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Why Are Nice, Normal Girls Getting Bullied Online?

Because all it takes is one jerk with a log-in and a grudge to launch a vicious, nameless attack against you. Here’s how Meghan Pearce and other young women are fighting back.

By Megan Feldman

One slow afternoon at her Arizona public relations job, 25-year-old Meghan Pearce found herself browsing the Scottsdale page on the gossip website thedirty.com. The site features photos mostly of women and invites readers to post snarky, anonymous comments about them. Pearce knew women who’d been ridiculed on The Dirty, so she’d occasionally log on to read it with the morbid fascination of a rubbernecker at the scene of a car wreck.

Clicking through the site, she came upon a category called “Would You?” where users debate whether they’d have sex with the women in the photos. The consensus is almost always “no,” and the reasons are a competition in cruelty. “Face like a horse!” says a typical comment. “Giant nipples,” says another. And then Pearce froze—there on the computer screen she saw her photo. In the picture, taken at a fashion show she’d modeled in, Pearce was strutting the runway in a short red dress; she’d liked it enough to post it on her MySpace page. Now, stomach churning, she opened the comments link, bracing for what readers of The Dirty had to say.

Her worst fears were confirmed. “Thunder thighs!” she saw. Another post said that she looked like a shih tzu. Perhaps most hurtful was when she read that her nose was “too big”; as a child, Pearce had been self-conscious about her nose. Even as she began to cry, Pearce kept reading the insults. She wasn’t the only one: Within days, she got sympathetic calls and e-mails from friends as far away as New York who had seen the posts too.

In the face of this public humiliation, Pearce’s confidence plummeted. She doubled her workouts and briefly considered cosmetic surgery. I have a boyfriend, I don’t go out much, I try to be nice, Pearce said to herself. Who would do this to me?

Anonymous online trash talk—the operative word being trash—isn’t exactly new, but some experts say it’s spreading. Whether on social-networking sites, gossip blogs or message boards, it seems as though women’s reputations are being shredded more often, and more viciously, than ever. One study showed that Web users with female screen names got more than 25 times the malicious feedback than those with male names. At ReputationDefender, a firm that attempts to remove nasty Web comments (or make them harder to find) on behalf of its clients, two thirds of the customers who have been attacked online are women.

Some sites, like The Dirty, appear to exist solely to put down women. Other sites focus on college gossip, like Anonymous Confession Board. (Sample ACB post: “These girls will do anything for a d—k.”) Mean taunts are everywhere, from blogs to social-networking sites like My Space and Twitter. “The Web is being used, especially anonymously, to say things you wouldn’t say to someone’s face,” says Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender. Adds Jean Twenge, Ph.D., coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic, “When people’s identities are hidden, they’re more likely to be aggressive. It’s a lot harder to hurt people when you’re looking them in the eye.” Just one insult can spur dozens of others and ratchet up the level of malice. “Nasty gossip has gone viral,” says Fertik.

One possible reason the cruel chatter keeps increasing is because few are held responsible for what they post, but that may be changing. Women are now fighting back to stop this slimy trend. By exposing their attackers or helping to lead awareness campaigns, they are altering the online landscape and leaving cyber bullies fewer places to hide.

Take the case of Liskula Cohen, 38. The ex-model was called a “psychotic, lying, whoring…skank” on Skanks in NYC, a now defunct website seemingly launched for just one purpose: to attack her reputation. When Cohen sought legal help to unmask her tormentor, she got little encouragement. Some judges, in the interest of protecting free speech, have refused to require websites and Internet service providers to identify anonymous posters, says Jayne Hitchcock, president of Working to Halt Online Abuse.

Cohen didn’t let that stop her. She asked a court to force Google, whose subsidiary hosted the blog, to identify the site’s author. Last August, in what legal experts call a precedent- setting ruling, a judge ordered the company to disclose the Skanks in NYC author’s e-mail address. Google, which has always defended the privacy of its users, said in a statement that it would provide such information only in response to a court order.

To her surprise, Cohen learned that the blogger was someone she knew, Rosemary Port. (Reportedly, Cohen had bad-mouthed Port to Port’s ex-boyfriend.) All Cohen wanted, she says, was an apology, which she says she received. Cohen has a theory for why Port, and others, resort to cyber-slime. “People sit at home bored out of their minds, and they spew hate,” she says. “It’s become the wild, wild West.”

Cohen’s taunter focused on her sexuality. That’s typical of online attackers, who, experts say, tend to zero in on two things: physical traits and sexual behavior. Take this comment from The Dirty, on a photo of a young woman in shorts: “She’ll spread those nasty cottage cheese thighs for anybody.”

