While it's true that people do behave rather badly on the internet (though in my experience it's been spilling over into the real world, too) men may get it bad, but women get it worse.

Men get the "fag"/"gay" remarks, the "n00b" remarks, etc. Although usually only if they're not up to the accusers gaming standards.

Women, however, get all the same hate that's heaped on the guys, with the added bonus of gendered slurs and sexual harassment. Regardless of our play style, the moment people know we're women we get anything from being hit on (from the "nice" ones) to being repeatedly called "whore", "slut", "bitch" and told things like, "get back into the kitchen, [gendered slur]!" If don't play well, they use it to reinforce their ideas that women can't play video games. If we play well, they lash out at us even worse because we've emasculated them.

Even in so-called "mature" (ie. adult players, not kids) guilds I've had to moderate fights where a woman has been on the verge of leaving because a member wouldn't stop harassing her. I've left games entirely over the harassment, both to myself and that I've seen done to others. The men in those games did not go through nearly the same bullshit.

And this phenomenon is in no way confined to the gaming arena. Hating the Hate Mail:

The psychic impact of hate mail is something female writers don't often talk about in fear of appearing vulnerable in the male world of opinion writing. I believe women can take the heat of opinion journalism as well as any man; the problem is that the heat we take and the reasons why are very different.

[...]

Do men get the same? I asked David Yepsen, who is white, male, centrist and also a columnist at the Register. He says he is called an asshole from time to time and received a death threat once, but Yepsen felt readers had paid their quarter and were entitled to an opinion. "I've heard Rekha was called a Hindu-worshipping slut and things like that. I've never gotten anything on par with that," he said.

Katherine Kersten is a conservative voice at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and gets a lot of grief from the liberal population. But it doesn't seem the same over-the-top, bone-chilling stuff that Rekha receives. Kersten said some readers harassed her for going against women's interests and she was accused of being dishonest and greedy.

However, Kersten felt men and women received equal treatment from readers, noting that Nick Coleman (a liberal voice at the Star Tribune), gets as many attacks, if not more than she does.

Coleman thinks there is a gender gap in the hate mail. "My wife is also a columnist at the St. Paul Pioneer, and there is a huge difference between the types of abuse I get, and what she gets. It's much worse for her," he said.

Michele Weldon, a contributor to Women's eNews who has also provided columns to the Chicago Tribune, recalled the time a hostile reader of a column read her memoir on the domestic abuse she experienced and wrote to tell her she deserved everything she got.

My time as a blogger has already earned me one physical hate mail (which prompted me to get privacy protection service for my domain) and countless hateful comments and e-mails. Most of which use a gendered slur against me at least once. My looks have been attacked (another favourite), usually coupled with threats of sexual violence.

Faith says that we should just "ignore it" and if that works for her, great. But women who notice this shit -- and speak out about it -- aren't being oversensitive. We're observing a real phenomenon that happens to us. And, crap, if we aren't working to get the harassment to stop, no one else will.