Trump Attacks on Kelly Echo Male Patterns of Abuse

Trump Attacks on Kelly Echo Male Patterns of Abuse



When women make strong comments or venture into political waters they face threats. Harassment of female journalists online seems to be growing at an alarming rate; and it dovetails with new research about women and speech.



(WOMENSENEWS)--Donald Trump's efforts to get Megyn Kelly's goat just keep going. When the Fox anchor returned to her show in late August after a brief vacation Trump retweeted a message from a supporter of his who called Kelly a "bimbo." He charged that Kelly attacked him unfairly in the first Republican debate when she questioned his history of sexist remarks. He later called CNN to say, "you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … wherever."
Vox Politics noted, "Trump's comments, and the overt hatred of women he conveyed, appear to have a real political constituency in America. Looking just at the immediate reaction, despite the backlash among the GOP establishment, his comments have inspired what appears to be an overwhelming wave of online hatred not against Trump but against Kelly."

A chart from the website Topsy mapped the number of tweets across the Internet that mention both Kelly's name and the words "cunt," "whore," "bitch" or "slut." The site says "What you are seeing here is an explosion of sexist hatred against Kelly that begins precisely at the moment of the GOP debate when she dared to ask Trump about his record of sexism."
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It's part of a pattern that has surfaced on the Internet in recent years. When women make strong comments or venture into political waters they face threats. Harassment of female journalists online seems to be growing at an alarming rate; and it dovetails with new research about women and speech. The Pew Research Center, which has been following online activity since 2000, found in 2014 that threats are directed far more at women than men. And in 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland created bogus online accounts and then sent them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.

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Why the outsized reaction when women offer their opinions? More and more women are speaking up in public spaces. And research finds that when men concentrate on women's success, they go into a defensive crouch. Psychologists Michael T. Schmitt and Jennifer Spoor at Queensland University in Australia found that when men focus on the gains women have made over the past 50 years, they report high levels of anxiety as well as a strong identification with their own gender. There's a tendency to circle the wagons, to exaggerate how far women have come and how far men have fallen. This reaction can easily translate into Internet anger.

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It's a message that has no place in a Democratic society.

Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett are the authors of "The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance is Hurting Women, Men -- and Our Economy" (Tarcher/Penguin).


http://womensenews.org/story/media-stories/150901/trump-attacks-kelly-echo-male-patterns-abuse