Misogyny – defined as the hatred towards women and manifested through sexual discrimination, degradation of women, violence against women, and sexual objectification.

They say we live in a man’s world where men are the rulers and they can freely order us women to do whatever they want.  But times have changed, and women have proved that we have as much right to do what we wish as men have, and are capable of doing anything that they can do.  Unfortunately, this realization only seems to be causing more hate towards the female gender.  It seems that some men just can’t accept the fact that women can be successful too.

The problem today is that there are more outlets for pigheaded men like this to express these sexist views. They’re recruiting and spreading the word via Facebook.

Facebook has strict rules regarding the posting of images or messages that promote homophobia, racism or anti-Semitism, but to date it has none for misogyny.  This has led to hundreds of images and messages promoting violence and rape against women being posted on the social network. Such content has been making its rounds on Facebook for years and no one has said anything or done anything about it – until now.

Three women, Laura Bates, the British 26-year-old founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, US writer Soraya Chemaly, and Jaclyn Friedman, the American creator of Women, Action & the Media, have been protesting vehemently against Facebook’s disregard of women’s rights on its service.

At first many stated that the three women were just too uptight and couldn’t take a joke, but the images they reported to Facebook were clearly not very funny at all, with many of them promoting rape and blaming rape victims.

Speaking to The Telegraph newspaper, Bates revealed that this kind of degrading content is far more common than most people realize:

“These incredibly graphic and upsetting images were popping up everywhere. They were becoming prolific. We had parents get in touch telling us their children had seen images of little girls with black eyes in their News Feeds. They were appearing in Facebook Groups – which had nothing to do with women or violence – such as an Atheist Group.

“What was happening was a normalisation of these types of images across Facebook. And while Facebook executives kept telling us that the site had to allow people freedom of speech – what they didn’t account for was how these images were stifling other women’s freedom of expression – as they left the site distressed and speechless,”

Facebook was at first hesitant to review its rules as the posts weren’t flagged or in violation of them.  The three women resorted to hitting Facebook right in the moneymaker – by targeting its biggest advertisers. They launched a campaign directed at large companies such as the British building society Nationwide, Nissan and Dove, urging them to refrain from advertising on Facebook until it changed its policy regarding misogyny.  Before the campaign was launched, ads from the companies appeared beside posts that promoted rape, sexual objectification of women, and violence against them. As a result of their campaigning, fifteen advertisers suspended their Facebook marketing campaigns and only then did the social media giant reconsider its stand on misogyny.

Facebook finally caved in and issued a statement regarding what it plans to do about gender-biased hate posts. Some of the steps it plans to take are to re-evaluate its guidelines regarding hate speech, update training for the people who review reported posts, “increase the accountability of the creators of content that does not qualify as actionable hate speech but is cruel or insensitive by insisting that the authors stand behind the content they create,” and establish formal communication with representatives of groups in this particular area

In addition, Facebook said that it plans to:

“encourage the Anti-Defamation League’s Anti-Cyberhate working group and other international working groups that we currently work with on these issues to include representatives of the women’s coalition to identify how to balance considerations of free expression, to undertake research on the effect of online hate speech on the online experiences of members of groups that have historically faced discrimination in society, and to evaluate progress on our collective objectives.”

These three women have scored a great victory for women’s rights and their efforts will surely go some way towards reducing violence against women. Even so, its unfortunate that money had to come into play before Facebook did anything about it, rather than taking the lead by itself.