Misogyny In The Metaverse

Cosmo contributor Charte Joseph on how the new world of virtual reality has become a space for sexism to re-imagine itself and leave women anxious about what awaits them online.

It was late evening in 2003, and a young rose-cheeked Mark Zuckerberg—light-headed from wine and too much screen time—was sitting in his Harvard dorm, laughing at the profile pictures of his Kirkland House dorm mates: “some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive,“ he publishes on his blog. 21 minutes later, he posts again: “Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals...), but I like the idea of comparing two people together. At that moment, FaceMash was a website where people could compare their fellow students' faces to one another to decide who was most attractive. FaceMash eventually became the popular social-media site Facebook and has now—in the face of more scandal—become Meta, host of the Metaverse, a series of virtual worlds where people can socialise and play in augmented reality.

Understanding the context of Facebook helps to contextualise the current issues facing the new immersive virtual experience. The Metaverse has become rife with sexism and sexual assault, not only from the launch, but at the research stage, and it is partly due to the culture of misogyny that exists online anyway. Research by Amnesty International found that half of the women received sexist or misogynistic abuse or harassment online, which lead to low self-esteem, anxiety, and panic attacks.