Abstract
From Ada Lovelace to Grace Hopper to Adele Goldberg, women have played and continue to play an integral role in the development of computer technologies. One of these technologies, the Internet, is an important forum for women to connect with others, share and debate ideas, and engage in social activism. In Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral, Karla Mantilla deftly documents how the Internet has also become a haven for people who want to threaten and silence women.
According to Mantilla, “generic trolling,” which refers to “making online comments or engaging in behaviors that are purposely meant to be annoying or disruptive” (p. 4), has been around for at least a couple of decades. The first part of the book describes various forms of online harassment and draws important distinctions between generic trolling and gendertrolling. Mantilla describes seven characteristics that she says are relatively unique to gendertrolling. For example, women are the primary targets, and the attacks tend to be sustained, vicious, sexualized, and engaged in by coordinated groups (e.g., the Gamergate incident in 2014). Racism is also a prevalent ingredient in attacks against women of color. Mantilla documents each of the characteristics by detailing the experiences of individual women and providing explicit examples of gendertrolling tactics, ranging from gender-based insults to explicit rape and death threats. One would expect that feminists would be the primary targets of gendertrolling attacks, but Mantilla points out that any woman who expresses any kind of opinion online, whether it concerns feminism or something as mundane as cooking tips, can be the target of vitriolic and abusive harassment.
Reading the first part of Gendertrolling is reminiscent of the essay on sexual terrorism by Carole Sheffield (1987) in which she described rape, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment as mechanisms to control women. This theme is evident in the second part of Mantilla’s book where she does a nice job of positioning gendertrolling in historical and cultural contexts. Although the online medium is relatively new, gendertrolling has evolved as one more method used to silence women’s voices and control their behavior. Responses to women who write about being targets of gendertrolling mirror the responses that women have experienced for centuries when speaking out about gender equity or sexual abuse and harassment: blaming the victim, denying that gendertrolling is a serious issue, and claiming that gendertrolling is an inevitable part of the online world. The argument that gendertrolling is trivial because it does not affect a woman’s “real” or off-line life is not valid because millions of women use the Internet daily, and many need it for their work. Some sites such as Twitter, as well as law enforcement agencies, have been slow in acknowledging the seriousness of gendertrolling and in instituting mechanisms to control and eradicate such attacks.
The last chapter of the book focuses on strategies to deal with the problem of gendertrolling. Individual strategies entail severely curtailing an online presence and using labor-intensive methods to detect and block gender trolls. Maintaining an online presence may subvert and even defeat the gender trolls’ goal of silencing women. However, until legal and workplace changes occur, such as revisions to existing harassment laws and greater gender and racial diversity in the Internet workforce, women’s well-being and lives remain endangered. The most important and difficult change will be cultural change that tackles “the root of the problem: misogyny” (p. 218). Her strong feminist perspective, vivid examples, and extensive documentation in the notes will make Mantilla’s book of interest to activists, instructors, students, and researchers. Because she names and documents the problem of gendertrolling, Mantilla has taken an important step toward the cultural change that she so passionately advocates.