Men Intentionally Sabotage Reviews Of Entertainment Aimed at Women
It didn’t come as a surprise that a particular subset of men online set out to sabotage the upcoming all-female “Ghostbusters” remake. But surely that kind of intentional, misogynist scheme didn’t pertain to all entertainment that was either aimed at women, starring women, or had a large audience of women, right? Men don’t spend a significant amount of time online trolling through ratings sites like IMDb in order to trash women-centric entertainment, do they?Well shit, actually there are men who do just that. According to a detailed investigation from website FiveThirtyEight, male users are sabotaging the online reviews of TV shows aimed at women.
The analysis began when the writer, Walt Hickey, noticed a discrepancy in the way HBO’s hit series “Sex and the City” had been rated on IMDb. “Any reasonable person should concede that ‘Sex and the City’ was an above-average television program (at minimum),” Hickey wrote. “You don’t need to think it was a perfect show, or even an outstanding one, but I think most people would agree it was better than average.”
Its IMDb ratings would argue otherwise. Hickey detailed, “‘Sex and the City’ has an overall rating of 7.0 on a scale from 1 to 10 — the average score of an English-language television series with 1,000 or more ratings is 7.3. So why did a show roundly considered seminal in the now ubiquitous genre of driven-New York-women-make-a-go-of-it programming score so low? Yeah, it’s men.”
