Brighton Digital Festival hosts a feminist debate

As will Suzanne Moore, the firebrand Guardian columnist, and Lucy-Anne Holmes, the No More Page 3 campaigner who has The Sun’s editorial policy in her sights.

The discussion on just what social media means for feminism in 2013 will be chaired by New Statesman deputy editor Helen Lewis.

But where are the men? If feminists believe men and women are equal, should there not be at least one man on the panel to share his views?

“I am fine with men identifying themselves as feminists,” Lewis explains when we chat a few days before the debate organised as part of Brighton Digital Festival. “But I don’t think they can lead the feminist debate.

“Men are so overrepresented on panels – even when the subject isn’t being a man – that when the subject is being a woman, I am OK with the idea women will have more interesting things to say about that.”

On any other subject she would argue for an even gender split, but this is an exception.

“The same way if there were a panel about anti-racism, I wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be a white person on that panel.

“You might if they work in a particularly interesting organisation but I don’t think there needs to be a special space carved out for them.”

Perhaps my introduction only serves to highlight the problem: men angle discussion their way. Social media, however, has energised the debate – despite being hijacked by trolls.

“So more people have vast access to the internet,” says Lewis.

“We have people who are carers, people with young children – people who wouldn’t have been able to take part in public meetings before now, and the internet has meant a much broader range can get involved in feminism.”

The downside is social media has opened up women to an enormous amount of abuse.

After Caroline Criado-Perez, freelance journalist and co-founder of thewomensroom.org.uk, campaigned to have Jane Austen put on bank notes, she was sent tweets threatening to rape and kill her.

Labour MP Stella Creasy has received similar threats via Twitter; Mary Beard’s appearance was ridiculed after she was a panellist on BBC’s Question Time; Independent journalist Grace Dent was on the receiving end of a bomb threat.

“What Caroline Criado-Perez experienced recently is not atypical. Laurie Penny, my colleague, gets the most incredible rape threats, people saying they want to urinate on her, people saying her mouth should be sewn shut.”

“It is stuff people wouldn’t say in real life but because it’s the internet, because there are not consequences and they don’t feel it is associated with their identity in real life, people say things they would never say face-to-face.”

Though that idea the internet is anonymous, that a troll can send hateful messages without consequences for their day-to-day life and existing relationships, is changing.

“If we have learnt anything from the NSA leaks and Snowden files – though that is on a Governmental level, or for people in repressive regimes – it is that there is no such thing as a truly anonymous account.”

Facebook reacted to the RIP trolls – people who left horrific messages on the Facebook pages of dead children – by asking for more personal information before users sign up and deleting abusive accounts (though the policy also serves the network’s advertisers’ desires).

Many newspaper sites now require commentators to contribute via existing social network accounts, which removes the anonymity.

The Huffington Post requires users to comment via Facebook. The New Statesman discourages hit-and-run behaviour by asking users to sign up to its forum through Twitter or Facebook. The Argus website’s “report comment” function can lead to users having their IP addresses blocked.

Lewis says Twitter is a different proposition. She discovered as much when she sent Criado-Perez messages of support after she had received a rape threat.

“I got a tweet back saying, ‘Relax, you’re too gross and annoying to rape’, which made me laugh in a horrible way, because it is this idea that rape is a compliment men pay to pretty women, which is not what happens: babies get raped, extremely old women get raped, men get raped.

“There is this idea that threatening to rape people has become a weird sort of modus operandi for a certain type of internet troll because they know it is extremely offensive, it is more frightening said from a man to a woman and it is specifically designed to intimidate.”

Caitlin Moran, Times columnist and author of How To Be A Woman, advocated a 24-hour boycott of Twitter after the torrent of abuse flying back and forth.

Lewis supported the silence.

“I feel the abuse women get on social media is designed to silence them. Therefore I liked the protest because it was a symbolic thing to say, ‘This is what it would be like if more voices were silent. Is this what you want?’ It was only a very small gesture but it was there to make a very simple point.

“The people who sent me stuff about how ugly I am and how I shouldn’t be allowed an opinion on television – and people who do that to Mary Beard because they are horrified that anyone over the age of 40 should be allowed to have an opinion about the Romans – they want to humiliate you and embarrass you into silence.”

Some high-profile commentators disagree. Writing in the Spectator, Rod Liddle argued that Moran – and others from the “well-fed London liberal absolutist left neck of the woods” – were more aghast at having their opinions questioned by “the great unwashed”.

He wrote, “What most of them are really complaining about is that the benighted hoi polloi are allowed to comment adversely and express their annoyance at the largely fatuous beliefs, which attend to this gilded circus of well-heeled bien pensant bores.”

It feeds into a wider discussion about feminism, which over the past hundred years has made great strides – equal voting being the most obvious example.

Lewis points out that one in six women are still raped or sexually assaulted in the course of their lives; only 20% of our MPs are female; women are under-represented in corporate life and still do the majority of unpaid caring work.

New media has energised the feminist fight. Transgender rights have also moved forward thanks to its open access. It has certainly encouraged more debate.

Guardian columnist and Feminism 3.0 panellist Suzanne Moore found herself in the eye of a storm after writing an article about the power of female anger, which was reprinted online in Lewis’s New Statesman, when she referred to women being “angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual”.

Old media still has much to do. It can be as guilty of perpetrating the feedback loop: women avoid TV and public life for fear of criticism and attacks, adds Lewis.

“We have a media culture in which women are subjected to an extra level of scrutiny which is not levelled at men. You see that in politics.

“The assumption is that men are the default, that a man in a suit is the kind of person you would expect to have an opinion on the Eurozone crisis. If she is under 25, it is ‘Why is she there? She can’t know anything’. And if she is over 40, it is that she is some dried-up old hag.”

Lewis, a regular on the BBC’s Sunday Politics, has found a critical mass of producers and commissioning editors who really want to make an effort, “so public life is not just a lot of middle-aged white men talking to each other generally”.

Still, she argues, “Women over 50 are erased from public life. Working on changing that is what the media could do.”

As for new media, they “need to encourage people to invest more in the idea of a community”.

• Feminism 3.0, Corn Exchange, Church Street, Brighton, Saturday, September 14
• Starts 7.30pm, tickets £10. Call 01273 709709