The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Ruin Your Week Without Even Trying ...

Anyone else following the lawsuit filed by two women at Yale law school against AutoAdmit -- the law school discussion board that makes the men's room wall at your local bus station read like the collected works of John Donne? Via the Wall Street Journal's law blog here's a link to the amended complaint, filed late last week in federal court in Connecticut. These women are alleging that anonymous posts to the Web site created emotional distress and may have precluded employers from offering them jobs.

It's going to be rough sledding for these women to actually track down the offenders, named, for instance, "Horse walks into a bar" and "Spanky" in the complaint. And who knows whether they'll be able to prove that they were harmed. Still, just reading the complaint is cause for emotional distress: The plaintiffs are threatened with rape and sodomy and violence; links to the site were sent to employers; private information about them was posted on the site. Part of this is just the unbelievable sewage that gets chummed up wherever anonymous posts about women roam free. I've written a bit on this, but have no real solution to offer. Read the complaint. Is this the kind of thing we should simply ignore? Are lawsuits the answer?