Fat shaming,feminism and Facebook: What ‘women who eat on tubes’ reveal about social media and the boundaries of women’s bodies

Social media, food and body politics

In 2014, the journalist Sophie Wilkinson was visiting her grandparents in the suburbs of London. She was running late; her toilet was leaking, the plumber was delayed and she ended up grabbing a salad from Marks and Spencer to eat on the way. A man boarded the tube and sat opposite her, while she was eating her salad. He took out his phone and seemed to take a photograph of Wilkinson, though no communication took place between the two. Later, Wilkinson remembered the Facebook group: ‘Women Who Eat on Tubes’. She was embarrassed and humiliated to find her photo online. And beneath it a series of comments about her: ‘I would like the name of her finishing school. Fail’, ‘Entering or exiting her gaping orifice’ (Wilkinson, 2014).

A striking characteristic of media culture in the early-21st century is the fetishisation and surveillance of women’s bodies and behaviour amid a heightened form of moral hysteria (Blackman and Walkerdine, 2017). There are a few spaces where this pervasive and ongoing critique might be challenged. Wilkinson reports that she contacted the photographer personally, letting him know that the image had caused her embarrassment and asking him to remove it from the site. He apparently agreed, but instead reported Wilkinson’s intervention to the rest of the group. Wilkinson was then ‘cussed for being a ginger, for being a journalist, for being what they think is an “amateur” journalist. I was called a “witch” and then came more sexual comments’. She discovered that taking photographs of strangers without their consent is not illegal, nor is posting them online (though the offensive and threatening comments are).

With few exceptions, in the United Kingdom, women can be photographed anywhere at any time by anyone. And those images can be uploaded to sites like Facebook with a little consequence to the photographer. Wilkinson was able to get the photo removed by Facebook – but only because the photographer had posted it twice, giving credence to her claim of harassment. This did not prevent the vitriol of group members: ‘We know where she works, we know what she eats and we know what her Twitter handle is’, someone stated, suggesting that Wilkinson could be stalked and harassed in real life as a result of her non-compliance with the expectation that her online presence was fair game. When she called for the site to be closed down, members took to Twitter to call Wilkinson ‘a cunt, a dyke, and worse’: ‘All this rage, for what? Trying to stop other women feeling the same shame I did. God knows, women have enough issues with disordered eating as it is’ (Wilkinson, 2014).

The Facebook group Women Who Eat On Tubes (WWEOT) was created in 2011. Its sole purpose was to showcase illicit photographs taken of women, like Wilkinson, ‘caught’ eating on London underground. Along with the photograph, members were asked to upload the time the photo was taken, to describe what women were eating, and on which tube line. The group rapidly gained upwards of 30,000 followers. Its male founder, a middle-aged film director, rejected claims that it sought to humiliate women, arguing that tubes were public spaces and that photographing women eating was equivalent to wildlife photography: ‘At its truest form’, Tony Burke said in an interview in The Telegraph, photographing strangers eating on the tube ‘should cherish its subjects in the way a wildlife photographer cherishes a kingfisher in a river’. Burke’s choice of metaphors is interesting, tapping into a lengthy tradition of viewing women, like nature, as objects to be surveyed, possessed and conquered. The male gaze, with its implied threat of violence, simultaneously depicts women as the hunted, men as the hunters (Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2003).

Burke dismissed Wilkinson’s claims that she was ‘victimised. And hurt’. He said, ‘anyone who gets their knickers in a twist over that . . . needs to develop a sense of humour and toughen up’. Rejecting the idea that the site encouraged bullying, he added, ‘if [women] were at home being photographed, that’s sinister . . . They’re in a public place. That’s the risk you take’ (Sanghani, 2014). Burke does not mean ‘public place’ in the commonly used sense of meaning open and accessible, or in historically specific (if gendered) senses of being in the realm of the civic, the judicious, the political, or even ‘the sociable’ (Mah, 2000). Rather, ‘public space’ is envisaged as a battle ground where the survival of the fittest triumphs.

