Updated! Threats To Female Comics Bloggers - A Recap

A few weeks ago we told you about recent news reports about threats to female bloggers. We wondered if it was happening in comics. We asked for comments on that, and here are the responses, which we found illuminating. Mister Fanboy is disheartened that other guys are still acting like troglodytes, but sadly, we're not surprised. By now means were we raised by a self-proclaimed feminist, but our mom taught us to respect everyone (Happy Early Mother's Day, BTW). At our core, it's one of our guiding principles. We could have continued to riff on Power Girl's chest, but that just seems frivolous with all of these comments in mind.

UPDATE: As much as possible over the next few days we'll add comments to the post as they come available, and fit into our moving out of state and vacation schedule. The one below from Marionette, in particular, is VERY frightening.

Dawn said...

I've never been threatened. The closest might have been some
insults on a computer geek board by some newbie but by that time I was a regular
and the rest of the guys gave hima good spanking and showed him the
door.

Lisa said...
While I've never had
a threat made on my blog, I HAVE had people link or copy/paste my stuff onto
other sites and attack me. I've had people tell me that I'm just "acting out"
because I'm a woman trying to compete in a man's world. I've had people
recommend that my husband brush up on Shakespear's Taming of the Shrew. I've had
people threaten to come to my store and act out (never did happen). I even had
one guy suggest that I have lobsters living in my crotch. Like I said, they
weren't brave enough to post to my blog, so I wasn't really afraid of them doing
anything more than internet chest pounding, which is all it turned out to
be.

Anonymous said...
I'm only a reader of Girl-Wonder.org, but not long after it started up, one
of their blog columns had to shut off comments because they got swamped with
insults. Then the message boards got spammed by people who posted disgusting
pictures (like "bathtub girl") and threads with nasty titles. "[name of
moderator] YOU WILL BE RAPED" was one I remember. Rumor had it they'd come from
4chan.

Michelle said...
That article
doesn't surprise me at all, sadly.I read a number of "regular" (i.e. non-comics)
feminist blogs, and there is a HUGE amount of hostility towards women who speak
up about oppression. There are a lot of very angry guys who will say the most
appalling things imaginable in order to intimidate and (they hope) silence
women.Most of these feminist bloggers aggressively moderate out the worst of the
garbage, but occasionally they'll share with their readers and it can get pretty
disturbing. Hostility towards women bloggers is frequently gender-based and/or
tinged with sexualized violence, of course. Women who unapologetically speak out
against rape/prostitution/pornography (Biting Beaver for example) come in for
the worst of it; they have to be very careful to maintain their anonymity.After
seeing what feminist bloggers are subjected to for voicing even mild opinions, I
was very nervous about bringing feminism into my comic blog posts (especially
since I've got my name posted on the site). It's early days, but so far my fears
have failed to materialize, thankfully.

Karen Healey said...
I've had rape
threats, hate-fucking threats and threats of non-sexual violence. Curiously,
many of them came in emails/comments criticising me for writing about comics
because "they're only comics!"

Michelle said...
Speaking of the
WaPo article, Hoydon About Town has a post on the passive-voice
victim-blaming approach inherent in that and many other
media reports on male violence against women. Unlike reports of murder or
robbery, "when it comes to reports of men abusing and oppressing women, the
passive voice prevails....The perpetrators of violence are rendered invisible."
Instead of "the man raped the woman" we get "the woman was raped" or even "the
raped woman" and we end up with victim blaming headlines like "Should Women Be
More Responsible?"It's an eye-opening read. The author points out that "Kathy
Sierra was re-abused, over and over, for not “being responsible”. For not
filtering her email, for not “taking it like a man”, for daring to be a woman in
a man’s world, for using her real name, and above all, for “letting herself” be
a victim. Yes, she did it to herself, apparently. The abuser was summarily
disappeared, and who fell into his empty subject position? The abused woman, of
course."

UPDATED COMMENTS:

Marionette said...
I hadn't seen the previous article or I would have replied. I was pretty much hounded out of blogging, one way or another. One blogger horrendously over-reacted when I mentioned that he had posted something almost identical to something I had done, becoming personally abusive. His supporters went further and even told me to kill myself. Shortly after that I got a nasty troll who responded to every post I made with off topic abuse and criticism. Blogging stopped being fun for me.