 don't have a large variety of slides to show you all I've just so you can have something to look at that isn't my face that is the cover of the e-book that I've got coming up tomorrow which is so this talk is sort of based on I'm not trying to plug I just didn't have any other pictures to send so I thought they can look at that so unscientific straw poll who is feeling a little bit depressed or angry right now yeah okay I thought that might be the case so and I want to start off by saying that that's an entirely appropriate reaction and I need to and I were talking just before this actually about the pressure to end these things things with some sort of you know inspiring uplifting message you know it's all gonna be okay because you know a lot of the women I know who write books about things that make them angry are then are pressured by publishers or editors to end it with a love story I mean we could maybe end it with a love story but it would be a bit out of context but you know it ended with it's all gonna be fine don't worry I really think we should worry I think some there is a massive battle for the for the future of gender relations taking place right now and we all need to be aware of it but having said that one of the biggest risks in this debate in the entire discussion about women and misogyny and harassment online is that we start thinking of the internet as a space which is not safe for women this is something I'm seeing a great deal in the UK which is where I'm from where at the moment there is a huge debate going on in the press about online harassment and how the internet is a terribly terribly dangerous place because it's definitely a separate place for women to go particularly young women and you know to protect themselves women should not go online we shouldn't engage in these spaces you know don't go to ask FM don't go to Facebook just you know maybe stay in your room and this to me there's really no difference between saying that and saying to women well if you don't want to get raped maybe shouldn't go out at night on your own it's the same logic it's the same it's the same way of saying to women control yourself do not participate in public life in public space and that is an incredibly worrying trend I wanted to talk a little bit about what the internet is doing for gender relations and for women and for media and I wanted to tell a story which is is my story in part and it is it's personal and political and it starts in 2005 which is a very long time ago in the life of the internet on live journal in a magical land called live journal far far away now sadly in a few months before Facebook Facebook was technically around but it hadn't come to the UK yet that would be a little bit later I have been active in online communities since from a very young age but it was really only at university at the age of about 19 that I finally started blogging in a really full-time way mostly because I moved in with a girl who was a close friend who informed me that if I ever wanted to talk to her again about anything important I had to get a live general account and talk to her on there despite the fact that she lived in the room next door to me and this proved an incredibly effective gateway drug and I found myself suddenly introduced to this fascinating new world where people talked about gender in a new way people talked about feminism in a new way I'm a massive nerd there were all kinds of fandom communities out there which made me feel I think safe is the wrong word for some of those pages but definitely like I'd found my kind like I'd found all kinds of different new tribes that I wanted to get involved with I was excited about the language being used there I was excited that there were people in these communities who weren't playing the same kind of gender game I heard words like cis and transgender for the first time it wasn't an accident that a great many people in those in those communities were young people who were coming out for the first time I my anti-racist education started in those communities a great many years earlier than I think it probably would have done had I not been involved in those subgroups because I grew up in an incredibly white area and was incredibly ignorant before I came online in that way and one of the things that I realized when I started engaging in LJ then on blogspot and various other communities like that was that all these secret private little feelings that I had been having about feminism weren't just mine a lot of people were angry and a lot of people were talking mainly to each other about what their experience of being female or being queer was like on a daily basis and this was massively massively energizing for me it made me think about my reality and what I was learning and being taught at university at the same time bearing and bear in mind I went to a very traditional eminent university where I was actually told by a female tutor that if I wrote about women's issues in my final paper I would I would not get a first and so I instead took up drinking and I didn't get a first but you know it's in the outside what I had actually my grounding in feminist thought was I guess reasonably advanced for somebody that age because I happened to be a nerd about various various feminist writers almost by accident when I was I was quite young I'd read Jermaine Greer I'd read Andrea Dworkin I'd read various other writers but I didn't I thought this was just something weird that I liked that was a bit passe and nobody else was thinking about it it turned out that that wasn't true in then moving on to 2006 and 2007 I became active in a number of different feminist blogs first in the UK with the F word and then following sites like Feminist like Shakespeare sites that are still around right now and some that have gone on active inactive as people have moved on and I realized that a whole new conversation was starting and I decided to start my own blog and decided to write in a way that incorporated for me not just feminist and queer issues but how those issues fitted into broader political writing because for me what I saw was those communities mainly talking to each other and it turns out that around the same time this is one of the wonderful things about the internet quite a lot of other people had the same idea what you have right now is a totally different world to that partly because of massive Bayermouth social media companies like Twitter and Facebook which weren't active in the same way right then which allows for much more rapid sharing of articles and blogs it allows things to go viral much faster I became a journalist through that process the process of starting in small online communities moving to my own blog doing my own writing then doing journalism training realizing that writing was something I wanted to do passionately and in public that was the trajectory it had nothing to do with the traditional media career that everybody was laying out in the in the training courses idea where you start on a local paper you know you write about flower shows and dog grooming for a