When I first wrote about the sexist abuse of women online, collating the experiences of nearly a dozen writers, the response was largely positive. Many hadn’t been aware there was a problem; they were shocked. Others had assumed that they were the only ones whose every word on the web was greeted with a torrent of abusive, threatening comments.
But a few reactions stood out, among them that of Brendan O’Neill, the Telegraph blogs section’s resident contrarian. He wrote that feminist campaigners pointing this out was a “hilarious echo of the 19th-century notion that women need protecting from vulgar and foul speech”. We were, he said, “a tiny number of peculiarly sensitive female bloggers” trying to close down freedom of speech.
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