Although it’s impossible to get a gender breakdown of anonymous posters, the
tone of most of the comments on The Dirty is distinctly male. Where is all of this venom coming from? According to Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law who studies online bullying, the Web has become a haven for women-haters, partly because it’s no longer socially acceptable to sexually harass women at work or school. “We’ve pushed a lot of that animus to the Internet,” she says. “That’s where men who resent women—perhaps because they feel outpaced by them at work or school—can express it anonymously.”

But there are plenty of mean girls online too. While men spread insults about women to exert power or get revenge for spurned sexual advances, says Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, women do so to compete over social status or men. Jayne Hitchcock once had a client who began receiving phone calls from male strangers requesting sex after her ex’s new wife posted false profiles of her announcing that she was “easy.”

It’s tempting to minimize the harm online trash talk can do, but in an age when everyone, from potential dates to prospective employers, googles first and asks questions later, Web chatter matters. “Having insults appear online is an especially severe form of social rejection,” Twenge says.

Take the case of one student at Florida International University who’d arrived at school freshman year weighing only 95 pounds. She’d suffered from an eating disorder in high school but worked hard in college to maintain a healthy weight. One day in 2008, while browsing a campus gossip site, she was horrified to read a flurry of online posts that described her as “fat” and a “butterball.” The insults likely made it more difficult to resist her old destructive habits. “These heartless people obviously had no idea what they were dealing with,” she says. “I felt worthless.”

Spreading online gossip is easy, but combating it isn’t. After she saw her photo on The Dirty, Meghan Pearce called an attorney, but was shocked to learn she had little recourse. Federal law protects websites from being held liable for comments. While commenters can be sued, that would require outing them, which can be tough since sites aren’t required to reveal their identities unless subpoenaed. So far, some courts have ruled that online remarks are often so over-the-top that they shouldn’t be taken seriously, says Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Getting photos removed from a site can be just as difficult. Often it’s up to the site’s owner to decide whether to take them down.

Pearce found her own ways to protect herself: She deleted her My Space profile to prevent anyone from stealing her image again. Then she contacted an acquaintance who worked for The Dirty who helped get the nastier comments removed. “That made me feel better,” Pearce says. That victims of online gossip have so few legal options shows that it’s time to reassess the laws on Web content, says Fertik: “There’s consensus growing that there needs to be some refreshing of the law.”

Some cyber-slime victims are determined to have their day in court. In a much-watched case, two female Yale Law School grads sued more than two dozen defendants for defaming them on Auto Admit, a popular Web forum for law students and lawyers. On the site, commenters had suggested, among other things, that the two women deserved to be raped, had STDs and traded sexual favors for good grades. Citing bruised reputations and lost employment—one victim says that she had been turned down for 16 jobs—the women sought $245,400 in damages. Last October they settled out of court with some of the defendants for an undisclosed amount. Experts say just filing the lawsuit has helped cool down the vicious tone on the AutoAdmit forum.

Other opponents of online gossip say the best way to quash the cruelty is to persuade people to just log off—to stop giving hate-spewers an audience. After Prince ton University senior Sarah Ferguson, 22, was accused of “sleeping with anyone to get popular” on the now defunct website Juicy Campus, she says, “I got paranoid. I heard people in the street whispering, ‘That’s her.’ ” Then she got mad and told her friend and student body president, Connor Diemand- Yauman, about the incident. Inspired by Ferguson, he founded the group Own What You Think. Soon the Prince ton campus blossomed with hundreds of T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan anonymity=cowardice. So far the group has gotten 2,800 people to sign a pledge to “take a stand against anonymous character assassination.” The Princeton effort has spread to other campuses.

Audrie Webster, 21, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, agrees that the exact same peer pressure that encourages Web nastiness can also help combat it. “I used to read online gossip sites regularly,” she says. But when she and her sorority sisters were called “easy,” “fat” and “pudgy” by anonymous posters, she quit cold turkey. “Those sites just fuel a fire of gossip and drama, neither of which I want to be a part of my life.”

How to Protect Yourself From Online Gossip

1. Don’t post Girls Gone Wild-worthy shots of yourself on My Space, Facebook or anywhere they can be copied. On photo-sharing sites, use privacy settings.

2. Is someone saying malicious things about you online? E-mail a polite request to the site’s webmaster, asking that the offensive material be deleted.

3. You might consider calling in the pros, like ReputationDefender for about $15 a month. But, be aware: Web gossip is so hard to control that there are no guarantees.