couple of years then maybe eventually you moved to the city that was nonsense I mean people here know that that's nonsense right the industry of media and specifically of news journalism was changing at the same time this was creating an incredibly interesting new environment for women's voices and marginalized voices to be articulated in a new way one stat which I find really really encouraging right now although obviously it's not perfect is that in print journalism in print news journalism only 20% of bylines are women's bylines that's that includes comments and op-eds on the internet it's 33% we're talking a professional news sites if that's really even a thing anymore I don't know quite how you count the Huffington Post I really hope there's nobody here from the Huffington Post right now have written for them in the past but sorry about that and the internet is doing fantastic things for changing the way that women see themselves changing the way that women and girls talk about our own experience there is a and this is becoming even more active but in the in communities like Twitter what you've seen recently is a massive outcry against sexism against everyday harassment things creations like the online of the everyday sexism project in the UK the Alps try project in Germany and things that are created by even younger women there is something I discovered only a few days ago is a site called the unslut project and I thought that rather than just put it up there I would read you a little bit from the unslut project is a group blog whereby young girls often very young girls school age teenage even preteen share their experiences of being called a slut of facing slut shaming and what that means and there was one and I'm going to really do my best to stay cool as I read this because it makes me it gives me feels as they say on the on life journal so this was from a few days ago so I'm 15 years old in ninth grade in Northern California I moved here from the UK last August last July in the UK I went to a party I was pretty popular I had a lot of friends the boys at this party tried to get me drunk I had never had alcohol and I was given lots of drinks that started off being mixed with alcohol and then became pure liquor they succeeded with getting me completely out of my senses about six guys made out with me and forced me to touch them and they touched me they trampled on me and held me down at points one guy literally dragged me up the stairs into a room and unzipped my shorts and tried to have sex with me I told him to not I didn't want it to happen I was on my period I never found out exactly how close we got to having sex but it was scarily close people went round at the party saying that we had sex and a couple of girls who were my close friends said that I was on my period I woke up the next day with bruises all over every part of my body and feeling horrible and disgusting the worst part was that everyone just didn't talk to it about talk about it to me but no one could hold eye contact with me anymore though I was a slut I was so ashamed school was hell for me I felt dirty and I believed everybody my nightmares were hell I want to thank you because your blog makes me feel like I'm not the only person who has been slut shamed and hasn't done anything to cause it it makes me so upset that so many people go through being treated like this your entries are great I'm so glad I found you and when we talk about women being silenced online and when we talk about what the shaming and silencing of women in digital spaces means that's what people are trying to stop right people are trying to stop the formation of an entirely new gender consensus a sharing of experience which only happened in very very small private spaces between women who had very limited ways of contacting each other before we had this technology I think technology does change us as human beings I think technology is changing what it means to be a woman and to exist in public space right now I've experienced this myself I don't want to go into everything that's happened to me over the past couple of years right now but suffice it to say that the backlash has been similar to Anita's actually and really at times made me think again about carrying on with my public career and with writing and speaking and actually a couple of weeks ago I had a bomb threat sent to me and I had to actually leave my house nearly had to actually permanently move out of my house and it was it was scary and enraging and it made me think yet again do I really want to be doing this do I really want to be devoting the emotional overheads to carrying just to carrying on the work you have to do just to stay there as a woman who is targeted not every woman who writes in public is targeted but any woman can be the energy it requires is tremendous and what happened as as often happens is that I was I was sitting in in the friend's house that I'd gone to sort of packed a bag taken my laptop left my house and I got an email from a young girl about 15 years old again living in a small village in the UK talking about her plans to become a writer and talking about how she felt nobody really understood her and her own and her politics were so different from everybody in her village and I thought my god you know what am I supposed to say to this girl what am I supposed to say to any of the young girls and young boys and young people of all genders who email me and write to me and reach out and say we want to be involved we want to create something new do you say to them you know you better protect yourself you know maybe maybe think again about what you put out online don't engage you don't feed you know you have to grow a very very thick skin that's an awful I get it all the time grow a thick skin I'm a writer I don't need a thick skin it's the last thing I need they tell you these things because they feel like the only option is to step back and exclude yourself from these spaces it's a very very old attitude applying to a very very new human space we act like the internet has been around for many many generations like it's something that can never change what we're talking about that can never change is the structural misogyny of our culture I think that technology can go some way to changing that and projects like the unslucked project outstri everyday sexism make us look again about how women experience harassment about how people of all gender all genders experience sex segregation I wanted to end by saying that right now somewhere out there is a young girl many many young girls thinking about the world they want to be part of trying to imagine themselves as part of a different story than the simple narrative that's been laid out for them as a young woman growing up in this still incredibly sexist society and it is on us as people who engage in media and as people who want to change culture to make sure that that young girl is able to live a new story and I think that I think that the internet can help us do that but we really have to fight for it right now there's everything to play for and it's up to us