{"id":532,"date":"2011-08-29T15:14:32","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T22:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/?p=532"},"modified":"2011-08-29T15:14:32","modified_gmt":"2011-08-29T22:14:32","slug":"being-female-online-is-being-a-target-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/2011\/08\/29\/being-female-online-is-being-a-target-online\/","title":{"rendered":"being female online is being a target online"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been online since 1993.\u00a0 Through it all, I’ve used my real name, and I’ve never tried to hide my gender.\u00a0 I’ve taken part in various online communities, mostly geek and music.\u00a0 One of my earliest lessons in being online is that being female makes you a target for threats.\u00a0 I’ve received rape threats, most notably after I’ve mentioned that I financially support RAINN<\/a>.\u00a0 I’ve received death threats.\u00a0 The threat that bothered me the most was a threat from a rather unhinged music fan against my beloved cat, since said music fan lived in the same city that I did and so I felt like there was a chance of him actually trying to do something.<\/p>\n

Threats are the reason why I moderate comments here.\u00a0 When I first started blogging, I didn’t bother.\u00a0 Spam was my only concern, when I first started blogging, and modern spam filters do a reasonable job of managing it.\u00a0 I started moderating comments when I got one particular commenter who saw it as his mission to threaten to rape me.\u00a0 At first, moderation didn’t change his comments, but it did keep an echo chamber from forming.\u00a0 Finally, he got bored, and stopped posting.\u00a0 Maybe he’s still reading, I don’t know, but he’s not making the threats any longer.\u00a0 I still get threats on occasion, most often if I’ve seen an uptick in traffic because I’ve gotten linked elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Sadly, it came as no surprise to me today when I saw another female blogger say that she’s gone into hiding as a result of death threats<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I got a death threat.<\/p>\n

I got another death threat.<\/p>\n

And then I got one telling me that if I went to a popular blogger\u2019s conference in November, they would find me, they would kill me, and they would kill everyone around me.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

As a reasonably prominent female face on the internet, I always knew the day would come when it would get very, very ugly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t know why being female online sparks this kind of response.\u00a0 I don’t know why there’s an echo chamber that creates an ever-escalating environment.<\/p>\n

And I don’t really know what to do about it, other than continue to be myself.\u00a0 Yes, I’m female.\u00a0 Yes, I’m a software engineer.\u00a0 Yes, I have opinions, and I share them unapologetically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been online since 1993.\u00a0 Through it all, I’ve used my real name, and I’ve never tried to hide my gender.\u00a0 I’ve taken part in various online communities, mostly geek and music.\u00a0 One of my earliest lessons in being online is that being female makes you a target for threats.\u00a0 I’ve received rape threats, most … Continue reading being female online is being a target online<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nadyne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":533,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions\/533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}