In late November, a woman posted a photo of herself proudly holding her PhD thesis and announced that she had successfully defended her thesis. “I’m thrilled to say that I passed my viva with no revisions and officially got my Ph.D.,” she said. wrote. What followed was a case study in how the online right targets and harasses those who don’t fit the narrow — and often contradictory — standards they’ve formulated for women.
“Why is this woman falling apart,” began one YouTuber hoe_math’s viral postWho makes videos about “the decline of western civilization”. “She got a PhD for it, and from the looks of it, she probably believes it entitles her to a very high-profile lifestyle. Remember that when they tell you women are ‘beating’ men to get an ‘education’.
“Crow’s feet and no children,” began other. “You literally lived in the most advantageous time for women in all of human history and after 40 years there is literally nothing to show for it and your bloodline will end with you because of your need to ‘stick with evil.’ Getting education’.
Suffice it to say that these are extreme, outlandish responses to an otherwise anodyne post about completing a PhD. But they’re all too predictable given the type of content that routinely goes viral on X, where conservative trades, anti-whack crypto bros and masked-off white supremacists enjoy a platform increasingly friendly to their extremism, especially An exit by users Looking for less toxic pastures.
Dr. Ally Lukes is the perfect target for this sort of thing: she’s a young woman with an advanced degree in the humanities, a field often derided by certain men in the online proper space who see it as a waste of resources and a sure ticket to “useless” or low-paying jobs. Her The thesis, titled “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose,” is an exploration of how descriptions of smell in literature shape our social world, and all Ph.D. Like the thesis, it was meant to be a unique and novel contribution to the field of English literature, but it angered right-wingers who saw it as well woke upIrrelevant, or trivial (using a lot of bad words, of course).
The mere existence of an educated woman probably provoked many of X’s right-wing men to the point where they bashed her Threats of rape For being “vegan, feminist and queer”. “It was definitely fun to be the scapegoat for the far right about academia for a few days,” Lukes said. has been posted.
Like the women in game media who were targeted in 2014’s Gamergate harassment campaign, Louks is just the latest in a long history of sexual harassment on X, formerly known as Twitter. Over the years, there have been Boycotted by women on the platform and Study dedicated To reveal how much harassment they face there.
But it’s gotten worse since Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022. In the two years since he has owned it, the company has rid itself of the verification badge that authenticates official accounts, notable figures and journalists, and instead issues a blue check to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. The change made it so that the top reply to almost any viral post is a scammer, a spammer, or someone engaging in bad faith or harassing Klout. Musk, as a Self-described free speech absolutistPreviously banned users have been reinstated and to cut Teams overseeing content moderation; White supremacist rhetoric is now so common that normal, perhaps non-white nationalist celebrities. The account is followed That is the result of extremist ideology.
X in the last two years Remove his policy Deadnaming of transgender people has been banned, while Musk has threatened to sue researchers who study it Increase in hate speech Recently X on the platform Changed its blocking function So that blocked users can still see the posts of the person who blocked them, making it easier for stalkers and harassers to continue monitoring their targets. In March, X was found to be the platform where women experienced the most abuse and threats based on time spent there, According to research from the Open University, a public research institute in the United Kingdom.
Phrases like “back in the kitchen” on X saw a 4,600 percent increase in the 24 hours after the ISD election, while “dumb cunt” had more than 64,000 mentions on Nov. 5.
The election of Donald Trump has made the problem worse, with men spamming responses with attack lines such as “Your body, my choice,” turning a longtime pro-abortion rights slogan into a rape threat. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) A 4,600 percent gain was found Phrases like “get back in the kitchen” spiked on X within 24 hours of the election, while “dumb cunt” had more than 64,000 mentions on November 5. Musk has aligned himself heavily with Trump over the past year, which is not surprising considering that fans of both men have rallied around Musk’s platform, where they dog their perceived adversary.
While content creator Angela Belcamino Posted in X About feeling lucky to be at a bar on Thanksgiving without paying a babysitter because she doesn’t have kids (and the right would hate it), she was immediately proven right and fired up by conservative men who called her “thought“and “brainwashing” by a “Abolitionist Apocalypse Cult.” Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg posted the quote and wrote“Nothing is more terrifying than drinking alone in an empty bar while everyone else is having a good time with friends and family. Congratulations.”
This landscape is perhaps surprising after a campaign year that pitted progressive values against growing backlash against Me Too and trans rights. Gender policing is now a blood sport online, where women who seem to defy traditional expectations of being warm, cool, chaste and vulnerable are humiliated and widely attacked.
Women who don’t fit the mold of the maxi-dressed wives of Katzco while baking snacks from scratch for their kids are being told they’re responsible for the downfall of civilization by an army of disgruntled men. with classical art As in their profile picture. What goes unsaid is the knowledge that these women, the trade wives they so revere, are often breadwinners for their families by monetizing their lifestyles online. Then their values are often contradictory: they want women to be visible online, but only in ways that satisfy men’s desires. But if women are very successful at it — like, say, when OnlyFans model Sophie Rain recently Shared a screenshot Which shows she’s earned more than $43 million on the platform in the past year – men were furious, again blaming her for society’s downfall.
Being a woman in certain online spaces has always been somewhat painful, but this seems like a uniquely disturbing moment. More than 100,000 people, female or otherwise, are already on the X (platform and Also companies), while millions have signed up for alternatives like Bluesky, and it’s a completely understandable response to a clearly degraded experience.
Being a woman in certain online spaces has always been somewhat painful, but this seems like a uniquely disturbing moment.
But it’s still debatable whether handing over a huge and still notable site like X to white supremacist and misogynist trolls is a move. Since I’ve spent a lot of time there, my “for you” algorithm is pretty tailored to my liking, and unlike many other users, I rarely see pro-mask, white supremacist, or otherwise offensive posts. Rather, it’s just people making jokes and weird memes about current events, which I’d argue is the only way to use the platform.
As for Louks, he writes that he remains at X for now. But at a certain point, you have to think: If you can’t even post about your greatest accomplishments without suffering heaps of harassment, what’s the point of a social network at all?
