Amanda Hess has a FANTASTIC article in Pacific Standard about women writers who are harrassed on Twitter and e-mail by insane men, and the limits of law enforcement. She describes a particularly disgusting tweet and the reaction of a local police officer.
Two hours later, a Palm Springs police officer lumbered up the steps to my hotel room, paused on the outdoor threshold, and began questioning me in a steady clip. I wheeled through the relevant background information: I am a journalist; I live in Los Angeles; sometimes, people don’t like what I write about women, relationships, or sexuality; this was not the first time that someone had responded to my work by threatening to rape and kill me. The cop anchored his hands on his belt, looked me in the eye, and said, “What is Twitter?”
Apt. 11d 
Some of those “men” are probably 95-pound 9th graders.
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This is a great article, as is the discussion on Slate about the article. I used to publish a lot of op-eds in national publications, but still get physically sick from the sorts of mean, harassing e-mails I always would receive from people who disagreed with me. My sense is that the attacks tend to be much more personal when you are female — I had so many people google me and then post online that I didn’t actually have sufficient academic credentials to be making policy arguments (despite the fact that I have a PhD and a degree from Oxford and I’ve written three books). It wasn’t that they were objecting to my ideas, but rather telling me that I didn’t have the right to have any ideas at all. My sense is that when these trolls disagree with a man who writes, they tend to take him to task for ideas which they might disagree with, but are less likely to tell him that he doesn’t have the right to have ideas or express them at all. (Oh, and these vicious trolls are much more likely to google women, find a picture of the author, and then dismiss all her ideas because she’s fat or not pretty enough. They don’t do that to men either.)
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It’s interesting how “anti-discrimination” has become the highest value in the modern ideology. In the linked article, the author worries about the government having too much power over the internet, which it might use to suppress free speech, punish political opponents, etc., but finally endorses a suggestion that the government use its power to prevent “discrimination,” at which point that power, apparently purified by its sanctified origins, becomes incapable of abuse.
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I don’t understand how you read that and think of it as an anti-discrimination issue. The article talks about the effect being discriminatory, but the mechanism (which is threats of rape and murder) have been reasons for government action since the founding of the United States.
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Definitely related:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-i-learned-from-worst-online-dating-profile-ever/
The Cracked writer attempts to write a dating profile for a fictitious gold-digging psycho that no man will contact, but discovers that it doesn’t matter how stupid or mean or crazy she sounds–she still is besieged with messages.
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