Study: Women Slut-Shame Each Other On Twitter as Much as Men Do

"Slut-shaming", another term/cause celebre by white leftists to fight the "war on women":

A British study has revealed that women are tweeting slurs that are derogatory to their own gender almost as frequently and viciously as men. But is this really so surprising?

In the 2004 film Mean Girls, Tina Fey’s character, a high school math teacher, addresses a gymnasium full of clashing teenage girls about what she dubs “girl-on-girl crime”: “You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores,” she pleads. “It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores.” Her message, along with much of the film’s, is clear: females can be their own gender’s worst enemy.

While that’s a truth that’s largely accepted about high school girls – where cliques and bullying are defining characteristics of the environment – it’s also an outlook that often carries over into adulthood. And not entirely without reason.

Last week, UK think tank Demos released a study that examined online misogyny and who, precisely, was behind it. Looking at tweets that used the words “rape,” “whore,” and “slut” that were sent from UK-based accounts between Dec. 26, 2013 and Feb. 9, 2014, the study found that more than 100,000 messages used the word “rape,” while 85,000 used the term “slut” and 48,000 used the word “whore.”

Naturally, a large proportion of the tweets were inoffensive – ie they shared news stories about rape or advocated against the use of misogynistic terms – but many were used in an offensive, off-handed way or worse. Around 12 percent of tweets that contained the word “rape” and 20 percent that contained “slut” or “whore,” seemed to be intended as a direct threat or insult. But the most surprising element of the research – according to the think tank – was the revelation that women were almost as likely to send tweets with the words “slut,” “whore” or “rape” – used both casually and offensively – as men were. Demos’ analysis found that accounts with male names used one of the words 116,530 times, while accounts with female names did so 94,546 times.

Is this surprising? It seems perplexing that great numbers of women are tweeting misogynistic insults that are derogatory to their own gender. But when you take a closer look, it’s not actually all that surprising that women are capable of bullying and gross misogyny, particularly online. Research has shown time and time again, that hostility toward women thrives online. Women are routinely subject to harassment, sexist attacks and rape and death threats online. In January this year, two people in the UK pleaded guilty in court to sending menacing tweets about British feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and were sentenced to jail time. One of the culprits was a woman, 23-year-old Isabella Sorley.

That women are behind some of those attacks doesn’t come as a surprise to Cheryl Dellasega, a professor at the Pennsylvania State University and author of the book Mean Girls Grown Up. She says that women – and men – often adopt the dominant attitude and language that’s used around them in order to fit in. “You have to comply the norm,” she says. “Even if it’s a norm you don’t like.”

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