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As women gain visibility in the
blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats.Men are
harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web.
But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out
in more starkly sexually threatening terms - a trend that was first
evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the
blogosphere, said experts and bloggers.
A 2006 University of
Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25
times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males.
A 2005
study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the
proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion
groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely
because of the exodus of women.
The study attributed the trend to
"sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms".
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Joan Walsh,
editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the
letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, "it's
been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more
brutal and vicious than those about men."
Arianna Huffington,
whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded
by women, said anonymity onli...
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