Mob misogyny is nothing new. I have the death threats to prove it. | The Washington Post

Sometimes you really don’t want to be right. In June, I wrote an op-ed for The Post, with the headline “Why can’t we hate men?,” offering a robust critique of the pervasiveness and corrosiveness of male power. I argued that the logical consequences were women’s anger and a deep need to embrace women’s leadership, while suggesting that men could do the world good by stepping away from power.

I knew my piece would be controversial; after all, we live in a time when a person who bragged about assaulting women was elected president anyway. But the facts I cited are hardly debatable. Feminists have been making similar arguments for years. While admittedly framed in a provocative manner, my remarks weren’t anything so “out there.”

And here’s what happened. I received hundreds of emails and tweets describing, in horrifying detail, how I should be raped and murdered or should die from a variety of incurable diseases. The social media onslaught was fueled by the usual suspects — Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News. Viewers and listeners were assured that I was mentally ill (Fox News’s Tucker Carlson) and a danger to male students. Some messages were so detailed and emphatic, the police had to look into them. A petition circulated calling for my firing. A Title IX complaint, organized by the National Coalition for Men, was made against my university.

Alas, none of this will be news to women in the public eye. Women running for office are barraged with attempts to humiliate and scare them. Female journalists, bloggers and pundits experience much the same, some of it exploding into the kind of terrifying harassment that was Gamergate. Women of color, no surprise, are attacked with that toxic admixture of racism and misogyny, and lesbians like me come in for particularly vitriolic fury. Most targets are not protected by academic freedom, as I am. Some, such as Vermont state Rep. Kiah Morris, the only black woman in the Vermont House, leave the public stage after the online ugliness becomes too much to bear. Others, like Christine Blasey Ford, who came forward with allegations of sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, are forced to leave their homes and hire security after receiving death threats. And all of this hatred has been made newly legitimate by a president whose disdain for women is a matter of public record…. Read the full Op-Ed on The Washington Post.