"Why Women Aren't Welcome on the Internet"

"But no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet. Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services, and missed wages. I’ve spent countless hours over the past four years logging the online activity of one particularly committed cyberstalker, just in case. And as the Internet becomes increasingly central to the human experience, the ability of women to live and work freely online will be shaped, and too often limited, by the technology companies that host these threats, the constellation of local and federal law enforcement officers who investigate them, and the popular commentators who dismiss them—all arenas that remain dominated by men, many of whom have little personal understanding of what women face online every day."

http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170

I've posted things like this before, but I am particularly inspired to return to this theme because I recently had a conversation with my brothers in which they had zero, zero idea of why I would be freaked out by Reddit. I understand not completely feeling my level of discomfort with certain parts of the internet, but it is so so jarring how completely invisible all of the sexism is to my brothers.
It's also frustrating that it's one of the things that has to be proven, that unaffected people actively don't believe in, or don't believe in the harms of. This article shouldn't need to exist, because it shouldn't be something that has to be proven again and again to people who are intelligent and caring.

It's also like that thing where it's really, really easy to get away with something if it is done casually, if it doesn't seem intentional or malicious, it's just something that you are doing like whatever.

This is a great point: "Abusers tend to operate anonymously, or under pseudonyms. But the women they target often write on professional platforms, under their given names, and in the context of their real lives. Victims don’t have the luxury of separating themselves from the crime. When it comes to online threats, “one person is feeling the reality of the Internet very viscerally: the person who is being threatened,” says Jurgenson. “It’s a lot easier for the person who made the threat—and the person who is investigating the threat—to believe that what’s happening on the Internet isn’t real.”"