Aram Zucker-Scharff

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Female comics professionals and comics fans are frequent targets for online harassment, especially if they comment on feminist issues.

The harassment doesn’t always stay on the Internet. Asselin’s bank accounts were compromised after her article was published online, and independent comics editor Caitlin Rosberg says, “some people have had stuff mailed to their homes as a threat of ‘I know where you live.’ “

Marvel’s Jeanine Schaefer believes this behavior is partly driven by extreme fear on the part of some comics fans.

“There’s this perception that, ‘Well, if we let women in, then everything is going to change. They’re going to take away everything that I like about comics,’” Schaefer says.

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– Where’s Thor When You Need Her? Women In Comics Fight An Uphill Battle.

“And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves even when nobody else would. The decades have proved that our way was largely right and the critics were wrong, so our habit of not listening has become deeply entrenched. It even became a bit of a bonding ritual to attack critics of the culture because they usually didn’t understand what we were doing beyond a surface level. It didn’t used to matter because nobody except a handful of forum readers would see the rants. The same reflex becomes a massive problem now that nerds wield real power. GamerGate made me ashamed to be a gamer, but the scary thing is that the underlying behavior of attacking critics felt like something I’d always seen in our culture, and tolerated. It only shocked me when it was scaled up so massively into rape and death threats, and I saw mainstream corporations like Intel folding in the face of the pressure we can bring to bear.”

– Why Nerd Culture Must Die.

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“We need to stop propagating the troll-driven meme that “it’s all just trollin’ and boohoo mean words you should cry more” and start making the hard, fine-grained distinctions. The hater trolls use the ‘just trollin’ and ‘just mean words’ to minimize even the worst attacks and gaslight their targets. In hater troll framing, there’s no difference between a single tweet and a DDoS of your employer’s website. There’s no difference between a “you’re a histrionic charlatan” and “here’s a headless corpse and you are next and here’s your address.” It’s all just trollin’ and mean words and not real life.

[…]

There IS no “the authorities” that will help us.

We are on our own.

And if we don’t take care of one another, nobody else will.

We are all we’ve got.”

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“If it was adolescent then, more mean-spirited fun than outright malice, it is now a frighteningly adult enterprise where the joke is lost somewhere amid the sexual harassment and death threats. What began as the occasional doxxing of a Tumblr user or…