The Eye Contact Problem
Women are told to be visible online. Then we’re told we should have known better.
The number one reason young women reach out to me is for advice around social media. Should they get off it? How do they handle abusive people online? Will their careers suffer if they aren’t on it? What happens when something goes viral and follows them into real life?
I’ve been off social media for almost three years now, so I understand the appeal of leaving. My mentals are sooooo much better without the toxicity of it. But that being said, I usually don’t have a tidy answer for them. A woman can need an audience for her work and have very good reasons to be afraid of what that audience might do. Being off it has made me more aware of how much women are expected to put up with to stay.
We tend to blame anonymity for online cruelty, but plenty of abusive replies come with a headshot, a job title, and a family photograph. These men (usually, but not always) are telling you exactly who they are. Apparently, they’re fine with that.
An experiment in 2012 tried to separate anonymity from invisibility and the absence of eye contact. Among 142 people discussing a dilemma in pairs, the lack of eye contact contributed most to hostile behavior. It was a small study of hostility, not misogyny, so it can’t explain everything going on here. But it does make me continue to wonder whose reaction people are looking for when they say something awful online.
Sometimes it’s clearly the people watching. You might be trying to work out why a stranger has said something cruel to you while he’s waiting to see whether anyone thinks he’s funny. He can close the app and go back to his afternoon. You’re left deciding whether to answer, save a screenshot, or tell someone at work. His joke has become something else you have to deal with.
Women have enough extra work. And this particular kind starts well before a threat or a fabricated sexual image. It starts when you’re deciding how much of your work, your ambition, or your life you can show people who may feel entitled to far more of it than you offered.
The price of showing up
Let’s talk about the supposedly simple task of announcing a career achievement. You’ve done something you’d like prospective clients or your industry to know about. Now you have to write the post without sounding a little too pleased with yourself.
You can lead with gratitude. Lots of gratitude. Maybe put a joke in front of the news so nobody thinks you take yourself too seriously. Or describe the setback that came before it, because success seems to go down better with some suffering attached. By the time you’re done, you’ve written considerably more about how lucky you feel than about what you did.
I have no problem with gratitude or a joke. I have a problem with the calculation. How much modesty do we need to add before an accomplishment is acceptable to random people who are looking to pick you apart no matter what you say? The sentence underneath the announcement is: please don’t hold it against me that I wanted you to know. Please don’t think I’m too self-promotional. Or exaggerating. Please. Please. Please.
There is research on this, and it goes back decades. In Laurie Rudman’s experiments, women who promoted themselves could be seen as more competent while being judged less likable or less suitable for hiring. Later work found that even expecting backlash could get in the way of women’s efforts to promote themselves. Super great for everyone!
Meanwhile, the career advice is always to be visible. Build a public profile. Make sure people know what you do. That advice makes sense for a consultant who needs clients or a writer who needs readers. It gets considerably less helpful when the same woman is then judged for wanting people to notice her. Why is she dressed so sexily in her headshot? Why is she pretending she worked there because I know they would never hire someone like that? Blah…Blah…Blah…You get my drift.
Yes, men get abused online too, and some of the numbers are worse for them. In Pew’s 2020 survey, published in 2021, men reported more harassment overall and more physical threats. Similar shares of men and women reported at least one behavior Pew classified as severe. Women were more likely to report sexual harassment, at 16 percent versus 5 percent, and stalking, at 13 percent versus 9 percent. A third of women under 35 reported sexual harassment.
Gender isn’t the only thing shaping who gets targeted. Pew found particularly high rates of severe harassment among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults. ADL’s 2024 survey found high exposure among transgender and disabled adults. Race can change the language of an attack and what its threats mean. A single average obviously won’t tell us what each woman is dealing with.
What I keep thinking about, though, is the stuff we never see. The post she deletes before publishing. The argument she softens until it barely says anything. We get to read whatever felt safe enough to share, without knowing what she decided wasn’t worth the trouble.
And then someone tells her to just get off social media. Bing bong. Problem solved.
Except she may need it for her work. Among 354 women journalists who responded to a 2025 survey reported by UNESCO, 75 percent reported online violence connected to their work. That wasn’t a representative sample of all women journalists. It does describe women being targeted while doing a job that requires them to be visible. Telling them to leave means asking them to give up something they’ve built while the people targeting them carry on.
