Then I got word that a loosely organized cybermob known as Anonymous was attempting to crash feminist sites, including Feministe, flooding comments sections with misogynist rants and threatening feminist bloggers with rape and other violence. This had happened before, but never with such organized force. No one was sure which systems would hold and which would fail; we didn't even know which site would be attacked next. Privately, we worried about our safety and strategized about how to defend our sites and ourselves. Publicly, we decried these attacks in blog after blog. We knew our attackers wanted to silence us, and we refused to give them that satisfaction.

These attacks were hardly taking place in a vacuum. They came only months after violent, gendered threats on technology writer Kathy Sierra made international headlines when they blossomed unchecked on popular and respected tech blogs, even going so far as to include her personal address and phone number, and ultimately causing her to withdraw from public speaking and shut down her blog.

In the end, it's no easier to imagine an Internet without misogyny than it is to imagine a world without misogyny. We're working on it, but it's going to take a long time to get there. In the meantime, as Borsellino puts it, "We'll just get better at fighting back."

Two out of every three shows on TV include sexual content, an increase from about half of all shows during the 1997-98 television season [the last season of the groundbreaking Roseanne, which ran for nearly a decade to top ratings]. The most widely viewed shows -- those airing in primetime on the major networks -- are even more likely to include sexual content. The bitches and ho's model isn't solely the province of gangsta rap. It's rampant in a more homogenized mode on TV.

Networks know that sex sells and their patron and cash cow is advertising. So we get female stereotypes with few exceptions, because that is what passes as humor in a culture that services the adolescent, chronically masturbating male -- the "target demographic" of network TV, which runs ads for movies that those chronic masturbators will pay to see.

Soft-core porn is big business with kids these days.