So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

“4chan takes the worst thing it can imagine that person going through and shouts for that to happen. I don’t think it was a threat that anyone intended to carry through. And I think a lot of its use really did mean ‘destroy’ rather than ‘sexually assault.’” She paused. “But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don’t talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn’t occur to most people as a male degradation. With men, they talk about getting them fired. In our society men are supposed to be employed. If they’re fired, they lose masculinity points. With Donglegate she pointlessly robbed that man of his employment. She degraded his masculinity. And so the community responded by degrading her femininity.”