Girl on girl harassment: Not sexy, and not just a cat fight

Cate Sevilla writes...

The Washington Post has brought the harassment of women online to mainstream audiences. However, besides rape threats, and other kinds of sexual harassment of women by men online, we tend to forget another form of harassment online: girl on girl. Now, when a woman complains that she's being harassed and bothered by another woman in real life, what's everyone's first reaction? To brush it off as adolescent-esque girlish squabbles, ("Oh, girls never get along!") or they heartily holler "CAT FIIIIIIIGHT!!!!" and wait excitedly for us to strip down to our bikinis and wrestle in a kiddie pool filled with KY Jelly. We're either just being melodramatic Drama Queens, or sensitive wittle girls who should shut up, call our moms, eat a tub of Ben & Jerrys and get the f*** over it.

And to be honest, most of the time, this is the case. Girls are hypersensitive and are almost heavily awaiting with bated breath for the slightest sign of contempt from a fellow female, so we can pounce and declare, "I KNEW you were jealous of me! You're such a backstabbing bitch! And I HATE those SHOES!" However, not all bickering and squabbles in real life can be cast off as girls just being girls, and the same goes for the online world.

Everyone is having a hard enough time agreeing that women who have been sexually harassed online by men are in the right, so you can imagine people's unwillingness to get involved when a woman is being harassed by another woman. Cyber Cat Fights are the messiest, nastiest, and sometime pettiest of all fights. Whether it's a high schooler creating a faux Myspace page for the girl that stole her boyfriend, or group of girls all talking crap about another member of their online community in private comments, it's all just nasty. It's nasty and the internet is a prime romping ground for the Mean Girls of all ages.

Online, no one can over hear a conversation. No one can hear whispered rumours about themselves in the locker room. So if one woman wants to take a stab at another, she'll have to do it in a comment on someone's blog, or in a post of her own. Why not just in an email? Well, because that's no fun. Their victim can't see that. What's fun about attacking someone privately? You can't get a reaction, or attention, and you certainly won't get a reaction big enough to, in turn, make you appear to be the victim. With everyone on hyper-alert about people blatantly harassing another user online, the Mean Girl can't just blatantly come out and say, "Oh, Ruby03 is such a psycho beyatch!!!1!" She has to disguise it. Hide it in a way so that while everyone knows who she's talking crap about, she can't get in trouble for it because she's not "naming names". No one has any proof that Ruby03 is the girl she's spreading lies about, yet everybody knows it.

So, where do we draw the line? If the Mean Girls are able to run rampant on a social networking site, spreading rumours and making ridiculous claims about other users, and getting off scott-free, how is that fair? If someone is obviously, and continuously harassing another user online, but simply avoiding any consequences by not directly naming the person, what's a girl to do? Understandably, this boils down to the same "he said, she said" crap. It is much too easy to say that Mean Girl isn't doing anything wrong. No one wants to appear to take sides, no one wants to touch anything to do with Mean Girl with a ten-million foot pole. That's just DRAMA, and no one likes drama.

Basically, if there's a woman involved in a harassment situation online, she's either being dramatic, and should grow up and it's "not that big of a deal". If there's two women involved in harassment online, it's just a cat fight. Of course, a man threatening a woman online with rape is absolutely horrible. But is one woman lying that another women is "obsessed with her" and is stalking her really that easy to brush off? I guess the problem is, is that this is the internet. A bunch of cables, and cyber space, and our lives and words just floating around some virtual space. There is no hard evidence, really. Between social stigmas and the fronts everyone puts up, how can we really prove and find the liar and true harasser in all the bleedin' drama.

I guess you can't, unless you have a screen shot with the Mean's Girl's blog post entitled "Ruby03 is fugly". I guess the whole "turn off the computer and walk away" and "grow thicker skin" annecdote will have to apply to the harassed as well. I guess us poor womens will just have to shovel in our Ben & Jerry's, ignore it, and get back to our soaps, eh?

Cate Sevilla is the Assistant Editor of Dollymix. She's also a crazed, stalker-like, obsessed person who thrives on The Drama and is an avid bunny boiler. Can she please have your address and phone number? And what's your last name?