Sex and the cybergirl

When Mother Jones stepped out onto the electronic superhighway, so did a few cyberpigs.

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Using the handle MaryHJones, MoJo recently logged on to a “live chat” session to check out the on-line action. She told her newfound friends that she did union work and was fairly new on the “net.” “Are you married?” asked Jim. “How tall are you and what color hair do you have?” And later, “When was the last time you really enjoyed sex? Was it gooooooooddd?

Though the “information superhighway” has been heralded as a great equalizer, where race, class, gender, sexual preference, and physical appearance make no difference, many women are finding otherwise. Females who surf the Internet’s vast, male-dominated network of computer databases or join in public discussions are often subjected to sexism and harassment–occurring most frequently in live chat and via “talk” requests where people can send private messages to anyone on-line at the same time.

Things can turn ugly. After apparently offending someone in an Internet newsgroup discussion, Stephanie Brail received an untraceable e-mail “bomb” containing hundreds of sexual and violent messages–the mildest of which was “Shut up, bitch.” Brail is calling for action. “It’s against the law to harass people on the phone, in person, or in the mail,” she says. “Personally threatening e-mail messages should be against the law.”

Other women have reported similar incidents; some refused to identify themselves for fear of on-line retaliation. Though laws pertaining to phone threats likely extend to e-mail, they remain untested. But Howard Rheingold, author of “The Virtual Community,” believes the problem will diminish with time. “It will be regarded as uncool. There are people who do uncool things, [but] that’s not the medium, that’s a larger social issue.”

Meanwhile, several on-line groups have taken matters into their own hands. Women’s Wire penalizes repeat offenders by suspending their accounts. MIT-based Cyberion City (a “bar” of sorts in cyberspace) warns customers that “unwanted advances of a hostile or forward nature are unacceptable. If you think someone [wants] a closer personal relationship, make absolutely sure before saying or doing anything that would be considered inappropriate in real life.”

Will the promise of cyberspace fall to a few sexist cyberpigs? The only way to change the present course, as nearly everyone in cyberspace agrees, is to get more women on-line. In the meantime, it’s a sty out there.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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