Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet
Language: English
Pages: 45
ISBN: B00EO24J3O
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'The Internet was supposed to be for everyone... Millions found their voices in this brave new online world; it gave unheard masses the space to speak to each other without limits, across borders, both physical and social. It was supposed to liberate us from gender. But as more and more of our daily lives migrated on line, it seemed it did matter if you were a boy or a girl.'
It's a tough time to be a woman on the internet. Over the past two generations, the political map of human relations has been redrawn by feminism and by changes in technology. Together they pose questions about the nature and organisation of society that are deeply challenging to those in power, and in both cases, the backlash is on. In this brave new world, old-style sexism is making itself felt in new and frightening ways.
In Cybersexism, Laurie Penny goes to the dark heart of the matter and asks why threats of rape and violence are being used to try to silence female voices, analyses the structure of online misogyny, and makes a case for real freedom of speech – for everyone.
Laurie Penny's forthcoming book, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution, will be published in 2014.
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teach any given generation of girls about computers in elementary school, it’s too late for them. Tech skills can be picked up as late as you like, as long as you don’t believe that your brain is temperamentally unsuited to the task, as many girls and women do. Of course, Mayer proved her credentials as a leader in a land built and run by nerd men by taking away Yahoo employees’ right to work from home – making the company yet another Silicon Valley leader structured in a way that excludes women
charge of, organising the diaries and offices of men that they might better concentrate on the important work, and, of course, raising children. Men, in other words, are good at doing, making and building things; women are good at making life easier for men. We’re not less smart, we’re just different smart. Smart at things that don’t involve being listened to or making an impact on the world. You know, different smart. It’s a eugenics of gender that would be seen for the throat-closingly vile
because God had designed them to be full-time mothers; today, women don’t go into research and engineering because evolution designed them to be bad at maths and better at babies. This is, apart from anything else, a terrible misuse of a respected theory. THE NEW CYBORGS I’m twenty-six and I work and write and hunt down stories online, and right now I’m following the Pirate Party, the online-freedom activist group that became a global political movement, as it seeks to get its first
sitting at home with tired faces uplit by lonely laptop screens are working out new ways of finding one another in this networked world, building platforms and lines of communication that have, over the past half-decade, routinely outpaced and outsmarted governments. Every time an individual state attempts to crack down on freedom of speech online it reassures Net denizens that online activism and online organising are powerful. The Internet is a real place. It’s where we live and work and fight
was an estate agent called Richard White, who lived in Sidcup, outer London, with a wife and kids, and just happened to run a hate website directed at women and minorities. The Internet recreates offline prejudices and changes them, twists them, makes them voyeuristic, and anonymity and physical distance make it easier for some individuals to treat other people as less than human. But it’s not just individuals having horny fun trolling anyone who seems like they might react. It’s not even just
