Sexist Slurs: Reinforcing Feminine Stereotypes Online

Abstract

Social media platforms are accused repeatedly of creating environments in which women are bullied and harassed. We argue that online aggression toward women aims to reinforce traditional feminine norms and stereotypes. In a mixed methods study, we find that this type of aggression on Twitter is common and extensive and that it can spread far beyond the original target. We locate over 2.9 million tweets in one week that contain instances of gendered insults (e.g., "bitch," "cunt," "slut," or "whore")-averaging 419,000 sexist slurs per day. The vast majority of these tweets are negative in sentiment. We analyze the social networks of the conversations that ensue in several cases and demonstrate how the use of "replies," "retweets," and "likes" can further victimize a target. Additionally, we develop a sentiment classifier that we use in a regression analysis to compare the negativity of sexist messages. We find that words in a message that reinforce feminine stereotypes inflate the negative sentiment of tweets to a significant and sizeable degree. These terms include those insulting someone's appearance (e.g., "ugly"), intellect (e.g., "stupid"), sexual experience (e.g., "promiscuous"), mental stability (e.g., "crazy"), and age ("old"). Messages enforcing beauty norms tend to be particularly negative. In sum, hostile, sexist tweets are strategic in nature. They aim to promote traditional, cultural beliefs about femininity, such as beauty ideals, and they shame victims by accusing them of falling short of these standards.

Media-Induced Sexual Harassment: The Routes from Sexually Objectifying Media to Sexual Harassment

“…The participatory nature of social media entails an open forum for information exchange, thus widening the dissemination of episodes, images, and words that sexually objectify women. To date, however, research on the effects of sexually objectifying contents via social media on sexual harassment and sexual violence in general is still in its very early stages (see Felmlee et al 2020;Gramazio et al 2019;Spaccatini et al 2019, for some early research). Therefore, although the Media-Induced Sexual Harassment framework encompasses the role played by the full extent of sexually objectifying media, most studies we reviewed in in the present article focused on "traditional media."…”

The cost of gendered attitudes on a female candidate: Evidence from Google Trends

“…According to Felmlee et al (2019), the epithet we chose is one of the most common sexist slurs used online and it is highly associated with messages that reinforce negative female stereotypes and enforce the negative sentiment of these messages. 4 The epithet is a common word in Google searches: Figure 1(a) reports the relative search level frequency overtime.…”

“…We follow Stephens-Davidowitz (2014) and define a gender-charged search rate as the percentage of searches for the word ["Word 1"] and its plural between 2012 and 2015 at media-market level. 1 The epithet we chose is one of the most common sexist slurs used online and it is highly associated with messages that reinforce negative female stereotypes and enforce the negative sentiment of these messages (Felmlee et al, 2019;Wu, 2018). We do not include data from 2016 in order to avoid reverse causality, that is, a potential increase in exposition of Hillary Clinton after the campaign affecting the online search of offensive language towards women.…”

“…Felmlee et al(2019) argue that identifying a woman as a "[Word 1]" means that she falls far out of line with the norm of sexual inexperience. This epithet ranks within the top 20 of all types of curse words used on Twitter (Wang et al, 2014) and one of the most predictive words of a post about a woman on the popular Economics Job Market Rumors forum (Wu, 2018).…”

The geography of sentiment towards the Women’s March of 2017

“…On Jan. 21,2017, millions took to the street in an historic event, the Women's March of 2017, which at the time represented the largest, single-day protest in American history. Estimates suggest that the March involved over 4.1 million people in the United States, comprising about 1.3 percent of the U.S. population [1].…”