When I first started getting rapey emails as a journalist in the late 1990s, my Achilles heel was my stick out-y front teeth.
I could get hundreds of messages about all the anatomically infeasible ways I was going to be violated, dismembered, and gang-banged into anal oblivion, and mostly I'd just laugh at the dicey spelling.
Then, every so often, some Big Man On The Interwebz would slip a buck tooth insult into the mix (usually something classy about how my supersized front fangs would need to be smashed out in order to maximise my giving-men-oral-sex competencies) and all of a sudden I'd be floundering.
Weirdly enough, it wasn't the ultra-violent imagery that got to me so much as the fact that I have a sort of Pavlovian response to buck teeth insults.
(Much of my high school career was spent being called Bugs Bunny, Chad Morgan among other things, and now I'm hardwired to shrink to Lilliputian size every time someone makes a hilarious dentistry-based gag such as suggesting I star in a movie called Gnaws etc.)
Eighteen years have passed since I got those first rapey emails. And, having initially found it hard to locate other examples of the hyberbolic, sexualised vitriol I now call Rapeglish, these days it's hard to avoid it.
I don't know exactly what percentage of the internet is made of rape threats, but in the places I work, play, and research, there are a LOT.
This anecdata lines up with a report from the UN Broadband Commission stating that 73 per cent of women and girls have been exposed to or have experienced some form of what it calls "cyber violence against women and girls" or "cyber VAWG".
The report notes that women are 27 times more likely to be abused online than men and that 61 per cent of online harassers are male.
"Cyber VAWG" is a useful term because it recognises that much of the gendered abuse being hurled at women online is a form of violence, not least because of its increasing tendency to spill offline or – conversely – to be an online extension of "traditional" domestic abuse.
Yet it is also important – and revealing – to focus on the language being used to harass and threaten women online because it is so insanely over the top and so utterly gendered.
Anyone who has been at the receiving end of a spray of Rapeglish knows that these messages are not "you're an idiot", "shut up", or "here is my careful engagement with the substance of your argument and my reasoned and civil explanation about why I must respectfully disagree with your views".
Instead, it's "the best thing about a feminist they don't get any action so when you rape them it feels 100 times tighter" and "the only thing good a women's mouth is useful for is to get face f---ed til she turns blue then have a man hot load shot straight down it". (Both these were posted on Facebook during a Tinder slut-shaming incident that last year led to a 25-year-old Sydney man being sentenced to a 12-month good behaviour bond).
I use the term "Rapeglish" to refer to such rhetoric because of its near-pathological obsession with the imagery of sexual violence.
How very interesting that, after all these years of ladies not being the chattel of their husbands, so many men who disagree with what women say, do, or look like online are reaching for the ye olde comeback of calling us whores and threatening beatings and "corrective" rape.
And how very depressing that so much Rapeglish is not only cruel, it's competitively cruel. On many sites, it's possible to watch participants vie to devise the most explicit and offensive rape and death threats – and to inflict the most suffering on targets.
Indeed, the Australian journalist Ginger Gorman's investigations into the topic reveals that trolls go out of their way to identify and target people's weak spots.
For instance, she asked one man why he'd tweeted about anally raping someone until they bled and his response was: "If you are a victim of sexual assault, you're open to it. You've already got a weakness to that sort of stuff … I haven't been raped so I don't care."
This charmer went on to boast about the fact that he studies his marks before launching an attack so as to increase his chances of getting "a good reaction".
Most of the women I've interviewed for my gendered cyberhate research also have Achilles heels in that they're able to laugh off or ignore most of the online onslaught, but every so often there'll be One Particular Thing that really gets to them.
I won't list any of these particular things because dudes like the one mentioned above don't need any more ammunition.
I will, however, take this opportunity to remind all the gentlemen of the interwebz that there really are plenty of other ways to pass the time, to show off to one's brofriends, to debate politics, to navigate online dating sites and to notice that (OMG!) a woman is using a computer without throwing great, big man-trums and yelling at everyone in Rapeglish.