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.
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
underrepresented in tech, in politics, in business, in the top rungs of academia. Just look at the evidence: we apparently have equality now, and yet there are still far fewer women in ‘smart jobs’ than there are men. We’re told unremittingly that feminism has achieved all of its aims, and that even if it hasn’t, tech and research are fields of perfect meritocracy, so this must be a process of natural selection. If women aren’t making it to the top, that’s clear evidence that they simply aren’t
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
those who pay us, employ us or live with us might be monitoring us at all times, watching what we do and say. Make sure your Twitter feed doesn’t embarrass your boss. Make sure your mum doesn’t see pictures of what you did last night. Whether or not they are actually watching doesn’t matter – we’d better behave, just in case. It takes to another level the traditional pose of paranoia and anal self-retention that has for centuries been called ‘femininity’. One of the most popular terms for all of
a project, it has been to make women ‘safe for work’, rather than making work safe for women. Women’s sexual bodies are not deemed ‘safe for work’, either literally or figuratively. We get to choose, online and offline, between the embattled paranoia of a ‘good woman’, respectful to her seniors and to men, never openly sexual, never asking questions or talking honestly about our own experiences, or the dark, tawdry world of ‘bad women’, where sluts who dare to have sex are humiliated and hurt.