The writer Rachel Hewitt has written of the gendered use of pavements and the aggression and violence that erupts when women are seen to take up space that ‘rightly’ belongs to men (Hewitt, 2018). And in addition to the physical policing of women’s use of space, women’s embodied behavioural practices – from how they walk, to what they wear or consume – are subject to scrutiny. Consider the ways in which victim-blaming centres on clothes that are framed as ‘provocative’ in rape accusations, a theme that was subverted by an art exhibition at the University of Oregon in 2013 entitled, ‘What were you wearing?’ (Brockman and Wyandt-Hiebert, 2013). The treatment of women as subjects and objects in rape cases reveals broader and disturbing evidence about the male gaze and the surveillance, and the abuse and control of women within the framework of social media.

While many studies of gendered space focus on physical space, especially in relation to sexual violence, and histories and sociologies of the body highlight the gendering of physical attributes and behaviours as part of the oppression of women and girls, it is important to tend to the relationship between different kinds of space: physical, virtual and symbolic, and its intersection with material culture. As a historian of embodiment and emotion, I am particularly interested in how the WWEOT episode highlights an ongoing and historically situated misogynistic response to female appetite, and to the ways class, gender and ethnicity intersect with food and consumption (Bound Alberti, 2016).

As Deborah Lupton has argued in ‘Vitalities and Visceralities’, the intersections of bodies and food in digital media, as in everyday practice, tend to represent as ideal a particular kind of body, especially:

those that are highly contained and controlled, privileging disciplined, ‘clean’ and health eating, ethical food choices, and lean, physically fit bodies. Uncontained, out-of-control bodies and appetites, and choices such as meat-eating, are [in some cases] typically positioned as disgusting, repellent and morally and ethically inferior. (Lupton, 2018)

The bodies that were scrutinised by WWEOT were initially those of women eating unselfconsciously, often messily, their eyes focused on their food, their concern for how they appear socially momentarily lost – mouths chew absently, spoons are wedged into mouths, bodies are slumped against seat backs, or clinging to grab rails. The fact that women were photographed among a row of similar ‘offenders’ – identified only by the tube line they travelled on, the food they were eating, the time – gave the impression of a police line-up.

We need to view WWEOT in the context of the gendering of bodily boundaries and appetites, and the ways that it intersects with the politics of food and eating. The sensorial and embodied aspects of appetite, desire and consumption are critical aspects of social relationships, so it is unsurprising that relationships of power and status are enacted through the production and consumption of food (Lupton, 2018). Whether it is Instagramming a meal (Slavich et al., 2018) or using Facebook to promote fashion brands (Choi, 2012), social media intersects with multiple gendered discourses on physical and mental health, the body, identity and social acceptance (Gangadharbatla, 2008). This is particularly relevant when the sociology of food and eating has itself become a contentious issue, with digital cultures magnifying public health concern about the quantity and quality of food available, as well as food poverty, food safety and the anthropology of eating rituals (Ward et al., 2010).

In the case of WWEOT, the political relationship between food and consumption is explicit and explicitly gendered. Reports about the site also polarised opinion into those who felt women were ‘fair game’, and those who believed photographing them was a violation of privacy. Ideas about ‘appropriate’ behaviour in public, which centred on the act of eating itself, as well as the fact that it was women who were targeted (and more specifically, their bodies), gave rise to a wave of feminist outrage. A protest was launched and coordinated by two students who set up, also through Facebook, a picnic event to take place on the tube, to which more than 500 people signed up (Gander, 2014). Wearing T-shirts with slogans like ‘Women who eat whatever the fuck they want’, demonstrators challenged the idea of WWEOT as ‘art’ and ate bananas (often sexualised as fruit fellatio by WWETO followers). Others shared Yorkie bars – advertised as ‘man fuel’ – and ‘mansize’ crisps. Sarah Hardcastle, one of the protestors, said that ‘Some people have asked us: “Why are you standing up about this? Why aren’t you tackling a real cause?” But you can’t do everything. And when you can do something, it’s better than nothing’ (Kennedy, 2014).

