Hashstag, by Rakka

Twitter hashtags make conversations and exchanges that would previously have been invisible to anyone not involved in them available to everyone. You can stick your head out of your own online bubble and peer into someone else’s. If you listen in to a conversation on a bus or in a bar you’ll often get a similar effect, and if you ever share a train carriage with a stag party you may well overhear some of the same sentiments.

There are a lot of possibilities and interesting conversations growing out of this (here’s a good Mashable post about cross-cultural conversations) but it can be uncomfortable having a front row seat for the social reproduction of gender stereotypes in real time.

Tweeting gender

[Apologies to any gender theorists out there for this next bit, in which I will be oversimplifying some complex ideas.]

[Oh and just to be clear, when I’m talking about men and women I don’t mean all men or all women, and I know those categories are far more fluid than our friends the hashtaggers would like to admit.]

Part of the Great Promise of the internet was that in the gap between your avatar and your fingertips on the keyboard all kinds of subversive genderfuck fun was to be had. And it is being had (hooray!), but there’s a tangible disappointment in some areas that the web is used as much to police and reinforce gendered ideas of appropriate behaviour as it is to undermine them. Social networks, it turns out, are simply another arena in which to enact and consolidate gender identity. Like the bus, like the pub.

And a big part of successfully Being A Man or Being A Woman is policing the behaviour of others. By laying down the rules you’re letting everyone know you understand them. In fact you’re an expert. By calling out someone else on their inappropriate behaviour (for example, women that are ‘loud’ – how unfeminine!) you’re picking up gender points for yourself. And appropriate gender behaviour points win prizes!

You can see this in action in the huge numbers of women participating in sexist hashtags and imparting helpful advice to their own gender:

#rulesforgirls stoppp being so easyyyy!

#ihatefemaleswho act like they in to sports

#agoodwoman sucks her mans dick w|. out no hesitation lOl.

#agoodwoman aims to please

Thanks for that. Now I’m all set. In another recent hashtag, #youneedanewboyfriend, large numbers of male and female Twitter users took the opportunity to remind everyone that male femininity = gay! Which as we all know = very bad indeed:

your man has more clothes with different shades of pink than you.#youneedanewboyfriend

If your man turns down sex from you, #youneedanewboyfriend

#youneedanewboyfriend If he knows all the words to every @ladygaga song out there #notnormal

It’s not just about putting women in their place, it’s about keeping men in line as well. If you can do both that makes you the Manliest Man of all, and king of all you survey. The tweets I quoted in the first post are part of this process. On the one hand encouraging traditionally feminine behaviours, and on the other boosting the masculinity points of the men tweeting, and asserting their dominance and entitlement (consider yourself lucky if you missed #itaintrape – that one was Not Nice).

What I think is happening here is that a large number of people are using a new medium to do exactly what an even larger number of people have already been doing for centuries, millennia, even. What’s different is that the isolated conversations are being collected and shared on a global platform.

What now?

"You are what you tweet" doodle by neabat

The flagrant misogyny of most of these trending topic hashtag tweets makes me furiously angry. But I don’t find them shocking. I think Germaine Greer is wrong on lots of things but right on this one: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” Well, now we have a handy index in our Twitter sidebar. The scale of the problem is intimidating, I agree, but being shocked isn’t going to help.

The good news is we don’t need to start a cultural revolution from scratch. There’s some excellent work already going on: for example, Womankind and PinkStinks are challenging misogyny and sexist attitudes among young people (who seem like the obvious group to start with, to my mind).

There are also lots of truly wonderful online projects that are trying to break down some of these poisonous stereotypes and ideas. BadRep is one, of course ;-) .  But another of my favourites is Genderfork – follow them on Twitter for the perfect antidote to all this #rulesforgirls/boys crap.

What else can we do? Mocking the hashtags is fun. Hijacking them is fun too. It might not overthrow the sexist idiot regime, but if it makes just one person stop and think then it’s surely worth it. Another blogger on the topic of hashtags suggested getting some feminist hashtags circulating. Suggestions included #feminist and #ilovemybody. That’d be nice for other feminists, but I can’t see how they’d have very wide appeal, particularly because they don’t invite people to personalise them.

So I’m going to end with a challenge: can we come up with a funny, pro-feminist / genderfuck hashtag people might actually use?