The audience is part of it
If you’ve watched a woman try to defend herself online, you know how quickly the assignment can change for them and only them. Someone demands a source. She produces it. Now they need her résumé, her references, proof that she’s qualified to have the conversation at all. Once that’s settled, apparently we need to discuss her tone. And then, and then, and then. At some point it’s worth asking whether there’s an answer these people would accept.
Sometimes her being there in and of itself seems to be the actual problem. A study involving Halo 3 found that lower-skilled male players were more hostile toward a female-voiced teammate, especially when they were performing poorly. The researchers interpreted this as a response to threatened status. A video game isn’t the whole internet, but the possibility that someone is defending his own standing helps explain why giving him another source might not settle anything.
An audience gives him another reason to keep going. Research using Twitter data and controlled experiments found that positive feedback encouraged more expressions of moral outrage, and that people adjusted to the norms of their networks. Getting a reaction can teach someone to keep posting that way. It doesn’t tell us how much outrage he actually feels.
The people staying quiet are harder to read. Some may disagree with what’s happening and still be waiting for someone else to say so. In studies of sexism in STEM settings, participants underestimated how concerned men were about sexism. Among men worried about their masculine standing, believing other men were less concerned was associated with weaker intentions to intervene.
From the receiving end, though, you don’t get to see any of that. You can’t tell who’s quietly horrified and who agrees with the attack. You just know nobody is saying anything, and you’re still dealing with it.
Then there are the people who feel absolutely, positively good about joining in. (And in normal society…they are called psychopaths…) Alice Marwick’s research on networked harassment, based on interviews with targets and trust-and-safety workers, describes how a moral accusation can organize a pile-on. Declare someone a fraud or a bad mother or a whore and suddenly punishing her becomes a way to prove you belong. You get to be one of the people deciding who can wear pink on Wednesdays. You go Glen Coco!
This is why I don’t think asking people to remember there’s a human being on the other side of the screen is always enough. Some of them probably know. They think she deserves it. Telling them she’s hurt can just confirm that it’s working. (Again, offline…absolutely anti-social behavior.)
Women in the audience
And yes, women do this too. Enthusiastically, sometimes. We can’t talk honestly about online misogyny if we only talk about what men do to us.
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Spend enough time looking at someone’s posts and you can start to feel as if you know her. You recognize her kitchen. You remember what she wore during her last pregnancy. You have opinions about her marriage. She has no idea who you are, but somehow that doesn’t seem to interfere with how much you think you know about her life.
The thing I learned the hard way, and the thing I tell women who ask me about staying online, is how little control you have once your life becomes the topic. Answer, and you’ve given the thread more material. Say it hurts, and now you can’t take criticism. Try to set a boundary, and they can spend the afternoon discussing that too.
The people doing it can even come to see themselves as the ones being treated unfairly. In a qualitative study of 920 Tattle Life posts, researchers examined how participants drew on feminine identities while playing down harm, defending their conduct, and presenting themselves as the injured party. From inside the group, picking apart another woman’s life can start to feel like a perfectly reasonable way to spend your time.
Some criticism of influencers is perfectly reasonable. If someone is selling a product on a false promise, question the promise. Check the commercial relationship. Research on the anti-fan site GOMI found concerns about deceptive commerce alongside restrictive judgments about women’s appearance and behavior. A thread can and usually does contain both.
But what does a complaint about a product have to do with every photograph of her body, every decision about her children, or every unhappy moment in her marriage? How did all of that become fair game? The explanation is usually some version of: she wanted an audience, so she should have expected this.
That’s awfully convenient for the audience. Its own behavior becomes something she agreed to by showing up. The question of what we owe her disappears into a discussion of what she should have known. “YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.”
The people in the thread can lose interest and go do something else. She still has to work out whether a claim needs an answer and whether answering will spread it further. Years later, she may be explaining it to someone who found it through a search. Their afternoon can follow her around for a very long time.
Women don’t have to invent a double standard to help enforce it. Sometimes being accepted by the group is enough, especially when everyone agrees the woman outside it brought this on herself. I also wouldn’t assume that belonging to the group will protect you if it decides you’re the next problem. But that’s a whole other shebang.
When a photograph is enough
So what exactly are women supposed to stop sharing? Keep your marriage private. Leave your children off your accounts. Don’t get into arguments. Fine. A photograph on your work website can still give someone what they need to make a sexual image of you.
You don’t even have to have taken an intimate photograph. Someone can manufacture one. Greaaaat. Thanks, AI.
