A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

From the first link (the pew poll):

Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26% of these young women have been stalked online, and 25% were the target of online sexual harassment. In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers and young people in general.

You mention regarding the second link (which you yourself say is 'decidedly non-scientific', and yet still proceed to cite):

There's also this decidedly non-scientific study of Twitter[2] which shows male celebrities receive more "abuse" on Twitter than female celebrities, where "abuse" means "something tweeted @ them with a swear word in it."

So, there was no attempt made to determine the severity of the abuse. You sound like you want to find empirical data to back your point of view, but your sources don't really say what you claim them to be saying.

My $0.02 (as a guy), sure you get some abuse, but none of it really matters. If someone emails me cursing, saying he's a navy seal and is going to come to my house to kill me, we all know it's BS and won't happen. For girls it's a threat that's much more likely to happen. As the pew study you linked to mentioned, 26% of young women have been stalked online.

I think, in fact, you'll find that I didn't say that there was no difference, just that the differences weren't as large as I've seen claimed in various online discussions.

I also made very sure to make sure that I pointed out the second study was both unscientific and poorly calibrated. The fact that you noticed that there was no determination of severity was quite deliberate on my part.

My point, such as it is, is that online vitriol and harassment isn't particularly restrained by boundaries, be those based on sex, race, or sexuality. I'm not saying "women don't have it bad," I'm saying "everyone has it kinda bad." There's a subtle but significant difference between those two points that you seem to be confusing.

The most interesting part of your comment, as I read it, is this:

>If someone emails me cursing, saying he's a navy seal and is going to come to my house to kill me, we all know it's BS and won't happen. For girls it's a threat that's much more likely to happen as the pew study you linked to mentioned. 26% of young women have been stalked online.

If it happens to a man, brush it off. If it happens to a woman, it's a real threat. Is this position borne out by evidence, or is it a symptom of the pervasive sexist undertones of society that say things like "Men can handle tough situations, while women need to be protected from them"? That's not a claim, by the way, but a genuine question.

It seems that you're intent on quibbling semantics, selectively reading the data you've presented. For instance, even though I actually quantified that online threats are more tangible to women (from a study you actually linked to), by pointing to the far higher rates of stalking of women online, you continue to just claim it's too complicated to know.

I don't know about you, but if I were a woman, and 1 in 4 of women in my age group had been stalked online (or I had been, remember, 26% probability), I'd take EVERY threat much more seriously. That means there's actually a multiplier, every toothless threat has a much larger psychological impact when there's a certain % that is for real, and the real and fake threats can't be sorted from each other.

So yes, by and large, women are more harassed online. I never said otherwise. What I said is that, based on my experience, women (while they are over-represented) are not as over-represented when it comes to harassment as the common perception seems to be. This is not data taken from the study, it's not a quote, and it's not cherry picking anything. Reading it as me attempting to skew the results of the Pew poll to support is incorrect. I'm not saying the study is wrong, I'm saying common perception is.

We also might have completely misaligned expectations of what "tangible" means. You've already said you're predisposed towards dismissing harassment towards men, and that's "BS". My question is what makes it "tangible" for women? Do you consider online stalking tangible, but online physical threats not? Why?

These aren't semantic quibblings. Whether nor not harassment is perceived as serious or not makes a huge difference towards how it is dealt with, both in individual circumstances and in society at large -- in this case, evidenced by you dismissing harassment towards men due to it not being tangible enough.