Marvel writer chased off Twitter by pathetic misogynists

A year ago, Marvel announced that the character Mockingbird would be getting her first solo series helmed by author Chelsea Cain. The book ran from March until it was cancelled this month, with the final cover prominently displaying the message "Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda." Predictably, this provoked the vile side of Twitter, and after the trolls amped up their harassment, Cain deactivated her account this morning. Once again, the social platform's failure to combat harassment allowed a vocal minority to drive away a creative voice.

In a blog post, Cain explains that she didn't leave Twitter because of horrific threats. She left because of the daily abuse, the "base level of casual crassness and sexism" that Twitter allows to persist. It didn't take rape threats or users doxxing her address to make the social platform's environment intolerable. Cain said, "The tweets that bothered me were never the ones concerned with content; they were the ones that questioned my right to write comics at all, and were disgusted by the idea of a female hero having her own series."

Other users quickly rose to Cain's defense, including many in the comics community, like Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso and lauded editor and Ms. Marvel co-creator Sana Amanat:

The comic industry suffers from its own sexist toxicity, both at a professional level and within its fanbase. In a 2011 essay, former Dark Horse editor and co-host of the comics history podcast Jay & Miles X-Plain The X-Men Jay Edidin summarized how the industry got here: More men held more control over fewer comics publishers and created content for their envisioned male demographic. This formed a chicken-and-egg causation whirlpool that alienated many girls and women, keeping them from joining the fanbase and entering the comics industry.

Some women persisted over the decades, enduring the boys' club exclusivity and harassment to lay the foundation for more women to create comics. There's certainly a higher population in the professional echelon today, and publishers are paying more attention to their female fans, but parts of comics fan culture remains from the days when Marvel and DC catered almost exclusively to men. These are the vocal and entitled lot that lash out on social media against female creators. Resisting that abuse often takes drastic measures, as comics writer and artist Kate Leth explained:

Cain left on rather moderate terms compared to the extensive racist harassment that bullied actress Leslie Jones off Twitter back in July. But at the end of the day, both fled rather than deal with a toxic minority of the social network's userbase. Even if much of the blame for Cain's exit lies with the hostile comics fans that refuse to embrace (or even tolerate) female voices in the medium, Twitter's inaction allows the bullying to continue. Its persistent failure to combat abuse already may have prevented a deal to get bought. Then again, Disney's back to sniffing around for a possible acquisition, so maybe Twitter doesn't have to fix its harassment problem before money saves the day. For them.