The often unbearable cost of being a woman with an opinion online
A disturbing new documentary on misogyny in the digital age shows how women are still being silenced
By Guylaine Maroist, filmmaker, Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age
You're not worried about the future of women's rights? I wasn't either seven years ago. That was before I plunged into the poisoned well of the web to do research for Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age, the documentary I co-directed with Léa Clermont-Dion. Of course, I knew women couldn't take anything for granted and that the road to true gender equality would be long and bumpy, but I never thought this road could actually lead us backwards. Well, here we are.
Hatred against women is being unleashed on social media more than ever. A recent study by The Economist Intelligence Unit showed that cyberviolence against women has been on the rise since the start of the pandemic, partially due to women spending more time online, increasing their exposure to threats. While working on this film over seven years, Léa and I saw these virulent sexist attacks spread like wildfire.
A real-life horror movie
Yet despite the astonishing number of cases in the media — Amanda Todd, Jacinda Ardern, Rehtaeh Parsons, Kathleen Wynne, Catherine McKenna, Diane Therrien, Chrystia Freeland, Clara Sorrenti, Rachel Gilmore and Saba Eitizaz to name just a few — this scourge that is affecting thousands of women around the world is still trivialized. Why? Because we don't understand the impact this so-called "virtual" violence has on the lives of victims and their loved ones. Because we still have a hard time believing that cyberviolence can have as devastating a psychological impact as face-to-face interactions, as a U.N. report has shown.
That's why Léa and I decided to take up our cameras and follow the daily lives of four women who were victims of cyberviolence. Our goal was to capture how these women were assailed by waves of hate, how fear crept into their private lives, and how they gradually lost their sense of security in public spaces.
'Just so you know, I know where you live'
Who are these women? Laura Boldrini, former president of Italy's Chamber of Deputies and one of the most harassed politicians in the country; Marion Séclin, a Paris-based actor and YouTuber who received more than 40,000 sexist messages, including rape and death threats; Laurence Gratton, an elementary school teacher in Montreal who was anonymously harassed by a classmate for years when she was a student; and Kiah Morris, a Black Democratic representative in Vermont who eventually resigned after enduring severe online harassment.
According to Morris, online harassment feels like "death by a thousand paper cuts."
These women live in different countries, and they're from different generations and backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common: a strong voice. Some men want to keep them quiet, and provoking fear is the perpetrators' weapon of choice.
The types of insults these women repeatedly receive are chilling: "Just so you know, I know where you live" and "I want you to get raped." When the threats got worse, Gratton went to the police. The complaints she filed were never followed up on.
The case of Morris is particularly unsettling. Only the second Black woman to have been elected in Vermont, the Chicago native was the favoured target of a member of the far right on social media for years. The house in Bennington, where she lived with her husband and young son, was vandalized. The type of message she read over her morning coffee? "Go back to Africa. It's the only place you'll ever be safe." Not only did Morris end up resigning, but she and her family also had to move.
"There have been postings talking about the necessity of having me [be] raped because it's a 'corrective action,'" she said. "It's a corrective action meant to silence, meant to dehumanize and meant to make someone live in terror...
"These are crimes of a new modern age. And that terrorism gives a direct pathway to real violence in the physical world."
Once again, the perpetrator got away with it. Following an independent investigation into Morris's case, Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan announced he wouldn't file charges since state and federal laws guaranteeing freedom of expression allow for hate speech.
Not the first antifeminist backlash
We met with Donna Zuckerberg, the author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in he Digital Age, at her home in Silicon Valley. She argues the misogynistic discourse of the extreme right draws freely on the literature of ancient Greece and Rome to justify racism and antifeminism.
"Social media has elevated misogyny to entirely new levels of violence and virulence," Zuckerberg, whose brother happens to be the co-founder of Facebook, told The Guardian. "I'm surprised that there are people who have seen the extent and the severity of digital misogyny and that they aren't more concerned and more horrified by it," she said in our documentary.
Since antiquity, there have been all kinds of ways to keep women quiet. According to political science professor and author Francis Dupuis-Déri, every time women have fought for and gained rights, there has been a move to repress them. With the arrival of the internet, new techniques have emerged to silence women: sextortion, slut-shaming, body-shaming, revenge porn, video-lynching, astroturfing, cyberstalking.
These days, cyberharassment is the price many women pay when they choose a life in the public eye. Some decide to quit, and how can we blame them? Equally troubling: some girls and women are no longer considering careers in the public sphere because they don't want to deal with the cyberviolence that comes with it. They are silencing themselves.
Still not worried? I am. I'm also certain that we have to act now if we want to preserve women's right to speak and their place in democracy.
Watch Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age on CBC Gem.