Policing female bodies – and appetites

Hardcastle’s words draw attention to the everyday micro-aggressions being fought by feminists around the world against misogynistic constraints on female behaviour, especially in response to the #MeToo movement. Feminist critiques raise some important perspectives on the prevalence and mechanisms of public shaming, which is an acknowledged problem of 21st-century culture: ‘social policing by shaming transgressions’ (Cheung, 2014), as one researcher has put it. Daniel Trottier has discussed ‘Visibility as Vitroil’ and user-led shaming, viewing WWEOT alongside similar shaming sites like ‘Crappy Parking in Melbourne’ or ‘Let’s Get These People Locked Up – 2011 Vancouver Riot Pics’ (Becker and Pepiak, 2017). These forms of ‘digital vigilantism’ have been explored as a form of social practice whereby ‘citizen’s use of ubiquitous and domesticated technologies enable a parallel form of criminal justice’. Thus, ‘weaponised visibility’ can be seen as an alternative to police action (or inaction), and is user-led, complicating traditional patterns of control and justice (Trottier, 2017). So the process of monitoring and controlling behaviour through the Internet can work both ways, and be a source of rebellion against, as well as conformity to, established social dictates.

Nevertheless, the misogynistic surveillance of women’s bodies in WWEOT is fundamentally about the politics of women’s appetites, and the appropriate boundaries and behaviours of the physical, lived body. These include internalised, often implicit rules about being thin and taking up as little space as possible (physically, aurally, emotionally, politically), which have long been a staple of – middle-class, white – Western culture, in which food can be dangerous, especially when linked to female appetites. There is a lengthy history of food and deprivation being linked to religiosity, poverty, social rituals and monastic habits – and of the relationship between hunger, appetite and the imaginative faculties, both awake and asleep (Lennon, 2017). The gendering of women’s appetites and consumption of food, in particular, has been linked, explicitly since the 19th century, to discourses on womanhood that had at their core a relationship between morality, sexual control and desire.

Thus, Victorian fiction highlighted a series of delicate, wan heroines (by contrast with their stocky, hearty, and often sexually active maids) that alluded to the dangers of giving into physical desires; abstinence from food was framed as both virtuous and cultured (Pearce, 2017). Sarah Pearce has explored consumption and food in Charlotte Brontë’s (1847, 1853) Jane Eyre and Villette. The idea that female appetite was ‘bad’ and dangerous circumscribed cultural attitudes to 19th-century female bodies; food refusal was used not only to show self-control and the dominance of the mind over the body, but also appropriate civilised female behaviour by contrast to the libidinous working classes – best exemplified by the sexualised images of mining women by Arthur Munby (Edge, 1998). As Pearce (2017) argues, ‘the ideal woman of the nineteenth century was a morally pure, slender and passive creature, devoid of appetites and confined to the home’ (p. 2).

There is an ample evidence of these constraints on female bodies and implied moral characteristics at work in the 21st century. The writer Roxane Gay has described how the boundaries of her own physical body expanded when she was subject to sexual assault; a protective barrier since obesity brought a relief from the ogling and attention of men; attention that she endured – as many women endure – from adolescence (Gruber and Fineran, 2016). Sexuality, gender, ethnicity and morality coalesce in Gay’s book Hunger, as the fat female body becomes offensive not only according to aesthetic Western standards about attractiveness, but also because it reveals the expression and satisfaction of a woman’s physical appetites; it is scandalous to feel hunger and feed that desire (Gay, 2017).

By the absence of eating, ‘good women’ display decorum and control; a socially encoded mantra whereby women who are perceived as ‘greedy’ in the bedroom or in the kitchen are presumed to have failed: morally, ethically, socially. Female appetites, in other words, are dictated by an overarching demand for control and self-vigilance, as well as the vigilance of others. The expectation that women will monitor their appetites in relation to food, that they will track calories, use appetite suppressants and suck lollypops – most notably advertised by reality stars like Kim Kardashian – to reduce the need for food is encoded into everyday culture in the West (Oppenheim, 2018). Denying food, and by extension appetite, extends not only to women’s physical hunger but also their sexual desires and yearnings.

Appetite and virtue

We can see these narratives of appetite and virtue playing out in print media – in magazines and newspapers – as well as television programmes that for decades have held up irreconcilable versions of ideal womanhood (Thomsen et al., 2001).

