A shorter version of Markos's post on the Daily Kos about Web incivility and the Kathy Sierra case: If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen:
Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you'll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist -- evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said "death threats". I suspect many are like this gem I recently received
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Email makes it easy for stupid people to send stupid emails to public figures. If they can't handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work. Because no "blogger code of conduct" will scare away psycho losers with access to email.
He may well be right about the blogger code of conduct not being effective, but otherwise he is very wrong in many ways. Let me count the ways:
Look, if you blog,[...], you'll get idiotic emails.
Ah! But women get those idiotic emails even if they don't blog. Even if they just comment on blogs. Even if they are silent, as in the recent study of Web harassment which showed that just having a female user name increased the number of malicious messages by a multiplier between six and twenty-five.
Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you'll get idiotic emails.
And what is controversial shit? To many misogynists a woman saying anything at all is controversial shit. Women, like Kathy Sierra, who blog on tech topics are not actually saying that much that should be controversial.
Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist...
Perhaps not. But there is a whole slew of crime statistics on misogynistic harassment, rape and worse in the real world. There is very little that can be compared with that in terms of real-world attacks against controversial male bloggers. Women may be justified in taking threats of harm more seriously than men, just because of this.
If they can't handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work.
What if it is a lot of heat, like the kitchen on fire, but this heat only burns the female bloggers and commenters, because they have to work against the kind of harassment Markos mentions AND the kind of harassment their gender creates?