Laurie Penny on web misogyny: It’s time to end the culture of online misogyny

It would be nice to think that the rot of rank misogyny was confined to fringe sites populated by lunatics. But it is found all over the web - and it's silencing its victims. Fighting it is not the same as censorship.

By Laurie Penny

(Photo By Trolls - the cute kind. Flickr/Cali4Beach, used under Creative Commons)

Like many women who have public profiles online, I’m used to messages of this sort – the violent rape and murder fantasies, the threats to my family and personal safety, the graphic emails with my face crudely pasted onto pictures of pornographic models performing sphincter-stretchingly implausible feats of physical endurance.