We are living through a jubilee of internet forgiveness. After many years of being what it is and doing what it does, the Web seems unexpectedly prepared to forgive its debts, free its captives, and start afresh with the mocked and exiled of yesteryear. And, like the biblically mandated jubilees of yore, we are making something of a celebration of it.

Lisa McElroy, a law professor at Drexel University, made news online in late April when she accidentally sent her class email list a link to a porn video. Gawker picked up the story, with this weighty item: “Professor Accidentally Sent ‘Interesting’ Anal Bead Porn to Her Students.” Unlike some of her colleagues in Internet blundering, McElroy escaped the media and social network scrutiny unscathed: She kept her job and, within a month, published an op-ed in The Washington Post detailing her time in the Twitter maw. ESPN reporter Britt McHenry didn’t suffer unduly, either, after being caught on camera insulting a towing company employee. Even Monica Lewinsky has emerged into the public view (yet again). She seems confident and calm, transformed into something like the patron saint of the publicly shamed. Her recent TED Talk, in which she referred to herself as “Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously,” met with widespread approval, and she has been the subject of a series of approving articles, in Salon, Forbes, The New Yorker, and the mother of all validating content, Upworthy.

Were it not for all the blatantly self-congratulatory posturing about how forgiving we all must become—“When the Cyberbully Is You,” The New York Times, April 29—it would hardly feel like the Internet at all. Yet, as with most displays of public forgiveness, the pardons contain a whiff of fear: There but for the grace of God go I. But punishment is fickle—it strikes or spares unpredictably—and so, too, is forgiveness. Women reap scantier benefits in the way of public forbearance than their similarly derided male counterparts. And some women, it seems, never get in on the jubilee at all.

If you had heard of Suey Park in early 2014, it was likely because she was a Twitter brawler, someone ingrained in the hurly-burly of social media and rewarded for it with followers—23,000, a fair number for a 23-year-old living in Chicago. (Suey is not Park’s real first name, but a sardonic play on “chop suey” and Asian American stereotypes.) Mostly she tweeted about race and gender, and none too gently. “Women of color aren’t ignorant. From our subordinated position we can just more clearly see your white gaze and bullshit,” went one representative example. “Please work on your twisted views of anti-racism. You may have taken a social justice course, but I’ve had years of white bullshit 101,” went another. She was young, savvy, and had a knack for creating hashtags that trended, most notably #NotYourAsianSidekick, a play on how Asian characters in popular culture are depicted as ancillary, if at all.

Then last year in March, Park produced her most significant, and—in terms of debt accrual on the great Internet shame-ledger—her most notorious hashtag. It was meant to push back against another tweet, this one from The Colbert Report Twitter account, which read: “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” This was a sarcastic rejoinder to the creation of a charitable foundation by the Washington Redskins NFL franchise, designed to draw attention away from its objectionable team name. A few hours later, she unleashed a Twitter outrage cycle by replying: