The "crime" can be as utterly innocent as identifying as a female in an online multiplayer game.
The response is vile, and absurdly aggressive: "We don't need consent to know what a bitch needs, you steamrolling crybaby."
It might seem devastatingly personal to that girl gamer, but Sydney academic Emma Jane says online threats of rape such as this are now so common that they are formulaic, repetitive and broaching on the ridiculous when viewed en masse. They form a misogynistic language that is now so mainstream that the University of NSW senior lecturer and research fellow has a word for it: Rapeglish.
Now, Jane and her colleague Nicole Vincent have built a program that randomly splices real instances of Rapeglish together to create a possible 80 billion new slurs – all in the name of generating awareness of the growing problem.
"It's an internet phenomenon so I wanted to use an internetty approach to illustrate it," Jane says of her newly launched Random Rape Threat Generator. For 18 years, she has been collecting the insults lobbed at women users of the internet. Side by side, the collection of insults – including "donations" from 51 prominent Australian women – stack up to an impersonal, even silly, library of X-rated taunts.
Click a button on the website and a stinging verbal attack appears a moment later, delivering an insult as simply as a victim (like author Tara Moss, TV presenter Tracey Spicer, writer Clementine Ford and comedian Alice Fraser) opens an abusive message.
"Some of my colleagues are still asking 'What misogyny on the internet?'," Jane says of the use of creating yet another source of vile insults online. "Talking about this material using generic descriptions such as 'rude' or 'in bad taste' or whatever, simply doesn't capture it."
She says people who have never been on the receiving end of these attacks are unlikely to have any idea what it's like. "I want people to get a real sense of it," she says. "I want them to have the option of pushing a button and having it right up in their faces."
The software contains, Jane warns, some of the most confronting language and imagery imaginable. One of her coders left the project because he found the material so distressing.
Yet even the most horrendous insults lose their impact when viewed side-by-side. Consider: "My cousin will come and slit your throat and rape you, you capitalist lesbian" or "WOMEN THAT TALK TOO MUCH NEED TO GET RAPED, you shark-mouthed Ayatollah".
One particularly obscene image involving a chainsaw is so frequently used it is verging on meme status, says Jane.
"It makes fun of the men who send these insults," she says of the generator. "They really are so horribly predictable, tedious and unimaginative. Not big and clever at all."
Online vitriol is presumably meant to intimidate, with the eventual aim of silencing victims. It is part of a power game that is, Jane hopes, eroded by tools such as her meticulously compiled generator.
But the project has at its heart concern for cyber hate victims and the observation that more and more Rapeglish is spilling offline.
"I wanted the women who have donated their rape threats to the project to see that there is something publicly beneficial that can come out of the private horribleness of receiving these messages. I really do hope that this generates some awareness," says Jane.
Awareness, she hopes, not just on the part of the public free of experiencing misogynistic hate, but also on the part of those who send such material.
"I would really like the dudes who send this material to remember that it's not just going out into the ether," says Jane. "It's landing in real women's homes."
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