Considering that it appears to disproportionally target women, labeling it "misogyny" seems completely fair, whatever underlying mental disorder they suffer from.

> Considering that it appears to disproportionally target women

That's a pretty big [citation needed]. All I see is that misogyny is a disproportionally popular news item, which is not at all the same thing.

And if it's just an expression of people's mental disorders, that's not hate, and it's not productive to fixing the issue to call it hate when it's not.

> That's a pretty big [citation needed]. All I see is that misogyny is a disproportionally popular news item, which is not at all the same thing.

I have to admit I don't have hard numbers to back my claims, but I think it would be common knowledge if men were routinely called "sluts" and threatened with rape by trolls.

> And if it's just an expression of people's mental disorders, that's not hate, and it's not productive to fixing the issue to call it hate when it's not.

Oh, for that matter, I think most racists and homophobes could use psychological help as well, but it doesn't change their behaviour.

Men are routinely the subject of death threats and similar style trolling. Men who die have their rememberance pages trolled. Young men are entrapped by criminal gangs into sending them nude photographs, which are then used to blackmail those young men.

Sexual violence online appears to be mostly aimed at women, and mostly from men. But it's not hard to find examples of men receiving those threats or women making threats of sexual violence. This is especially true for non-hetero-normative men.

It's a hard problem. Well funded companies full of smart people have tackled it and failed (youtube comments).

Just for clarity: the experience of women online is likely to be pretty miserable. Many people, of both sexes, experience hatred.

PS: I hate it when people ascribe bigoted opinions to mental illness. That excuses the behaviour whilst also stigmatising mental illhealth. Arseholes are arseholes because they're arseholes, not because they have a mental illness that causes them to be an arsehole.

> Young men are entrapped by criminal gangs into sending them nude photographs, which are then used to blackmail those young men.

But that's just a business model (granted, it doesn't make any difference to the victim). Misogynists threaten for free.

> Arseholes are arseholes because they're arseholes, not because they have a mental illness that causes them to be an arsehole.

My working hypothesis is that well-adjusted people don't spend their free time sending rape/death threats over the Internet.

Ah, the "obviously the most important discussion to have about this is what the exact meanings of words are" derailment tactic. Honestly you could play mansplaining bingo in here.

Exaggeration is a well known and powerful poetic tool. Although hate is not an exaggeration of what is going on, it is an emotionally loaded term that delivers the message clearly. You get all the relevant information from the context, and you get the urgency, and the disgracefulness of the act by using poetic replacement terms.

I agree that it's a powerful tool. It's a short-circuit for logic that, at times, can be useful to apply (such as, for example, wartime when debate can be deadly). I don't think this is one of those times.

If we release our energy as hate and disparagement of harassers without fixing the problem at its core (or even finding out what that is), then all we've done is used exaggeration to make ourselves feel better, and add more poison and fear to the world.

That's why I'm against calling things "misogyny" which aren't. Mind you, I do think misogyny is a real thing and a real problem, but I think it's quite buried in the social media and you'll rarely hear about it.

Real hatred isn't funny, rational, or outrageous enough to be viral, and real hatred doesn't get off on reactions. That's the difference.