Question of the Day: Discretion Advised

Here it is.


The NCAA tournament is in full swing.


You are watching a game. 
You notice that the opposing team is playing dirty and not being called on it. 
You go to your twitter account and you energetically tweet that the other team is:


"playing dirty & can kiss my team's free throw making a—"




Now for the question.


If you are a man and you tweet this, will the response tweets include calling you:


a cunt
a whore
a bitch


and:
telling me to suck a two-inch dick


If you are a man and you tweet this, will the responses include threats of rape?


Who is permitted to have passionate feelings about sports?


Ashely Judd, apparently, crossed the invisible line and received a tsunami of tweets letting her know she had gone too far. 


Here is her assessment:

I love March Madness so much that even now, what I really want to talk about is how Sunday's strategy did not, in fact, work. I really want to talk about a deeply distressing dream I recently had that UConn beat us in the finals, in which we scored a scant 49 points, not to mention the oddity of why my awful dream featured UConn and not Wisconsin.

Instead, I must, as a woman who was once a girl, as someone who uses the Internet, as a citizen of the world, address personally, spiritually, publicly and even legally, the ripe dangers that invariably accompany being a woman and having an opinion about sports or, frankly, anything else.

What happened to me is the devastating social norm experienced by millions of girls and women on the Internet. Online harassers use the slightest excuse (or no excuse at all) to dismember our personhood. My tweet was simply the convenient delivery system for a rage toward women that lurks perpetually.

Here is the op-ed she wrote about this, where she bravely discusses her own history of sexual abuse, and why the backlash of threatening tweets are pulling her forward to speak, instead of be silenced.