#BirKadındaMutlaka was plastered across Turkish Twitter in 2013. The hashtag translates in English to “a woman must be…” A 2015 analysis of the trend found that 94% of the 636 tweets reviewed under the hashtag contributed to “patriarchal discourse.” This was viewed as enforcing women’s traditional domestic and professional roles, physical beauty, and/or moral values. Social media was full of misogynists taking the liberty to tell women what they should and should not be.

6 years later, and not much has changed. Both mainstream and more niche social media sites’ forum-like nature allows for IRL-taboo topics to thrive online. The anonymity of social media helps too; it’s easy to be flagrantly sexist when you can hide behind a profile name.

E-misogynists like to target women who they feel threatened by, and often they are intentionally targeting women in power. So the mixture of being a woman, with being a political figure who may make controversial decisions, is one that they prey off of.

Since 2016, Brexit has been heating up political tensions not just in the UK’s parliament, but online as well. And female public figures are at the center of it all. British activist Gina Miller and Labour MP Diane Abbott both were subjected to misogynistic abuse online, which included death and rape threats. The comments Miller and Abbot received were laced with racism, proving that when being a woman of color is added to the combination, the misogyny reaches another level.

The comments were rampant both before and after the event of Labour MP Jo Cox’s murder, in which her attacker killed her in the name of Brexit. Abbot cites the murder of Cox as when the abuse really began to set off alarms within her. “The turning point for me was the murder of Jo Cox.” She continues, “Up until then I’d always said it would never happen. I suddenly realised it could.”

Throughout mainland Europe, female politicians endure non-stop onslaught from far-right parties. In Germany, the growing online presence of the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) is directly affecting female, liberal politicians. Katharina Schulze, a leader of the left-wing Greens party, has been mentioned by the AfD on Facebook 10 times more frequently than any other politician. Comments range from sexualization and implied rape threats, to claiming that Schulze should be thanking white men for permitting “young ladies like her to achieve whatever they want”.

What motivates a lot of these online attacks is simply that the presence and following of sexists on social media are growing. Many point to the “manosphere” of Reddit. With subgroup names such as “Involuntarily Celibates” and “Men Going Their Own Way”, the manosphere is a section of the website where men have no shame in expressing their hatred towards the opposite sex.

This growing manosphere doesn’t just motivate abuse on social media; it emboldens real-life terrorists to attack women. After a man in Toronto drove a van into a group of people, killing eight women and two men, it was revealed that he was an incel, “radicalized online and spending time in forums that served as an echo chamber for his increasingly violent thoughts.” The attacker was frequent in the manosphere, specifically Involuntarily Celibates (a.k.a Incels) and posted a disturbing pledge of allegiance to the group on Reddit before he killed ten people.

The attacker aligned himself with a group whose beliefs center around the sole idea of women refusing them sex. Incel culture surrounds a biological hierarchical system, stemming from the belief that a man can get sex-based only on the desirability of his genetic traits. At the top of the pyramid are “Chads”, men who the Incels define as so genetically blessed that they can get any woman. Incels lie at the bottom of the pyramid, and unlike Chads, are so unwanted by women that they are “involuntarily celibate”.

It is the online sharing of this toxic ideology that has fueled so many incels to despise women. And it is that hate which inspires violence both online and in the real world.

These themes that E-misogynists are writing about and discussing may be nuanced in their pseudoscientific lingo, but their roots are planted in feelings as old as misogyny itself. Exclusion, male anger and entitlement. They are hurdles that women have always had to climb ladders in order to get over.

The reason why it’s important to discuss this now is because of the issue of online hate speech is more contemporary than ever. The El Paso shooter’s radicalization serves as an example. The gunman was frequent on 8chan. Though he was radicalized by online xenophobes and not misogynists, he displays how easy it is for extreme prejudices to travel across the internet and touch everyday people. The gunman had read the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter and followed in his footsteps by uploading his own before he opened fire in a Walmart. Radicalization is easier now than ever.

In the digital age, hate speech in women’s lives has acquired a new form: men frustrated with their loneliness, leaned over their computer, keyboard-smashing, and blaming women for their problems. And while the image may seem comical to some at first, it’s actually terrifying, considering the serious impact these men can have on other men. It’s terrifying because the internet can be a tool used by the oppressor, taking advantage of the first development in all of history that allows an idea, no matter how extreme, to reach any user in the world in a matter of milliseconds.

Whether it’s a Twitter trend of men describing the acceptable wife or a closed-off social media subgroup that fantasizes about raping women, misogyny is rampant online. And this, unfortunately, makes the implications of the patriarchy much more visible in the lives of women and girls globally. If that’s not acknowledged and acted upon, it’s only a matter of time until more problematic, hate-filled, anti-female posts are plastered on the walls of Reddit. As more men join the hate-filled caverns of the internet, more women feel unsafe and lives are threatened.

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