It is perhaps unsurprising that these concerns and debates have been transported into social media. As I discovered when researching the moral panic around loneliness in 21st-century culture, it is not social media use that is a problem in generating loneliness, but rather the ways social media practices echo real-life behaviours, including social isolation and a lack of friends (Bound Alberti, 2019). Imagining social media as producing rather than reflecting female concerns about body-image is unhelpful; it is the two-way production of values that matters, and the distortion of the female body and female appetites that is so apparent in WWEOT exaggerates attitudes towards, and presumptions about women’s bodies that are found in other spaces.

The regulation of women’s appetites and virtues, and their use of physical space, then, is a well-worn path in contemporary culture and it is unsurprising that it finds its way into Facebook. Women are expected to take up the minimum of public space, and to contain their physical and emotional needs – even when those needs extend to others. Consider the furore around breastfeeding and the frequency with which breastfeeding women are banished from public spaces and sent to toilets to feed their babies (Mahon-Daly and Andrews, 2002). Women’s breasts could be publicly displayed as sexualised, fetishised objects (often belonging to disturbingly young-looking women) in The Sun’s Page 3 until 2016, but not as functional objects for the nurturing of infants. This polarising attitude to women’s breasts is distorted by language use; ‘nipples’ are used unproblematically when discussing sex or pathology, but it is their use in those contexts which muddies, for some scholars, a healthy public discourse on lactation (Bock, 2019; Buller, 2016).

And yet, women as the suppliers of food are a mainstay of Western culture. At the same time as women are expected to deny themselves the physical and sensual pleasure of eating, women are most frequently the main cook in individual households (Allen and Sachs, 2002). Women deal more often than not, with the ‘unsexy’ end of food preparation; with budgeting, shopping, menu planning, spoon-feeding the young and the old; with caring for the multiplicity of food disorders found in young people (and themselves), and with the repetitive function of shop: cook: clean: repeat. The English Professor Sherrie Innes has described walls of women with trolleys at the supermarket as embarked on a Sisyphean mission that will never end (Innes, 2001).

There are important exceptions to this model of women as food producers but not consumers. The English Professor Lise Shapiro Sanders has written about the celebrity chef Nigella Lawson in ‘Consuming Nigella’, noting the ways in which sexuality, appetites and consumption centre on the chef’s voluptuous body (Shapiro Sanders, 2010). Lawson is best known for her striking beauty, her curves and her flirtatious manner with the camera as she lasciviously stuffs a chicken, or talks about devouring whole chocolate cakes without a hint of guilt. All the more shocking, then, that Nigella Lawson was transformed from ‘domestic goddess’ to the face of domestic violence, when paparazzi images showed her husband Charles Saatchi putting his hands on her throat in a threatening gesture outside an expensive restaurant (Freeman, 2013). The voyeuristic tones of the British tabloids indicated an unpleasant, almost vengeful delight in the chef being publicly humiliated, at the same time as they defined their own voyeurism as a ‘public good’. How else can we explain headlines like ‘Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi: the remarkably messed up life of two remarkable people’? (Langley, 2013) or ‘The tragic life of Nigella Lawson’ (Ryall, 2013)?

The rewriting of Lawson’s fall was clear; behind the façade of ‘self-assured scrumptiousness there was something darker, media coverage insisted, with articles that bemoaned the “tragic life” of the “food porn queen”’. In right-wing newspapers, this moral judgment was implicit; Lawson is too open about her (food, but also it is implied sexual) desires and too willing to indulge them. If she was not in the news because her physical body was picked apart and judged – too fat, just fat enough, too exposed, not exposed enough (all of which came together in media coverage of her wearing a burkini on holiday) – then she was vilified for cocaine use. The boundaries of Lawson’s physical body became a useful barometer for her social acceptability, at the same time as they demonstrated how impossible it was for a woman to have healthy desires without punishment.

