Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls­—and How We Can Take It Back

Alaimo (Pitch, Tweet, or Engage on the Street), a communication professor at Farleigh Dickinson University, offers an uneven overview of the state of online misogyny. Arguing that social media (a catchall she uses to mean people interacting online) has had seismic negative effects on female users, she surveys multiple well-trod examples, including the promotion of unrealistic body expectations by altered images and “sextortion”—the sexual blackmailing of girls by boys threatening to release nude photos. She also intriguingly ventures into less familiar ground, noting that women report having less satisfaction with online dating than men (“The majority of American women say dating is harder than it was ten years ago.... The majority of men disagree”), and that women are more susceptible to misinformation about health and wellness (“The vast, overwhelming majority of rank-and-file members [of anti-vaccine social media groups] are women”). But Alaimo’s argument gets shaky as she attempts to encompass too many phenomena, such as in her defense of Karenesque meltdowns. “People have discovered they can make bank by secretly recording women’s worst moments in public and selling the rights... so the whole world can come together to shame us,” Alaimo writes, seeming to misunderstand that many such clips are likely staged. The result is an impassioned denunciation of the damage being done online to women and girls that lacks firm analytical footing. (Mar.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the university where the author currently teaches.