical thinking, curiosity, and respect will filter into society through the contact we have with our students, but do we have a greater responsibility than that? Should more of us take up the pen to fight the trolls?