Which brings us back to WWEOT. Women who eat in public are not the dainty, socially acceptable, genteel face of middle-class ‘ladies who lunch’. Nor are they the half-starved waifs who populate another strand of social media: ‘thinspiration’, where Facebook groups exist to encourage young women to become as thin as possible (Gregoire, 2012). One female blogger explained to The Huffington Post the purpose of her ‘thinspo’ blog: ‘I like images that show skinny, happy girls . . . They look so confident and we can see their bones through their skin. It’s the most beautiful thing ever. I also like tips about food or how to ignore hunger’ (Gregoire, 2012). Learning how to ‘ignore hunger’ and to avoid having desires, let alone fulfilling them – or, perhaps also, fulfilling a different set of desires – is a further reminder how the boundaries of women’s body reveal broader social fears and fixations. Facebook is not alone, as a social media platform, in acting as a gateway to these kind of conversations about, or the policing of, women’s bodies and appetites. Instagram is increasingly popular as a site for the narcissistic display and visual consumption of images of the body (Sheldon and Bryant, 2016). Yet, Facebook has prompted a series of concerns about body-image and the Internet, especially in relation to women and young girls, with Facebook users reporting more negative body-image in one study than those who did not use the social networking site (Tiggemann and Slater, 2013).

Public space and the micro-aggressions of misogyny

For the past 20 years, researchers have questioned whether the Internet functioned as a public space and whether regulation was therefore required in the same way it was in other public spaces ‘in real life’ (Papacharissi, 2002). Facebook became a forum for debating appropriate behaviour, in this context, and attacks on the ‘rudeness’ of eating on the underground are long-standing. In 2015, the Conservative peer Lord Sherbourne called for a ban on ‘hot food’ on the grounds that it was ‘offensive’ (and more so, presumably, than taking photos of women without their consent). The subtext is that it is working-class men and women, who consume fast-food, who are exhibiting behaviours that are unacceptable and disturbing the comfort and safety of other passengers. There is also a racialised dimension; take-out chicken is popularly and stereotypically associated with consumption by people of colour – especially if they are economically deprived (Williams-Forson, 2013) and curries, or foods of all kinds labelled ‘stinky’, tend to be regarded as ‘foreign’ and other (Roth, 2015).

If women eat more frequently than men on the tube, as WWEOT’s founder suggests, then maybe we ought to consider why. Women who eat on tubes do so, in the main, because like Wilkinson, they are pressed for time; rushing between school drop off to work or from work to school pick up, rushing from one job to another, one meeting to another, collecting shopping, running errands, caring and supporting for extended family members, and undertaking the multiple multi-tasking required of women on a daily basis. Research into poverty and ethnicity reveals high levels of fast-food consumption and time-poor eating patterns among impoverished white, mixed race and black communities (Baker et al., 2006). More scholarly analysis is needed into the ethnicity and gender of those who eat on public transport – buses as well as tubes, since buses make travel both lengthier and cheaper – and not just those who appear in groups like WWEOT.

Nevertheless, the feminist outcry against WWEOT has been subject to a backlash – by critics who assert that the site is nothing more than a bit of fun. Dismissing the broader cultural environment in which women’s eating is discussed, critics lament the ‘culture of self victimisation’ [sic] that leads to criticism of WWEOT. The main argument seems akin to bullies all around the world: get over yourself; it’s only a bit of fun. ‘WWEOT has nothing to do with gender politics’, claims one observer, ignoring the fact that only women are photographed, ‘WOMEN – BE AFRAID OF EATING ON THE TUBE IN CASE SOMEONE TAKES A PHOTO. CALL THE POLICE. IT MIGHT KILL YOU. IT’S CAUSE ALL MEN HATE YOU. HATE THEM BACK’ (Jones, 2014).

Division within feminist perspectives is not new (Gubar, 2000). Nor are debates about how to monitor and legislate and police the web, or definitions of ‘cyberbullying’ (Tokunaga, 2010). Measuring and classifying what constitutes online bullying has proved problematic; traditional bullying criteria, including ‘intent to harm, repetition, and imbalance of power’ can be difficult to prove in web-based abuse, which is why some scholars prefer to focus on the term ‘cyber-aggression’ (Corcoran et al., 2015).

