Sunday evening roundup: stay strong edition

There's a problem when people are afraid of anatomical terminology. The irony is, that neutralizes the term for racier connotations.

I don't understand the offense some take at outing trolls. I do understand exposing the double standard:

But, as the scholar Mary Anne Franks has observed, women haven’t actually achieved this “bodiless” freedom online. They are embodied in distributed pictures and in sexual comments, whether they like it or not. The power to get away from yourself, like everything else, is unevenly distributed. Women have become, as Franks put it, “unwilling avatars,” unable to control their own images online, and then told to put up with it for the sake of “freedom,” for the good of the community. And then they are incorrectly told, even if the public is behind them, that they have no remedies in the law. They are shouted down by people with a view of freedom of speech more literal than that held by any judge.

And don't think it's not all about power.

It’s not a coincidence that it’s right around the age of 12 that a girl begins to come to an understanding of her potential for power. Not just her sexual power. But her intellectual and physical mettle as well. She’s still very much a child – a child in need of support and protection – but early adolescence is the beginning of a girl coming into her own as an independent person. With a brain and a body she’s going to control. How terrifying that is for the hateful, misogynistic jerks of the world. (And I’m not letting sabotaging, self-hating females off the hook here for their bullying and divisiveness either; they’re a huge part of the problem too.) They pick on girls because it’s easier than dealing with adult women; that’s how weak they are.

The writer's message to young girls:

I hope you and your friends grow up to be everything that scares the crap out of these idiots. I hope you all stay loud and strong and refuse to be pushed around by dirty weirdos hiding in their basements, anonymously trying put you down, rewarding each other with encouragement and bobbleheads. I hope you change the world. I hope you all can stay brave and autonomous and bullyproof and be their worst nightmare. Because they’re been trying to be yours for way too long.