I've always found that most sites on the internet unconsciously have a white and male bias. It's not a tremendous surprise that institutionalized racism and sexism are present on the internet as it's embedded in some parts of our culture, but anonymity on the internet really throws a few logs onto the fire.
Luckily there is more awareness these days, and a lot of increasingly popular people are dedicated to combating it. I'm a big fan of FreeThoughtBlogs, it mostly focuses on atheism and social justice, but tends to have a lot of tech-related posts.
Great read. I'm still hesitant to say that changing the laws is going to fix this, especially when the people making the laws are so clueless on what the problem is. All we can do is slowly make this shit socially unacceptable and hope that there will always remain places online where women can talk freely and not be scared of rape threats. I have a feeling that writing articles like this will likely to do more harm than good. For every person who reads this an learns from it and sees that there is a real problem, there are 10 more trolling douches that are going to flood her inbox with more abuse. As the old saying goes, don't feed the trolls. The internet is a double edged sword - it allows us to communicate freely and anonymously and, while it is a shame that some people do take advantage of this, the internet wouldn't be what it is today without that freedom and anonymity. Throwing laws at it isn't going to fix it - but it might continue the shift of a less anonymous, less free, less open internet.
I don't think laws are really needed. I think enforcement is. There's no excuse for saying something to the effect of "I'm going to rape you tomorrow." That's already against the law in any civilized place. What the internet world needs is a few high profile cases of men who think they are invincible and free to persecute to get the book thrown at them. Obviously there's a grey area as to what constitutes trolling and what crosses the line into harassment, but there's no such thing as free speech when it comes to specific threats.
All I can think is: that sucks for the few high profile people who end up in prison for years because of a tasteless joke. Hopefully those who get the book thrown at them are truly menacing human beings, not a neckbeard in mommy's basement who has no actual violent will towards women.
Personally, I wouldn't give a fuck. Actions have consequences. If some dipshit has to go to jail to be made an example of, then so be it. It's not even correct, IMO, to refer to this type of thing as a bad joke. There's no context in which telling a stranger you're going to rape them is funny.
I thought you were replying to me, and then I noticed that my comment was among the most recent... Anyway to expand on what seems like a crap answer. Say you're a female on Reddit (doesn't matter where) and see how quickly your inbox fills up. I did this once as an experiment, and gave it like 2 weeks before I shut down that account. Anyway what happened was that it was almost a non stop continious inflow of men sending cock selfies and (what I understood to be) sexually harrassing messages. Which shows I think, the aggression to women that Reddit has. (Among the messages that were received were a lot of hate mail... So there's that too.)