Excerpted from Jane Jones:

“There is a deeply shocking, and somehow, at the same time, shockingly credible story in today’s Guardian about the rising rates of violence, intimidation, control and general abuse directed by teenage boys and young adult men against their female counterparts. The piece follows a warning this week by Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, that teenage girls between 16 and 19 – closely followed by girls aged 20 to 24 – are now the group most at risk of domestic violence. Portraying an adolescent universe in which young women are routinely subjected to sexual slurs, and humiliated or ostracized for perceived permissiveness, the story also echoes one which appeared in January, noting that, at the same time, young women are also being pressured into sex with either one or multiple partners, and/or having their movements and social interactions monitored and controlled by men through the threat of violence.

What struck me about both of these stories is the role attributed to social networking sites in general, and Facebook in particular, in the creation of so-called ‘Sket-sites,’ in which intimate images and/or details of a girl’s sexual behaviour are posted online, and men invited to pass judgement or gives marks out of ten on a scale of nought to…you get the idea. The reason why this is particularly striking was that it follows, by only a few weeks, my finally getting around to watching The Social Network, and being, on that occasion, deeply struck by learning that the most powerful incarnation of Web 2.0 was unambiguously forged in the fires of misogyny. Zuckerberg, we recall, having been dumped by his girlfriend (for being an asshole, not a nerd) retires to his dorm and whips up a program called Facemash, which invites innumerable anonymous men to make judgements on the relative sexual attractiveness of two randomly-selected young female students, the photos of whom Zuckerberg has oh-so-respectfully hacked from the school’s websites. This opportunity to subject such a large number of unsuspecting young women to the objectifying and violently adjudicating male gaze is so compelling, we are led to believe, that within hours the Harvard network succumbs to the intensity of traffic.

There is an evident similarity – even a line of continuity – between these two moments in the history of social network media, and it is a similarity which speaks of several things. It tells us simply, in the first place, about the incipient violence which underlies so many of the invidious comparisons the late capitalist subject is invited to make in cyberspace. While in part Facebook is just what it pretends to be – a place to stay in touch with ‘friends’ – it is, also, and at the same time, a masterful exercise in exacerbating all that social-status-anxiety so central to eroding solidarity, promoting competition, and ensuring our continued servitude as good consumers. It seems likely that individuals of both gender are equally subject to the continuous pressure of comparing themselves negatively to people with more friends, better-looking partners, and more exotic holiday destinations than themselves (not to mention all the celestial people we are encouraged to fixate on). However, while evidence about the ever-increasing rates of depression among teenage girls suggests that they – as befits their social conditioning – direct that negative pressure inwardly, boys – equally in accordance with their given roles – tend to transmute all their fragility and vulnerability into violence.

As I have suggested before, misogyny is, at base, a particularly virulent variation of the generalized violence which derives from the inability of the masculine* ego to tolerate its vulnerability, and which results in the need to violently dominate pretty much everything around it – children, people with different colored skin, terrorists, oil-fields, the north pole. Women are particularly favored as the object of this violence because they exist as the most visible embodiment of the lie of masculine invulnerability… they are, in short, what men need – as their mothers, as their lovers, as the mothers of their children. “