During the surge in Grok image editing on X in late 2025 and early 2026, the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that it produced roughly three million sexualized images in eleven days. That category included suggestive clothing and poses as well as more explicit material. The researchers couldn’t establish how many showed real people without their consent, so this isn’t a count of three million confirmed victims. It’s an estimate of how much sexualized material the tool produced.
If someone makes one of you without your consent, getting it taken down becomes YOUR problem. You have to find it, work out how to report it, and possibly explain it to people who otherwise wouldn’t have seen it. Proving it’s fake doesn’t undo someone sending it to your colleagues or your family. You can end up showing it to more people in the course of trying to make it go away.
The evidence about who gets targeted is more complicated than the public websites alone suggest. Women predominate in some studies of publicly available sexual deepfake videos. But in a survey of 16,693 adults across ten countries, men were more likely to report that synthetic intimate images had been created of them or threatened against them. The authors suggest that public collections may miss images used privately, including for sextortion.
We also need to take what happens to boys and young men seriously here. In financial sextortion, someone threatens to circulate intimate images unless the target pays. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received an average of 137 reports a day in 2025. These aren’t all cases involving AI. Separately, its cumulative account identifies at least three dozen American teenage boys who have died by suicide after being targeted. That death count covers multiple years, not just 2025.
A boy who’s afraid he’ll be blamed may be too scared to tell anyone. That leaves him alone with the person threatening him. The fear of what everyone else will think gives the blackmailer something to use. It can be devastating, whoever the target is.
Who should do the work
I want more of this work to fall on the companies whose products people are using to do it. A woman shouldn’t need to become an expert in reporting systems because someone made a fake nude of her.
The TAKE IT DOWN Act, enacted in 2025, makes certain forms of publishing nonconsensual intimate images a crime, including digital forgeries that meet its requirements. Covered platforms must now provide a removal process. After a valid request, they have 48 hours to remove the image and must make reasonable efforts to remove known identical copies.
How a company handles those requests matters. A small 2024 audit of X posted nude images of synthetic subjects and tested two reporting routes, with 25 posts reported through each. None reported under its nonconsensual-intimacy policy were removed within three weeks. All 25 reported through copyright procedures were removed within 25 hours. That was one small test, but I find the difference hard to shrug off. Why should a person have to figure out which legal complaint will get a company to act? Why should she need a lawyer for this?
The companies supplying the tools need to answer for their part too. A business that generates an image may be in a different legal position from one that hosts something a user supplied. Section 230 already makes it relevant whether a company helped create or develop the information at issue. The legal answer depends on what the company actually did. My question is what we should require it to do before a foreseeable abuse reaches the next person.
Of course, a removal system can also be abused. The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which advocates for victims of intimate-image abuse, welcomed federal criminalization while warning that the Act didn’t adequately guard against false removal demands. People need a way to challenge a fraudulent complaint. Protecting someone from abuse shouldn’t give someone else an easy way to silence them.
And I don’t want the answer to be making everyone identify themselves. Research with rural LGBTQ young people describes how pseudonyms and control over what they disclose can make connection possible. Anonymity has legitimate uses. Nobody should have to give up their privacy or turn on a camera to be protected from abuse.
Companies should test for predictable abuses before releasing a tool. They should also let someone report an entire harassment campaign instead of making her assemble a separate complaint about every reply. Moderation can make a difference: research on Reddit’s 2015 bans found substantial reductions in hate speech among users who stayed. We can expect companies to do something useful even when they can’t fix everything.
Those of us watching have choices too. Before joining in, we can ask what we’re actually contributing. Are we correcting something that could have been done in private, or giving everyone another reason to enjoy her public embarrassment because she deserves it? If we think what’s happening is wrong, we can say so publicly. One person objecting may not stop the pile-on, but at least she won’t be left wondering whether everyone agrees with it.
I don’t want the women who ask me about social media to have to keep calculating how much of this they can afford. Nobody should have to give a more moving account of their pain before anyone helps. People should be able to publish their work, take a photograph, and get on with their day. We have become much too comfortable asking women, especially, what they’re willing to put up with for that.
And that is a problem that no amount of eye contact can correct.
Stevie Cline, Esq. is a legal practitioner in the Artifical Intelligence space. She can be found at www.steviecline.com. The views expressed here are her own and not that of her employer. I mean…maybe they’re the same views. Who knows?
