Because there's no accountability on line in the same way there is in real life, all of a sudden you can say like, yeah, I hate women; I want to kill women. And you can say that online, and not only will you find a place to say it, but you'll find a place to say it where people are like, yeah, me too.

As much as I disagree with Sarah Palin, there's no denying that she was the victim of sexism.

In 1986, Gloria Steinem wrote that if men got periods, they 'would brag about how long and how much': that boys would talk about their menstruation as the beginning of their manhood, that there would be 'gifts, religious ceremonies' and sanitary supplies would be 'federally funded and free'. I could live without the menstrual bragging - though mine is particularly impressive - and ceremonial parties, but seriously: Why aren't tampons free?

Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.

You have to have your personal life, and at the end of the day I think what people forget, especially when you're online, is that you're a person too, right, and that you're not this ideal of feminism, that everything you do like feminism just like falls in your wake.

Hearing the Beastie Boys speak out against sexism made me feel like if these men who had once sung about getting girls to 'do the laundry' and 'clean up my room' could understand, maybe the rest of the world would follow suit. It made me hopeful in the best way.

Young women know that something is off; they know that the world is a messed-up place. They know that the world is a sexist place because they've had experiences in their own life; they see things happening to their friends, to their parents. But because feminism isn't widely accepted, because they don't necessarily have access to feminist thought or to feminist groups, they don't necessarily have a language to put behind the feelings and the thoughts that they're having. And they certainly don't have a support system to let them know like, hey, that's okay; you're right, that is screwed up.