Women's Studies International Forum 47 (2014) 46–55 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif Online incivility or sexual harassment? Conceptualising women's experiences in the digital age Jessica Megarry School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia article info synopsis Available online 20 August 2014 Launched in 2006, the growth of Twitter as a microblogging platform has been exponential, yet little research to date specifically considers women's experiences of the medium. This article draws on a case study of the #mencallmethings hashtag, in which women describe and discuss the verbal abuse that they have received online from men. Providing a broad based context for the specific analysis of the #mencallmethings hashtag, I concentrate on the theoretical contributions made by western feminist research over the last 30 years to embed the aggressive harassment of women online in a wide review of types of threats to women. I argue that the harassment conveyed in the hashtag should be recognised as online sexual harassment, and a form of excluding women's voices from the digital public sphere. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction hashtag became a trending topic, algorithmically determined to be one of the most popular conversations on Twitter at the The aggressive harassment of women online is a topic that time. is receiving increasing attention from the media, academia, and The hashtag provides a unique case study through which to the general public. More than 15 years ago, feminist linguist analyse a significant tension in academic debates surrounding Dale Spender (1995: 207) noted that ‘if, because of threat- the internet, online participation and gender: the assumption women refuse to participate [online], they will be cutting that the online public sphere can provide an equal and themselves off from the information medium’.Todaytheissue democratic social platform. This article considers the issue of of equal participation online is even more pertinent, as online online social equality to be broader than that of women simply social networks have become a vital part of our daily digitalised achieving numerical parity with men in digital spaces. Despite reality (Dines & Humez, 2011; Herdağdelen & Baroni, 2011). women now representing the majority of social media users While social science scholarship has celebrated the emergence (Duggan & Smith, 2014; Heil & Piskorski, 2009), this has not of Twitter in terms of the medium's potential to enhance digital resulted in a feminist transformation of digital technologies. democracy (Loader & Mercea, 2011), it has often ignored Rather, it appears that the underlying system of patriarchy key issues regarding social equality, specifically the ability of remains stable (Halbert, 2004: 126). Many scholars have women to participate equally with men. pointed to the widespread culture of misogyny that exists Created on 7 November, 2011, and primarily a phenom- online (Barak, 2005; Bartow, 2009; Citron, 2009b; Franks, 2012; enon pertaining to US, UK and Australian based bloggers Ritter, 2009; Spender, 1995), and indeed the appearance of the (Singer, 2011), the #mencallmethings hashtag generated a #mencallmethings hashtag suggests that there is a problematic forum for female Twitter users to publically reproduce and disconnect between the experiences of women and men in discuss examples of the harassment they receive online from cyberspace. As such, I proceed from the vantage point that men. Through a series of short public messages known as equality online is dependent not only on the ability to occupy a Tweets, what emerged was a harrowing picture of abuse, which space, but to be able to influence it and speak without fear of often took the form of violent threats. The #mencallmethings threat or harassment. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.07.012 0277-5395/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. J. Megarry / Women's Studies International Forum 47 (2014) 46–55 47 In this article I make the case that the aggressive harassment limitations and ethical considerations involved in engaging with of women online, as conveyed in the #mencallmethings the #mencallmethings data set. hashtag, should be conceptualised as online sexual harassment, In this article I consider tweets which reference and a form of excluding women's voices from the digital public '#mencallmethings' in the first month after its creation, from sphere. Driven by a concern for the lack and loss of women's 7 November, 2011 to 7 December, 2011. I chose this particular voices in the public domain, I aim to situate the abuse time period in order to observe the differing conversational experienced by women online within a discursive context that strands develop and play out: while the bulk of responses to recognises and reflects the reality of the situation for the women the #mencallmethings hashtag were posted in the first few involved. Divorced from feminist understandings of male social days after its appearance, discussion and media reporting was control and the silencing of women in the public sphere, the still continuing one month later.1 I gained access to tweets by type of harassment conveyed in the #mencallmethings hashtag way of Topsy Labs Incorporated, an online resource which is often viewed as inconsequential and apolitical (Citron, 2009b; purports to be ‘the largest social data index in the world’ and Jane, 2012). My approach is intended to render visible the provides access to all publically available Twitter content harms done to women as a social class through this behaviour. (Topsy, 2012). Topsy returns 578 tweets within the given The article begins with a discussion of the parameters, period, and includes information such as the date the original limitations and ethical considerations involved in engaging tweet was posted, the content of the tweet, the author's with the #mencallmethings data set. I then situate the hashtag username and a web link to the original tweet. The hashtag also phenomenon in relation to the principal debates regarding had cultural relevance beyond the scope of Twitter, as it was women's place in the public sphere, the possibilities the reported on in mainstream print media in the USA, UK and internet might provide for women's public participation, and Australia. These media texts are included in my case study of the ways in which these discussions have played out. The the hashtag phenomenon because ‘cultural documents … article then moves to a consideration of the relationship shape norms [of women's oppression]; they do not just reflect between the hashtag entries and feminist theories of sexual them’ (Reinharz, 1992: 151). Articles were identified using the harassment. I draw on the concept of street harassment to search term ‘#mencallmethings’ and returned three articles elucidate the particular manifestations of online sexual harass- from Australia, five from the United Kingdom and two from the ment, and offer conclusions. United States.2 My analysis of the #mencallmethings phenomenon has Mapping women's experiences online: methodology and two distinct aspects. Firstly, I isolated tweets in which women the #mencallmethings hashtag recounted examples of online harassment verbatim, and completed a content analysis to deduce the nature of the The growth of the microblogging social media platform harassment.3 Secondly, I undertook a critical feminist analysis Twitter has been exponential (Efron, 2011). Twitter allows of the broader hashtag conversation and the media reporting of users to participate in public conversations through the posting the phenomenon. As Twitter is not by nature a closed forum, of short messages known as tweets. Tweets can contain a conversations are not able to be restricted to particular groups maximum of 140 characters, and users are able to connect their of users. While the hashtag provided a space for women to individual messages to larger themes through the use of the collectively discuss and begin to politically conceptualise their hashtag symbol (Murthy, 2011). Some 18% of internet users experiences of online harassment, the conversation was also now have a Twitter account, with some 46% of Twitter users appropriated by a variety of voices. This discussion, combined checking in daily (Duggan & Smith, 2014). Twitter has been with the media reporting of the #mencallmethings phenom- positioned by a recent Pew Report (Smith, Raine, Shneiderman, enon, was used to analyse the ways in which women's voices et al., 2014)as the new public square: a space to disperse and and concerns are shaped and controlled by dominant social seek information and connect with others through public norms in the public sphere. debate and discussion. In this sense Twitter is ‘as important While the correlation between the political persuasion of to document as any other large scale public gathering’ a specific woman and the degree of harassment received is (Smith et al., 2014), and provides researchers with unprec- outside the boundaries of this particular case study, the edented access to online social and political behaviour. #mencallmethings hashtag raises pertinent questions about The tweet data of users responding to the #mencallmethings the safety of women who contribute to public debates online hashtag is no longer directly available from Twitter itself, which and are critical of male dominance. Some of the women represents