In terms of “weeding” the thread, I generally try to stay hands off unless something crosses the line. While I might not agree with many of the anti-feminist arguments that were made on that thread, that’s not reason enough to start to delete things. Also, the community itself is pretty good about discussing this stuff.

I’m curious as to what others think we can do better, though. Always open to constructive criticism.

I hope so.

Except they do sometimes use these tactics against guys, although certainly not as often as they do against women.

but to have someone go on and on in great detail about torturing, raping and killing you is whole new level of crap that no one should be expected to quietly put up with.

To me, that’s the key to this whole issue – opening up space in the culture of blogs for people to actually talk about how these things affect them and not just pretend that we’re too strong or smart to let them hurt us. Being bullied isn’t about how strong the bullied is, it’s about how cruel the bully is, and until we see that, keeping quiet about it is the same as victim-blaming.

What’s even more appalling is that the women who participate in those fora are blind to the abuse, often because the guys think they are cute.

How, exactly, is that more appalling than men being abusive? I’m interested to know.

That’s a matter of statistics; anybody is going to be a lot more nervous about dangers that happen all the time than about dangers that almost never happen. If some internet psycho started sending me (I’m male) threats of rape, I wouldn’t believe he’d actually do it, because outside of prisons, males almost never get raped. So it’s just not a credible threat. Since the typical male target remains unaffected by this variety of threat, psycho bully types don’t bother pulling that act on male targets.

Whereas everybody who reads the paper or watches the teevee news knows women get raped pretty often. So when some creep starts mouthing off though he were going to stalk and rape a woman, even though most likely he’s just a jerk-off trying to freak her out, she takes the threat seriously, because that sort of thing actually has happened frequently before. Since that technique of harassment achieves its goal so often – the creep who is trying to freak the woman out does so – that successful technique gets used again and again and again.