Megan Carpentier, Jessica Valenti, Rebecca Carroll, Sady Doyle, and Mary Hamilton are writers and editors at The Guardian (opens in new tab). In their roles there, they oftentimes write about how women are harassed online. The video above features the five women reading their most recent abusive comments aloud.
The messages range from name-calling ("cold-hearted, emotionless, stony bitch") to threatening ("I will fuck your ass to death, you filthy fucking whore") to scary, rambling ridiculousness ("The Holocaust was an individual matter of choice of many Germans and pro-Nazis also abortion is you are a Nazi").
Some of the abuse is completely unrelated to ... anything. In response to merely posting a photo of her grandfather, Valenti was told to "kill yourself, cunt nugget." She is able to laugh in the face of this, but that comment and others bring to light the aggressive harassment most women face online.
It's hard to believe there are humans who actually take the time to write these things, but alas. There are small (small!) steps being taken to prevent this kind of abuse. Twitter has enabled a block feature (opens in new tab) to be used against violent harassment and Reddit has begun blocking certain subreddit threads (opens in new tab) despite complaints from users.
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