Abuse aimed at women represents a significant proportion of cyber-aggression; when the comedian Kate Smurthwaite objected to being called ‘darling’ in a TV debate, she received 2000 abusive tweets, calling her ‘bitch’, ‘slut’, ‘harpy’ and threats of violence and rape (Cooper, 2015). Labour MP Stella Creasy released a video detailing some of the abusive messages she had received online during her deputy leadership bid (Press Association, 2015). The historian Mary Beard has been subject to hundreds of abusive messages about her appearance. She has observed how historically women have been shut down by men in order to maintain control of public spaces (Beard, 2014).

Beard’s historical perspective is important. If we consider social media as a relatively new form of public space, in which access to power is (theoretically, and if we leave aside issues of literacy and access to resources) equal, then male control of women is a well-tested way of ensuring the maintenance of traditional forms of hegemony and power. And, of course, it is not just women who have been subject to such strategies; ethnic minorities, the disabled, LGBTQ+ communities and others have found their privacy and dignity attacked in online fora. This online process parallels real-life political struggles being carried out in the West as the traditional holders of power – cisgendered, white men – feel under attack. In a recent book entitled Misogyny Online, Emma Jane (2017) talks about the various ways in which ‘Men have turned on women online’:

as a result, the place that was supposed to be radically inclusive. – a gender-, race-, and class-free zone – is now delivering female users a blunt message: GTFO. It stands for ‘Get The Fuck Out’ and that is what increasing numbers of women hear when they turn up online. (p. 1)

Those words might take the shape of a literal directive – GTFO – but more often than not takes place through sexual threat:

WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT:

You need a good smashing up the arse

Sit on a butcher’s knife so that you may never be able to reproduce

Put a toothpick in your vagina then thrust a wall as hard as you can

Fuck off you boring slut . . . I hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob (Jane, 2014)

The women that receive these messages do not receive an ‘explicit content’ warning. They are policed graphically through the threat of male violence by behaving in ways that do not conform to an ideal of female subservience; sometimes just for the way they look. As men’s rights activist Paul Elam put it:

We are coming for you. All of you. And by the time we are done you will wax nostalgic over the days when all you had to deal with was someone expressing a desire to fuck you up your shopworn ass. (Jane, 2014)

Jane makes a convincing argument that this unspeakable language needs to be spoken about in academic discourse and public spaces; that it is only by exposing the vitriolic, violent, disturbing nature of words used against women that we can understand the depth of the problem and how best to create change.

This is the context in which we need to situate the existence of Facebook groups like WWEOT, and why we cannot view the illicit photographing and shaming of women online, dressed up as an ‘art project’, as harmless fun. In the Daily Mail, the journalist Peter Lloyd explained how any offence taken at WWEOT is just a reminder of how ‘hypocritical and humourless feminism can be’. The founder had ‘not intended to hurt anybody’, and women should remember there are ‘much bigger fish to fry’. Lamenting how much worse off men are than women in the 21st century, Lloyd set himself up as an advocate for ‘boy power’ – so necessary when women cannot take a joke (Lloyd, 2015).

And yet, there is little to laugh about. Misogyny is a spectrum that intersects and crosses with divisions of ethnicity, class, geography, socio-economic status and ability. It shares themes: the rise of porn culture (Sarracino and Scott, 2008), a lack of prosecutions for rape (Larcombe, 2011), the death of 137 women a day around the world as a consequence of domestic violence (BBC News, 2018) and continued economic equality (Inequality.org, n.d.). WWEOT is not harmless fun but rather an internalised, unconscious way of behaving towards women, women’s bodies and women’s appetites that reinforces gendered inequalities.

Legacies and legislation

In 2018, the original WWEOT group closed down before being launched by Tony Burke as People Who Eat On Tubes (PWEOT), after petitions and lobbying of Facebook by the feminist activist group Level up. There was even, temporarily, a new incarnation of WWEOT – ‘It may not be the original group’, posted its founders:

but let’s try to recreate the magic again . . . Any photos of various foodstuffs being devoured on the Tube in London by females is accepted. A description on where the snacking occurred would be appreciated. Keep the comments friendly if you can, as this is a group that appreciates this artform. (emphasis added)

While that group has also closed down, there are others, including the slightly altered wording of WWEOTT. And there has been a rise in groups similarly focusing on women eating in public spaces, including libraries. The Facebook group ‘Women Who Eat in the Library’ brands itself as ‘an observational, artistic movement’, in similar language to that used by Tony Burke. Again, women ‘are embraced and cherished. We celebrate and encourage women eating food in libraries’, and ‘FOOD, PLACE and TIME’ should be recorded. There are also body positivity sites that celebrate, somewhat ironically, Women Who Eat.

