Why did the internet lose its mind about a woman getting a PhD?

In late November, a woman posted a photo of herself proudly holding her PhD thesis along with the announcement that she had successfully defended her dissertation. “Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone,” she wrote. What followed was a case study in how the online right targets and harasses those who don’t fit into the narrow — and often conflicting — standards they’ve formulated for women.

“This woman is why everything is falling apart,” began one viral post by the YouTuber hoe_math, who makes videos about “the degradation of Western Civilization.” “She got a PhD for this, and from the looks of her, she probably believes that this entitles her to an extremely high-status lifestyle. Remember this when they tell you that women are ‘beating’ men at getting an ‘education.’”

“Crows feet and no children,” began another. “You literally have lived in the most advantaged time in all of human history for women and after 40 years have literally nothing of any real value to show for it and your bloodline will end with you due to your need to ‘stick it to the evil man’ by getting an ‘education.’”

Suffice to say that these are extreme, outlandish reactions to an otherwise anodyne post about completing a PhD. But they’re all too predictable considering the types of content that regularly go viral now on X, where conservative trads, anti-woke crypto bros, and mask-off white supremacists enjoy a platform increasingly friendly to their extremism, especially in the wake of an exodus by users looking for less toxic pastures.

Dr. Ally Louks is the perfect target for these types: She’s a young woman with the highest degree in the humanities, a field frequently ridiculed by certain men in online right spaces who view it as a waste of resources and a sure ticket to a “useless” or low-paying job. Her thesis, titled “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose,” is an exploration of how descriptions of smell in literature structure our social world and, like all PhD theses, is meant to be a niche and novel contribution to the field of English Literature. But it enraged right-wingers who saw it as too woke, irrelevant, or frivolous (using much nastier terms, of course).

The mere existence of an educated woman presumably triggered so many of the right-wing men of X that they have hounded her with rape threats for being “vegan, feminist and queer.” “It sure has been fun to become a scapegoat for the far right’s qualms with academia for a couple of days,” Louks posted.

Like the women in games media who were the targets of 2014’s Gamergate harassment campaign, Louks is only the latest in a long history of misogynist abuse on X, formerly known as Twitter. Through the years, there have been boycotts by women on the platform and studies dedicated to exposing the extent of the harassment they face there.

But since Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, it’s gotten far worse. In the two years since he’s been its owner, the company rid itself of verification badges that confirmed the authenticity of official accounts, notable figures, and journalists and instead granted the blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 per month. The change made it so that the top reply on almost any viral post is a scammer, a spammer, or someone engaging in bad faith or harassment for clout. Musk, as a self-described free speech absolutist, brought back previously banned users and cut down the team overseeing content moderation; white supremacist speech is now so common that normal, presumably not-white nationalist celebrities are following accounts that spout extremist ideology.

In the past two years, X also removed its policy banning the deadnaming of transgender people, while Musk threatened to sue researchers studying the increase in hate speech on the platform. X also recently changed its blocking function so that blocked users can still see the posts of the person who blocked them, making it easier for stalkers and harassers to continue to surveil their targets. In March, X was found to be the platform where women were most likely to experience abuse and threats based on the time spent there, according to research from the Open University, a public research institute in the UK.

Donald Trump’s election worsened this problem, with men spamming replies with attack lines like “Your body, my choice,” flipping a longtime pro-abortion rights slogan into a rape threat. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found a 4,600 percent increase in phrases like “get back in the kitchen” on X in the 24 hours following the election, while “dumb cunt” had more than 64,000 mentions on November 5. Considering that Musk has heavily aligned himself with Trump over the past year, it’s not surprising that both men’s fans have coalesced on Musk’s platform, where they dogpile on their perceived opponents.

When content creator Angela Belcamino posted on X about feeling lucky to be at a bar on Thanksgiving without having to pay a babysitter because she doesn’t have children (and that the right would hate this), she was immediately proven correct and excoriated by conservative men who called her a “thot” and “brainwashed” by an “extinctionist apocalypse cult.” The conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg quote-posted it and wrote, “Nothing more awesome than drinking alone at an empty bar when everyone else is hanging out eating well with friends and family. Congrats.”

This landscape is perhaps unsurprising following a campaign year in which progressive values were pitted against a mounting backlash to Me Too and trans rights. Gender policing is now a blood sport online, where women who seem to defy traditional expectations of staying hot, quiet, chaste, and weak are humiliated and attacked en masse.

Women who don’t fit in the mold of wives wearing cottagecore maxi dresses while baking snacks from scratch for their herd of children are being told that they’re responsible for the downfall of civilization by armies of disaffected men with classical art as their profile pictures. What goes unsaid is the knowledge that these women, the trad wives they so revere, are often the breadwinners of their families by monetizing their lifestyles online. Their standards, then, are often conflicting: They want women to be visible online, but only in a way that serves men’s desires. But if women succeed too much at this — like, say, when OnlyFans model Sophie Rain recently shared a screenshot that showed she made more than $43 million on the platform in the past year — men were furious, again blaming her for the collapse of society.

It’s always been somewhat harrowing to be a woman in certain online spaces, but it does seem like a uniquely infuriating moment. More than 100,000 people, women or otherwise, have already left X (the platform and also the company), while millions have signed up for alternatives like Bluesky, and that’s a completely understandable response to a clearly deteriorating experience.

But it’s still debatable whether ceding an enormous and still significant site like X to the white supremacists and the misogynist trolls is the move. Because I’ve spent so much time there, my “For You” algorithm is pretty tailored to my preferences, and unlike many other users say, I rarely see pro-Musk, white supremacist, or otherwise reprehensible posts. Rather, it’s just people making jokes and weird memes about current events, which I’d argue is the only way to use the platform.

As for Louks, she wrote that she’s remaining on X for the time being. But at a certain point, you have to wonder: If you can’t even post about your greatest accomplishments without enduring heaps of harassment, what’s the point of a social network at all?