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Update: This article has been updated to reflect the news that “Rantic” now appears to be taking responsibility for creating the Watson site.
In her famous 1996 commencement address, writer Nora Ephron warned the new graduates of Wellesley college that they were entering a world that was hostile to women’s achievements and begged them to “take it personally.”
“Understand,” she said, “every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you.” We must all take such attacks personally, she argued: “Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: Get back, get back to where you once belonged.”
On September 21, actress and UN Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson stood up at the UN Headquarters in New York City and delivered a powerful speech condemning the harm that gender discrimination causes to both men and women, and inviting men to become active participants in the global struggle for equality. The next day, anonymous individuals set up a website targeting Watson with sexual threats, counting down the five days until, we were meant to presume, her private nude images would be made public. The threats against Watson are an attack on me — and I take them personally. We all need to.
Users on the 4chan message board took credit for creating the site, which featured the 4chan logo. However, it now appears that the threat site was created by a group calling themselves “Rantic marketing,” which is apparently a fake company run by an internet collective that has been behind several other false countdown sites in the past. (Although some are calling this a “hoax,” it’s hard to see how that is true. Threats still cause harm and still have a chilling effect, whether the site was set up by Rantic or by 4chan users, and the harm from those threats persists even if no photos are released.) Basically, it’s unclear who actually created the site and what their motivations were. But that matters less than the fact that it even existed in the first place.
The site threatening Watson was greeted with glee on 4chan and Reddit, where commenters explicitly stated their hope that the threats would force her to abandon her feminist campaigning. “If only her nudes got leaked and she had the load on her face. Her feminism kick would be over,” a commenter wrote. “If this is true her recent feminism rally is going to be shutdown hard,” wrote another. “Feminism,” one 4chan user opined, “is a growing cancer.”
Watson is not the only one being told to “get back” by misogynists who wield sexual terror as a weapon. She is in the company of many other women, all over the world, who have made the decision to participate in public life and suffered the consequences. Writers on feminist issues, deluged with rape threats: get back. Activists from Syria, to Sudan, to the Congo, raped in prison: get back. South African lesbians, raped to “correct” their sexuality: get back.
Those threats and attacks are especially powerful, because they are aided by the pervasive, deeply-held idea that women have a responsibility to alter their behavior in order to avoid sexual violence. When CBS News correspondent Lara Logan was assaulted in Tahrir Square, a barrage of comments and tweets asserted that she should have known better than report from Egypt, which surely wasn’t safe for a woman. (Get back.) When online pundits heard that rapes of college women are horrifyingly pervasive, they warned female students to stop drinking. (Get back.) When a series of rapes were reported in Haryana, India, local politicians urged that the solution was for girls to be married off as young teens. (Get back.) Even when the impulse is protective, the demand that women be the ones to change is, essentially, a demand that we shape our lives around the whims of sexual predators, not our own needs or ambitions, or the contributions we can make to the world.
And it gets even worse.
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