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At Bookforum’s website, Miranda Popkey reviews the book The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett. According to Popkey, The Dark Net demonstrates that “when things go bad online, it is often women who are harmed, and men who do the harming.” Here’s an excerpt from the review:
“Ultimately,” writes Bartlett, “the dark net is nothing more than a mirror of society. Distorted, magnified, and mutated by the strange and unnatural conditions of life online—but still recognizably us.” And so it is not surprising that, online as well as off, women are generally more vulnerable than men: subjected to double-standards and casual sexism; punished for claiming the same privileges—of speech, access, privacy—their abusers use to attack them. That (with exceptions, of course) women who seek approval online via sex are punished for it; that men who seek approval via threats of violence and displays of dominance are not. What is surprising—and frustrating, especially given his general ability to empathize with his subjects—is Bartlett’s failure, or perhaps refusal, to comment explicitly on this evident trend.