Disturbing as they are in real life, harassment and sexism towards women have extended online as another face of one ugly coin. Certainly it comes as no surprise to note or learn that women online face problems unique to the fact that they are women, aside from the ones they already share with their male counterparts.

Via Salon.com, I read a story about renowned blogger Kathy Sierra who runs a blog called Creating Passionate Users, and who is suffering from a mass-cyber-attack staged by a group of misogynist perverts.

The story on Kathy Sierra, written under the title Men who hate women on the Web, is a narration of the blogger’s ordeal now that is she is targeted by an army of people that hate her simply for being a woman, and make no secret of it.

Drawing on my own experience online and on the stalking episode I previously mentioned, it is now even more evident to me how women are discriminated against online (as well as offline). The very nature of the discourse with a woman in a chat room is significantly different from that with a man (I played being both). It follows logically that women are targeted in different ways than men and that, often, attacks against women take a sexual-violent nature.

Take for example the Kathy Sierra case; she has had someone post this on her blog: “fuck off you boring slut… i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob.” Later on, famous bloggers took part in the “game” and comments poured in with crystal-clear threats of hanging Kathy, suffocating Kathy, beating Kathy, and sexually humiliating Kathy. Not to forget the photoshopped pictures of the blogger in dark-fetishistic situations.

So where does this leave us, women bloggers? In Kathy’s own words, she says

I do not want to be part of a culture–the Blogosphere–where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is Kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish.

In our conservative culture, everyone knows that any event of this type would escalate to a dangerous pitch. Simply put, Arab hackers probably first hunt for pictures on a girl’s PC, and then use them. Also, probably every woman blogger has received some sort of a threat, a special request, or a sexist remark. I know I have, and I know many who have received the same.

This issue at hand is not a single case. It is not about those “morally corrupt” American men who attacked a similarly “morally corrupt” American woman, as many men and women in cyber and real Arabia would quickly announce. This is not a phenomenon exclusive to a single society. This is a problem rooted deeply in our mentalities as people. Again I say, as people, not animals. Actually wait, I take that back. I never heard a male dog call a female dog “bitch.” My bad.

I am usually particularly offended by the men who think they have discovered a shortcut to heaven when they squeeze out the magical pseudo-solution “If women didn’t get that much exposure, then nothing would have happened.” What does a blogger like me do, according to these people? Crawl under a man-shaped shadow and wither? Go offline and write on papyrus?

Indeed, bad things are bound to happen, and they could happen to anyone. However, it is undeniable that when they happen to women, they are a lot worse. The social and psychological scars they leave are often irrecoverable. It’s technically “keeping women in their right place” principle that dictates this manifestation of a deeper social dysfunction.