Ashley Judd on the misogynistic harassment she received for tweeting about sports

What happened to me is the devastating social norm experienced by millions of girls and women on the Internet. Online harassers use the slightest excuse (or no excuse at all) to dismember our personhood. My tweet was simply the convenient delivery system for a rage toward women that lurks perpetually. I know this experience is universal, though I’ll describe specifically what happened to me.

I read in vivid language the various ways, humiliating and violent, in which my genitals, vaginal and anal, should be violated, shamed, exploited and dominated. Either the writer was going to do these things to me, or they were what I deserved. My intellect was insulted: I was called stupid, an idiot. My age, appearance and body were attacked. Even my family was thrown into the mix: Someone wrote that my “grandmother is creepy.”

As I began on Twitter to identify and push back against this toxicity and abuse, I faced the standard bashing anyone (girl or boy, woman or man) experiences when objecting to and taking action against misogyny.

[…] The themes are predictable: I brought it on myself. I deserved it. I’m whiny. I’m no fun. I can’t take a joke. There are more serious issues in the world. The Internet space isn’t real, and doesn’t deserve validity and attention as a place where people are abused and suffer. Grow thicker skin, sweetheart. I’m famous. It’s part of my job description.

These are the “dangers that invariably accompany being a woman and having an opinion about sports or, frankly, anything else,” Judd writes. But I do think that there’s an especially viscous tone to the misogynistic harassing that comes when women voice strong opinions on topics and subcultures — like sports, or gaming — that men like to imagine as their “territory.”

And Judd is so right that the response she’s gotten for speaking out about it — that if she can’t take the heat, she shouldn’t have made her original tweet — is also illustrative of a common dynamic. Today, Fox News’s Mark Fuhrman tried to argue that since it’s March Madness, “All bets are off, all laws don’t apply.” But as Amanda notes, there’s a difference between good-natured sports shit-talking and violent rape threats. Just like there’s a difference between harsh criticism of someone’s argument and comments that make the simple fact of being a woman grounds for hateful attack.

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