Digby, Sexism and Blogging while Female

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Friday February 08, 2008 · 6:56 AM PST

2008/02/08 · 06:56

I'd been wondering why the comments section at Hullabaloo had disappeared for a few weeks. Now I know why:

Just so everyone understands, this is why I closed comments earlier and it's why I have had to spend the better part of the day deleting comments like the two responses above. 24 of them at last count on several different threads and I'm sure I missed some.

I'm not going to allow people to call me a cunt on my own blog. It's just not acceptable. I'm sorry it's so tiresome to hear me ask people not to feed these trolls or if you think it's obsessive for me to ban people who call me a douche twenty times a day, but that's tough.

Save the sanctimonious lectures, everybody. I don't care if you tear each other apart politically in the comments but I'm not going to be anyone's personal urinal. You talk that way around here from now on and you're out. I'm done.

My thoughts on all of this are past the jump.

One of the commenters supportive of digby said this:

Is it just me, or were your comments the best genuine dialogue among progressives on the entire Intertubes up until you outed yourself as a girl?

The comments threads were among the best, definitely. Though the troll invasion happened a good year after she outed herself, I still can't help but notice that certain trolls really do up the yuck factor when they know that their target is a woman. Go spend some time over at Pandagon or Shakesville and compare the threads to, say, Eschaton. The troll vitriol at Eschaton is mild compared to Pandagon and Shakesville -- and the trolls at Eschaton only get truly vile when they think that they have a female audience they can freak out. It's the "let's freak out Mom" principle, apparently.

A lot of folks try to blow this off by saying that "well, political blogs have always been nasty". But then how do they explain what happened to Kathy Sierra? She ran the Passionate Users tech blog. TECH blog, mind you, not political.

Her personal information was published online, she started getting death threats and wound up having to cancel some live presentations, and stop blogging, because of the harassment she was receiving.

What did she do to set off the nutjobs? Be a good-looking blonde, apparently.

It's rather like the attacks against Jade Raymond, a videogame developer who commits the apparently unforgivable crime of being attractive and Asian, which of course means to some boy geniuses she has no brains and got her high-paying job through oral sex and bukkake.

The good news for digby is that moderation does work: The trolls will give up in a few days, once it's clear to them that she means what she says. There is hope.

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