What role does legislation have in monitoring the potentially harmful effects of groups like WWEOT? If their moderators are unable to insist on ‘friendly’ interaction, is legislation against Facebook groups the answer? There has been lengthy discussion on free speech versus hate speech on social media, an indication of the way the Internet has developed without outside intervention and constraints, at least in the Western world (Leets, 2001). Rethinking how social media defines its spaces, rights to access, and entitlement over use, is the next logical step for those who parallel social media and physical, lived spaces. ‘We need new guidelines and capacity for the police and prosecutors’, writes the politician Yvette Cooper, herself a target of violent threats online. And:

social institutions could do more. Pubs give people warnings if they are being abusive or kick them out if they are harassing other customers. The new social spaces – social media and newspapers that publish online comments – need to think about their responsibilities too. (Cooper, 2015)

The role of governments and organisations in tackling online bullying and the predatory behaviour demonstrated by WWEOT is much debated. In Hungary in 2014, it became illegal to take photographs of anyone without their consent (Nolan, 2014). In the United Kingdom, it has been illegal since April 2019 to ‘upskirt’ a woman by taking a photograph up her skirt, an act that has long been a staple of paparazzi culture. The law will also apply to kilt-wearing men (BBC News, 2019). The regulation of social media and sites like Facebook has been the subject of much discussion, especially in relation to international terrorism and election rigging (Lazer et al., 2018; Wu, 2015: 281). It has been suggested that user practices help regulate ‘hate speech’ on Facebook and other sites (Abraham, 2014). This practice involves users posting ‘blue text’ hyperlinked Facebook page names into status updates and threads, sending a visible message that hate speech will not be tolerated. Perhaps, this does represent users taking some kind of collective responsibility for websites, akin to vigilantes patrolling the streets, but is it enough?

Emma Jane, whose Misogyny Online was discussed earlier, has explored feminist ‘digilante’ responses to the phenomenon of online misogyny, which has grown considerably since WWEOT was founded in 2011 (Herring, 2002). It is significant that sexual exploitation online has risen at the same time and received a similar lack of joined-up legislative or governmental action (Livingstone and Smith, 2014). Focusing on the case of the Australian gamer Alanah Pearce responding to threats of sexual violence from young male Internet users by alerting their mothers, Jane argues that a more concerted approach to the problem of online misogyny is needed. For while Pearce’s response was radical and thought outside the box, responsibility for online misogyny was still given to the private rather than the public sphere (and the responsibility for change given to women). Feminist efforts, Jane argues, including ‘a recalibrated approach to collectivism’ is necessary to effect the kinds of legislative and corporate reforms that will tackle misogyny online.

What WWEOT reveals about the use and abuse of the public sphere – digital, as physical – is that shaming and ostracisation is a persistent means to preserve the patriarchy and keep women from equal participation. Preventing women from speaking out and participating in debates – the rape threats and actual attacks found at the so-called ‘high end’ of online abuse – is only effective because of the constant hum of female subordination found elsewhere: in more subtle critiques about the boundaries and shapes of women’s bodies, minds, aptitudes and appetites that have existed for centuries which, as Kate Manne describes in Down Girl, functions as the ‘logic of misogyny’ (Bound Alberti, 2016; Manne, 2017).

There are many troubling questions raised by WWEOT that connect, more generally, to the gendered experience of using public transport and being harassed, molested or photographed; the misogyny associated with apparently unregulated consumption by women (which taps into historical discourses about the female body’s ‘appropriate’ – racialised, gendered, sexualised – boundaries), and the stranger-shaming that has become part and parcel of digital culture. What WWEOT shows above all else is the way spaces in social media can become sites for the ongoing monitoring and control of female appetites and desires.