Harassment: Historically, much theorizing about privacy and gender concerned
women’s privacy being invaded through non-physical sexual harassment. For
instance, it now seems accepted that even in public, people (and women in
particular) have the right to anonymity in the sense that others should not draw
attention to them in a thoughtless way, particularly if this is systematic harassment
or is intrusive (Allen 1988, pp. 126–129). The main gender-related forms of nonphysical
harassment probably concern inappropriate sexual comments or drawing
attention to personal appearance. Inappropriate sexual comments seem to be a risk
on the Internet since individuals can be anonymous and hence can be offensive with
little risk of being caught. An example of drawing attention to personal appearance
is a website from 1995 that listed homepages of random women and rated them for
attractiveness (Shade 1996). This is not a legal invasion of privacy but is an overt
form of surveillance by drawing attention to women and using their photographs
out of context, thus diminishing privacy in the sense of the right to anonymity.
(A modern gender-neutral version, HotOrNot.com, is based on self-submission and
so is not intrusive.) More generally, women in society seem to be more frequently
evaluated by physical appearance and so even the need to post profile photographs
in social network sites may be potentially off-putting to females.