Internalising patriarchy is a term that can be used to refer to incidents when women perpetuate sexist ideology through their own behaviour. The idea is that as women are themselves victim to skewed ideas of gender roles, and gender, within society, that hey can end up saying and doing things that fall in line with such ideas.
This claim of women being their own worst enemy, on many occasions and in terms of gender equality, is borne out by some recent research as reported by the BBC:
Twitter abuse – ‘50% of misogynistic tweets from women’
Half of all misogynistic tweets posted on Twitter come from women, a study suggests.
Over a three-week period, think tank Demos counted the number of uses of two particular words as indicators of misogyny.
It found evidence of large-scale misogyny, with 6,500 unique users targeted by 10,000 abusive tweets in the UK alone.
Twitter boss Jack Dorsey has said that tackling abuse is a priority.
The research comes as five UK MPs – Yvette Cooper, Maria Miller, Stella Creasy, Jo Swinson and Jess Phillips – launch their Reclaim the Internet campaign, in response to growing public concern about the impact of hate speech and abuse on social media.
The campaign has opened an online forum to discuss ways to make the internet less aggressive, sexist, racist and homophobic.
The Demos study also looked at international tweets and found more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the words, “slut” and “whore”, were sent to 80,000 people over the same three weeks.
Demos used algorithms to distinguish between tweets being used in explicitly aggressive ways and those that were more conversational in tone.
Certainly interesting reading.