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, 14 tweets, 2 min read

And now, a thread about smart women and misogyny.

Whether or not you’re a woman on Twitter, you might know that…

(1/14)

…many women who are experts in their fields and who articulate unconventional ideas on Twitter—especially if they use humor/sarcasm or other confident/assertive/non-timid tones—are regularly insulted and otherwise verbally abused by other Twitter users. (2/14)

I’m a middle-aged white man. Sometimes I articulate unconventional ideas, and my tone is often assertive, and sometimes I get attacked in ways that are personal and inappropriate. But only sometimes. Most of the pushback I get is relatively civil, even on Twitter. (3/14)

Yesterday, I tweeted a compliment of Pam Karlan. She deserved it, and I stand by it. Agree with her or not, like her style or not, Karlan is one of the smartest constitutional lawyers alive.

I’m writing this thread because of what happened next. (4/14)

After I tweeted my positive statement about Karlan, my notifications filled up with ugly replies. Lots of them. Some attacking me for speaking well of Karlan, but mostly just attacking Karlan. In ugly and non-substantive ways. (5/14)

The replies attacking her were personal. About her appearance, her personality, her (real or imagined) personal life and sexuality. They used words that are paradigmatic terms of abuse toward women. There were pictures and GIFs. (6/14)

There were also replies asserting (just baldly asserting) that Karlan is stupid or ignorant or an incompetent professor. Which I assure you she isn’t. (7/14)

I understand that Karlan often has a confrontational style. She’s wasn’t trying to make nice yesterday. But it’s hard to understand this flood of nasty replies as anything other than misogynistic. (8/14)

Also uninformed. But ignorance alone, without misogyny, doesn’t give rise to the hostility and the specific forms of invective used in these replies. (9/14)

Trash like that doesn’t usually come into my notifications in any quantity. There are people who don’t like my ideas, and sometimes people on Twitter assert that I know nothing about law. But even nasty repliers don’t usually react to me like *that.* (10/14)

That kind of invective showed up when I saluted a woman who is a super-smart powerhouse of a professor, who does not apologize for who she is and what she knows, on the day she explained why the man who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy should be impeached. (11/14)

The point here, of course, is that the sick stuff was *unusual* in *my* notifications. But it was just a window into what abuse looks like on a regular basis for smart/expert/assertive women who speak up in public. (12/14)

Those of us whose social privileges make us not the normal targets of that garbage should practice actively remembering, day by day, that many of our colleagues face that gendered hostility all the time. And think of things we can do about that. (13/14)