The respectable media’s war against “trolling” continually mixes together prejudicial spite with political thinking, as if there is no difference between them. So feminist bloggers who rail against misogynistic trolling wring their hands over everything from threats of rape, which are very serious and potentially illegal, to ridicule of feminism, which is just a form of political criticism – often not very sophisticated criticism, but so what? One news report on the problem of misogynistic trolling lumped together commenters who make “threats of rape” with commenters who are “strongly and personally antagonistic towards feminism”. That is outrageous. Feminism is a political ideology and thus must be open to criticism, even stinging, hurtful criticism. To compare ridicule of feminism with the threat to rape a female writer is a kind of censorious moral blackmail, where the aim is clearly to demonise critics of feminism by associating them with foul blokes who get off on writing emails about rape.
