Earlier this week, Monica Lewinsky wrote about being "possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the internet" (recalling the biting sexism she experienced in the late 1990s), and tonight, in a BBC2 documentary, Kirsty Wark is exploring whether men have a newfound freedom to be abusive to women, online and off. We asked five leading feminists whether, in the years since the internet began, misogyny has grown worse, or simply become much more obvious.

Nina Power: 'Is there more sexism now? I think not'

Nina Power 2 Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Given that sexism is still useful for those who can profit from it, either financially or emotionally – employers, abusers, politicians, for instance – it is not surprising that the internet hasn't magically eradicated the individual desires that structure the whole. A sexist world is no less sexist for being partly online.

That said, and given that the majority of the world's population doesn't use the internet, it would be a little foolhardy to make sweeping claims about the proportionality of sexism to technology. Would we want to say that there is quantitatively more sexism now the internet exists? I think not. We could tentatively say that sexism looks slightly different online. The allure of anonymity certainly appeals to some, just as honking horns and shouting abuse from cars does to others (perhaps they are the same people, but I suspect not).

At the same time, depending on who you read online, the internet is a place of enormous recognition and insight. Whether it be personal accounts of exploitation and oppression, critical pieces about, say, the depiction of women on TV shows, or analyses of common assumptions about gender and gendered language, it is possible to point to a much greater awareness of the nature and types of sexism than it ever was before.

For a start, I'm sure that people who grow up with the internet from a very young age are far more aware of what sexism is. For those of us who didn't, it perhaps took a lot longer to work out. But I don't think sexism online or off is in anyone's interest, apart from those who get off on maintaining the status quo: and these are fewer people than we might think. I remain optimistic!

Nina Power is the author of One-Dimensional Woman

Lola Okolosie: 'Sexism is depressingly ubiquitous online'

There is nothing new about any of the prejudices that plague us today. The internet is not an egalitarian utopia "open" to all – because it is made up of people, it inevitably reflects the social and structural inequalities prevalent in the wider world. Sexism is depressingly ubiquitous online because it is a real world problem. Indeed, it has long been so normalised that large swaths of people are unable to see it as a reality, instead considering it an imagined phenomenon experienced by the pathetically oversensitive and/or humourless.

But an aspect which is particular to our historical moment is that anonymity, coupled with high-speed broadband connections, has enabled the internet to become a cauldron of hate and vitriol, led by men against women. In 2006, researchers at the University of Maryland found female chatroom users received 25 times more threatening or sexually malicious messages than their male counterparts. Parents were advised: "Kids can still exercise plenty of creativity and self-expression without divulging their gender." The message? Being online is fine, so long as you don't identify as a woman.

When age, sexuality, race and ability get thrown into the mix too, women from particular social groups often feel it best to disengage from their online lives altogether – a form of virtual gentrification. The StopBlackGirls hashtag which trended on Twitter in 2013 was just one example of black women being demeaned and degraded on the internet.

Women's ability to claim a space for ourselves online is severely impeded by the abuse directed our way. The impunity with which so many trolls act has been fed by a society still dealing with entrenched inequalities; the wheels of time haven't really moved far at all.

Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer

Beatrix Campbell: 'We now know what's inside the misogynist head'

Misogyny is institutionalised, and has been for a few thousand years. Is it worse since the internet? Well, how would women know? Men are the experts, and they're not the ones having this debate. What feels different, is that the internet has enabled men to change the terms of engagement – what might have been sequestered dirty talk, aired in the pub, the club or the public urinals, is shared with women who would have been excluded from those spaces. There are new and sheltered platforms to broadcast nastiness. Dirty talk once shared among coteries of men is now a kind of public discourse. What appears to be democratic access, via the internet, to opinionated women's debates, becomes the opportunity for up-close and personal contempt and cruelty.

Feminists have always been menaced, mocked, harassed, boycotted and sued. Men's outrage is not new. I'm regarded as a street fighter – in the nicest possible way of course – and rudeness, ridicule and threats are an occupational hazard. But the internet changes the context: whoever hacked my website and redirected it to pornography entered my personal and professional space in an unprecedented way, which could not be ignored. It was easy for him, but cost me time and money.

