“Jim Norton- 1, Walking Land Whale- 0” : Gender and Language Asymmetries in Cyber-Bullying

Abstract: Unfiltered online language use is most visible where social media sites highlight power injustices such as racism, homophobia, feminism and sexism, which in turn sometimes promotes behavior such as cyber-bullying or internet-trolling. Women have been explicit targets for cyber-bullying and internet-trolling. The linguistic sub-field of gender and language considers questions of how language is used by and about men and women. This is a language and gender study with focus on a gender vocabulary and gendered language use in an online social media forum. This study aims to reveal the linguistic patterns in the discussions about genders. This was represented by YouTube video where one man and one woman, engaged in a debate on misogyny in comedy. The research was done through a qualitative and a quantitative research, by studying the comment section regarding the YouTube video. The results show that there are two different ways of how and what people tend to focus on when talking about men and women. For a woman, her appearance will most likely be in focus while, when talking about a man, it is the man’s performance that is of relevance. The asymmetry is that men are discussed with regards to what they are saying while women are evaluated for how they are saying it, and what they look like saying it.