Where is it written that the internets are a boys-only club?

The He-Man Woman-Haters Club and a few girls who have the temerity to think they should be allowed into the clubhouse

What is it about the internet that brings out the worst in some men? Is it the shield of relative anonymity? And if so, does this mean that the kind of vicious misogyny we're seeing in cyberspace is just a revelation of what most men walk around thinking most of the time?

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about "the daily ins and outs of being a mom" was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to "sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms."

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, "it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men."

Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded by women, said anonymity online has allowed "a lot of those dark prejudices towards women to surface." Her site takes a "zero tolerance" policy toward abusive and excessively foul language, and employs moderators "24/7" to filter the comments, she said.

Sierra, whose recent case has attracted international attention, has suspended blogging. Other women have censored themselves, turned to private forums or closed comments on blogs. Many use gender-neutral pseudonyms. Some just gut it out. But the effect of repeated harassment, bloggers and experts interviewed said, is to make women reluctant to participate online -- undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum.

Robert Scoble, a technology blogger who took a week off in solidarity with Sierra, said women have told him that harassment is a "disincentive" to participate online. That, he said, will affect their job prospects in the male-dominated tech industry. "If women aren't willing to show up for networking events, either offline or online, then they're never going to be included in the industry," he said.

[snip]

Two factors can contribute to the vitriol, experts said: blogging in a male-dominated field, such as technology, and achieving a degree of prominence.

Susan Herring, a professor of information science at Indiana University, said each new online venue has been greeted with optimism because the early adopters tend to be educated, socially conscious people who think the form engenders community. Even as recently as 2003, she said, it was relatively rare to find negativity on blogs.

Now, she said, blogs risk becoming "nastified," at least in the comment zones.

Kathleen Cooper, the single mother, said she began to experience harassment about five years ago after she posted a retort on a friend's blog to a random blogger's threat against a friend. The harasser began posting defamatory accusations on Cooper's site, on his blog and then on a site that purports to track "bad businesses." He said that he could not be responsible for what "his minions" might do to her, she said.

Cooper, 37, who lives in Sarasota, Fla., has tried password-protecting her site. She and five other women have asked the man's Web site server to shut him down, but he revives his site with another server. Law enforcement officials laugh it off, she said, "like 'Oh, it's not a big deal. It's just online talk. Nobody's going to come get you.' "

Is that really true, when just about everyone has a Google footprint?

This article focuses primarily on technology bloggers, but touches on political bloggers as well in the form of Michelle Malkin. Why the author didn't talk to Amanda and Melissa, whom have received far more threats from Malkin's Minions than the other way around is anyone's guess. But the point remains: threats of physical and sexual violence are being used to silence women online.

I've been fortunate in that the closest thing I've had to a threat came from a woman. With all the wingnuts that have visited this site because of the occasional links from Memeorandum and Real Clear Politics, I've thankfully been the target of none of this kind of threatening behavior. Of course, my little rantings are of so little consequence to even the feminist blogoshpere that I didn't even know that Saturday was Take Back the Blog Day. Sometimes irrelevance is a blessing.

So who are the women who are targeted? Those who have been threatened for their political views tend to skew young, whereas I have made no secret of the fact that I am on the shady side of 50, the shorter side of five feet tall, and the horizontal side of Lucy Van Pelt. Kathy Sierra, the unlikely target of some of the most explicit and vicious virtual violence, is only two years younger than I am, but she is tall, slender and blonde. This brings up the question of whether perceived "fuckability", whether by age or by physical appearance, is the variant here. Are women whose photographs are online more at risk? Does knowing what a woman looks like somehow make her more "real" to men seeking a target for their hatred?

In considering the kind of threats of rape and violence to which some women are subject online, I keep getting the image in my head of Cho Seung-Hui brandishing his guns -- another nerdy would-be tough guy who stalked women and became enraged when rejected. Then I wonder how many Virginia Tech massacres are going to happen because some nerdy guy gets rejected by women he thinks owe it to him to fuck him -- and no one took seriously the threats he makes to women online.