When feminist women reach a certain critical mass of readership or influence, then mass negative exposure and harassment invariably comes their way. Sooner or later, there are just too many people who know about you, and the threats become credible: Blacklisting, hacking, smear campaigns, invasion of private property, maybe even straight-up bodily harm. At a certain point it goes beyond grudges or trolling or sarcastic comments or even just isolated scary dudes; it becomes a large-scale Thing, and it attracts its fair share of people who operate without anything even vaguely resembling a conscience.
Sady Doyle › Why I Didn’t Delete Tiger Beatdown
Also, another quote worth noting:
In each case, this happened because the women were getting too close to power: A President, a presidential candidate. The idea that these women might be doing politics, not “just” gender politics. That was enough to set it off.
An excellent run down, posted by Sady on what happens when women who write about gender, feminism and politics get too famous. The post is a long read but it does a great job of detailing the most aggressive cases of the past couple of years. So aggressive that some of them included rape and death threats and one of the women involved, Kathy Sierra, had to quit her job due to the aggressions she was subjected to.
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