Words like “slut”, “whore” and open invitations and threats of rape have become commonplace on social media.
And we have reached a stage where these nauseating, blatantly sexist, and viciously abusive comments are not even surprising anymore. It’s a sorry state of affairs, really.
But here comes another piece of news that relegates the debate on twitter misogyny to an even more serious sphere: Half of all misogynistic tweets posted on Twitter come from women, a recent study by think tank Demos has suggested.
Also Read: ‘You Slut!’: The Anonymous World of Twitter Misogyny
What The Study Says
Mapping thousand of aggressive and abusive tweets from UK twitter accounts over a three-week period, the study reached the conclusion on the basis of two words as “indicators of misognyny”– slut and whore.
- It also found large-scale evidence of misogyny, with 6,500 unique users targeted by 10,000 abusive tweets in the UK alone.
- The Demos study also looked at international tweets and found more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the words, “slut” and “whore”, being sent to 80,000 people over the same three weeks.
- Demos states that they have used algorithms to distinguish between tweets being used in explicitly aggressive ways and those that were more conversational in tone.
“This study provides a birds-eye snapshot of what is ultimately a very personal and often traumatic experience for women. While we have focused on Twitter, who are considerably more generous in sharing their data with researchers like us, it’s important to note that misogyny is prevalent across all social media.”
Surprising Revelation?
Online trolls, slurs and abuses are an indelible part of our lives. Being anonymous helps.
Several studies have in the past indicated the severe, often ruthless name-calling and abuse that girls and women have been subjected to in the online space.
However, the discourse on how gendered a lot of the brickbats are is not new. The fact that the language in itself is sexist, and paves the way to the eventual fetishisation of the female’s body/physical features is also not new.
A 2014 study by Dove found that over five million negative tweets were posted about beauty and body image. Four out of five were sent by women.
Are we seeing a bigger problem here? A problem that transgresses the boundary of merely assessing misogyny in gendered terms?
Normalising Sexist Abuse
Several studies have also attempted to understand the psychology of young females and why they are subjecting fellow women to misogynistic online abuse.
In a research done by British think tank, NASUWT, it was revealed that girls are deploying sexist language towards teachers and other pupils. It also found cases where girls as young as 15 are calling each other “skinny slut” and “fat slag”, engaging in an apparent conversation of body shaming.
But in a space where misogynistic language gets normalised, even through social media, young girls resorting to similar language is not entirely surprising.
Fat-shaming and skewed gender representations not being challenged become an obvious indicator of their naturalisation.
And maybe it makes sense, then, that young women start believing (or are made to believe) that judging other women is legitimised. And maybe, for some, its a way to channel their own struggles with being victims of the same misogyny elsewhere.
The research, however, cannot be symptomatic of the entirety of social media or even the world, for not only is the sample size small, it also focuses only on Twitter, in one country.
It also uses two words as qualifiers for “misogyny”, which again restricts the scope of the otherwise humongous volume of words that can be included as being sexist.
But this is still an important entry point for delving into the complex psyche of those who perpetuate sexist harassment online.
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