Men who hate us don't have to go out and find us, leave the house, post an anonymous letter or go to a meeting so that they can heckle. They don't have to move an inch to be near us.

All they have to do is use their imagination, and then, by the flick of a finger or the click of a mouse, throw their nightmare fantasies into our faces. It gives them access to women they can't otherwise touch; the opportunity for domination by public humiliation. It licenses abuse as a higher form of argument.

Is misogyny worse now? Who knows. But before, we didn't necessarily know what was in the misogynist head. Now we do.

Beatrix Campbell is a journalist, author, broadcaster, campaigner and playwright

Bidisha: 'Modern men hate us more than ever'

I thought modern men would recognise that women are human beings. Instead, they hate us more than ever. Online you can find clips of hate porn posted by abusive men of their exes, or trolls on Twitter attacking female journalists. The many pages posted on Facebook, celebrating rape and other male violence against women, were only removed after months of feminist campaigning. T-shirts with the slogan Keep Calm And Rape A Lot were for sale on Amazon until an online backlash.

Rape culture and porn culture have conflated into one toxic misogyny-bomb. Rapists, abusers, harassers and molesters record, share and boast online about what they've done, using the material as a way of dominating, humiliating and controlling their victims. Porn teaches both sexes from childhood that a female is a non-human object to be used any way a male wants, that she can feel no pain – or enjoys pain. There are girls who do not realise they've been raped, because they did not know they could refuse.

These are not women's issues but men's issues, since the perpetrators are males of all ages and cultures. At least now the toxic matter is rising to the surface for all to see. In its blatancy and the chilling silence of the billions of men who offer tacit support of abusers, it gives women's advocates like me something to attack. Nobody can deny how much men hate women now. Not all men: just enough for one woman in three to be raped or beaten by a man at least once in her life.

The fightback is happening too. There has been a resurgence in online and offline feminist activism globally as women speak up about what we have survived; testifying, giving witness, campaigning. Through our global conversation we are establishing solidarity, and realising that men's abuse of women, the justifications of the perpetrators, the collusion of wider society and the punishing of victims are exactly the same all over the world.

Bidisha is a journalist, broadcaster and writer

Joan Smith: 'Misogyny went mainstream with Jack the Ripper'

Misogyny has always been with us. But for most of recorded history, your average woman-hater couldn't even read and write. Those who could, from Roman poets to the medieval monks who wrote a manual for witch-hunters, were not shy about expressing their loathing of women. Misogyny arrived early as a literary form and went mainstream in the 19th century with the arrival of Jack the Ripper. Popular fascination with men who mutilate and murder women has never abated, and neither has the tendency to give them aggrandising nicknames.

Confronted with the frothing misogyny of the internet, it is easy to forget this history. Who could have imagined that so many individuals would use social networking sites to post torrents of abuse to women they've never even met? Did these people secretly harbour rape fantasies for years, returning home each day filled with loathing for women they'd passed in the street or overheard chatting to friends on the bus?

I wouldn't be surprised if some of them did. They probably hated feminism as well, and believed all those gleeful commentaries announcing its demise. Then two things happened: feminism came bouncing back, more invigorated than ever, and suddenly they had an instant outlet for their sick imaginings. In the past, abusing a woman you didn't know required effort: discovering her name and address, posting a letter or taking the risk of making a telephone call.

Now, even the laziest misogynist can spot a woman on TV, Google her and send a threatening message via Twitter within seconds. In that sense, the internet is a monument to the wisdom of second thoughts. It has created a channel to the spiteful and illogical inner worlds of total strangers, and the sheer volume of misogyny lurking there is dispiriting.

Don't forget, though, that the ancient Athenians are credited with inventing democracy but kept women in a separate part of the house. For centuries, confining women to the private sphere was one of the main methods powerful men used to avoid dealing with their fear of women; it's still happening in some parts of the world. In the west, that just doesn't work any more. Women are much more visible – and so is woman-hating.

Joan Smith is a columnist, novelist and human rights activist