NYPost

NOW: PUT UP OR SHUT UP

By JOSEPH GALLIVAN

April 17, 2001 -- The National Organization for Women has found a way to fight online sexism: start charging for it.

NOW has decided to offer its bulletin boards only to those people using their new Internet Service Provider, which costs $19.95 a month.

The message area of NOW's Web site has been inundated with flames or abusive comments from men, such as one NOW Executive VP Kim Gandy refuses to name but says has registered under several different names and has posted "hundreds of messages a day."

Some of the men have even pretended to be women.

"We call those ones trolls," said Gandy. "When an anti-feminist man poses as his stereotype of an anti-male woman, our troll-watchers give them a rating for how convincing they are."

Gandy said the organization was looking into ways of combating the problem when it stumbled across the ISP model and decided to launch NOWworld.

The site debuts May 1.

Affinity Online, a Web shop that works with affinity groups, will launch the site and collect the money. Some $2 a month per customer will go to NOW, as well as $500,000 a year for spending on staff and promotions. The actual ISP behind the NOWworld site is the giant UUNet, which reaches 93 percent of the U.S.

"It's great because we don't have to put up any money up front, and they let our three staff continue to do the bulk of the site," Gandy said.

While the regular NOW site will remain free, NOWworld users will have access to special content as well as bulletin boards from which troublemakers can be easily tossed. Trained moderators will police the site.

"They can have their $19.95 back," said Gandy of potential troublemakers.

Users will get access to the Internet plus five e-mail addresses and instant messaging.

Affinity has estimated it needs 7,000 people to sign up for NOWworld to break even. But not NOW. "It's all gravy for us," said Gandy, referring to the fee that will be paid to NOW per subscriber, even before profitability is reached.

NOW has been online since February 1995, and still employs only three Web staff: a writer, an editor and a "Web person," - the feminist term for webmaster.

Gandy said the ferocity of the personal attacks was preventing discussion from forming on the boards. "Heated debate is one thing, but if someone is going to be slammed for everything they post, it's very different."

She said she expects some men to join, just as there are pro-women men in NOW.

Other sites have had trouble with abusive postings, but this is the first time an organization has tried to solve the problem by launching a proprietary online service.

Recently the Anti Defamation League contacted the Microsoft Network about its Judaism forum, which was disrupted by anti-Semites. "We asked MSN to step in, and they did," said the ADL's director, Abraham Foxman. "After the nomination of Joseph Lieberman for Vice President last year there was a major spike in serious anti-Semitic activity on the mainstream politics chatrooms," he added.

"The Internet is a new miracle of communication, but it has a dark underbelly. It provides a superhighway for bigots."

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2001