femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

The internet is an amazing rabbit hole. You follow a path of links and they lead you to a place that you didn't know existed (yet are unsurprised to find). As it turns out, the rape culture reality that exists in the F2F fleshy world is thriving and prospering in its cyber-counterpart. In researching the attacks of Anonyomous, whose aim is not explicitly anti-feminist and anti-woman (although it clearly is if you look at actions and statements; in other words, Anonymous doesn't have a centralized mission statement that is hostile towards women), I found a plethora of blogs who are outwardly hateful in ways that make me incredibly sad. I'm alternately stunned and disappointed, shocked and resigned, angered and saddened by these blogs and websites. The juxtaposition of these two phenomena is bringing new research questions to the forefront. It would seem at first that researching Anonymous would provide more material for nuanced rhetorical analysis whereas researching MRA groups who are explicitly mysogynist would be simply pointing out the obvious. But what strikes me as particularly interesting here is the juxtaposition between these people as cyber-identitites and as F2F. Or their cyberidentities versus who they are in the corporeal realm. Oddly enough, I think that the actions of Anonymous are more congruent with acceptable social behavior for men in meatspace--mysoginist, homophobic, racist, and sexist comments are generally accepted when they are presented as "jokes" humor. On the other hand, out and out statements on hating women and doing violence to them is less acceptable. The important factor here is humor. Violence cloaked in humor somehow becomes acceptable. What's funny about this? How does this affect the "safe space" of web writing? If women like sex worker renegade evolution can be outed, what happens to women (or men) who use blogging to deal with their traumatic experiences?