Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored | Laurie Penny

We were told we couldn’t take a joke, and that social media isn’t real life. Now the misogyny of early chatrooms and Gamergate has reached the White House

Why has it taken so long for us to treat misogyny as a political problem? The modern manosphere has been metastasising for many years – and for years, mainstream culture has responded with a helpless shrug. There was nothing unusual about men hurting women, even if the technology was new.

In the early aughts, angry and alienated men began indulging in recreational misogyny online, bombarding women and girls in the public eye with threats, insults, harassment, hacking, and hideous “revenge porn”. Strange as it may now sound, though, “the internet” was still seen as separate from “real life”.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, author and screenwriter. They write the substack Force of Culture