Martha Nussbaum. Photo by Eric Allix Rogers, ( CC)

A few days back, The Nation published a piece by Martha Nussbaum titled “ Haterz Gonna Hate?” When I came across it, I was immediately intrigued for three important reasons:

For those of you who didn’t spend your twenties tucked away in a humanities department, Martha Nussbaum is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, and arguably one of the world’s most influential living philosophers. She’s written extensively on both ancient philosophy and contemporary issues, including politics, gender, animal rights, and law.

“Haterz Gonna Hate?” is a review essay of Danielle Keats Citron’s Hate Crimes in Cyberspace . Here, Nussbaum offers an insightful overview of the challenges faced by those who wish to hold perpetrators of online sexual abuse accountable for their actions without jeopardizing the Internet’s status as a marketplace of ideas. But where the piece truly shines is when Nussbaum steps out of the legal realm and reflects on gendered cyberharassment more broadly.

“Why, given all the things the Internet facilitates, has hatred—particularly misogynistic hatred—become such a significant part of online activity?,” asks Nussbaum. There is no simple answer, as the motivations of those who commit various forms of gendered harassment may vary greatly.

Throughout the piece, she brings up a number of examples: Revenge motivates ex-lovers who contribute to revenge porn sites, and anxiety and envy motivate male law students who write pornographic slander about their successful female peers on the law forum AutoAdmit. Nussbaum is less certain about what motivates an online stalker that personally targets her, but she suggests “envy, love, emulation and despair.”

The question, then, she argues, is not so much what motivates gendered online harassment, as why “so many different cases produce aggressive male outbursts directed at women.”

“We need to look at how our culture forms attitudes toward sex and gender,” she says:

Psychologists working with troubled adolescent males (I think in particular of the impressive work of Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson) find that our highly competitive society produces a gendered “culture of cruelty” in which young males, unwilling to admit weakness or fear, are driven by their peers to act out dominance in many pernicious forms. One prominent casualty is their relationships with women. Boy culture stigmatizes empathy and tenderness and valorizes, as Kindlon and Thompson put it, “power, dominance, and denial of sensitivity.” When women are not only objects of sexual desire but also competitors for jobs, law-school admissions and so forth, the result can be a potent and toxic brew of sexualized aggression in young men.

If my experience growing up is any in any way typical, Nussbaum’s description of male culture is spot on.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I first discovered that doing anything “like a girl” was an unforgivable faux pas , but it was definitely early in elementary school. When I grew older, the norms of masculinity grew more vicious on the soccer field, where acting “like a girl” had been replaced with “being a bitch.” After I moved on to play American football, the proper relationship between a guy and a “bitch” became one of ownership. (“You totally made that guy your bitch!”)

I wish I could say that we men realize the error of our ways as we grow older, but I would be lying if I did. As a Norwegian citizen, I was required to serve for a year in the armed services after graduating from high school. Many of the women I served with proved gender stereotypes wrong on a daily basis—they were physically stronger and just as capable as many of their male peers of sustaining the strains of hunger, lack of sleep, and flack from their superiors. However, that didn’t stop the officers from speaking openly about how women are not suited for military service.

It’s tempting to look at male sports teams and the armed services as outliers, but a brief look to other male-dominated cultural spheres prove that this simply isn’t the case. As the controversy surrounding GamerGatehas finally made clear to the world, the gaming community has similar problems, as does other more obscure male-dominated fields, such as the atheist movement or alt-lit. The same goes for a number of academic fields, including philosophy.

I am not saying that all men in these communities believe that women are lesser, but I think we are deluding ourselves if we deny that the cultural tendency Nussbaum describes is a real and ongoing problem.

Nussbaum suggests that this can’t be addressed through legal means, because:

In the end, the Internet is only a conduit. It may exacerbate, but does not cause, the underlying problems of hatred and harassment. Danielle Citron’s legal prescriptions can curb, but will not cure, the deformation of human beings that vexes our society. That sad fact should not discourage us from improving the law; but we must not imagine that law alone can fix the deeper problems that make law necessary.

Instead, she says, it is our culture that needs to change:

To effect real change, then, we need to reshape the background culture of maleness, which, unlike the structures of the Internet, does not have value that we should try to preserve—or, at least, the valuable characteristics traditionally identified with masculinity (physical strength and bravery, reliability) are not the same characteristics that cause the problem. But changing gender norms is an epic task, requiring the cooperation of parents, teachers, and concerned men and women of all ages.

I wholeheartedly agree.