Last Updated on February 21, 2019 by Karl Thompson
The league du LoL was a closed Facebook group of around 30 male journalists who co-ordinated sexist trolling of various female journalists, feminists and LGBQT activists between the years 2009-2012, although it’s believed that some of the members were active well after this period.
Examples of their harassment include co-ordinated condescending comments on twitter, photomontages mocking the appearance of some female journalists and one member of the league even posted a recording of himself offering a fake-job to another female colleague.
The League has resurfaced in the news recently because Check News, a fact checking web site has recently published an article querying whether the League actually existed.
Clearly it did, given that most ex-members have issued formal apologies for their being members of it it and 6 of them have faced disciplinary action at work over their previous membership of the league.
It goes without saying that various victims of the league’s activities can also testify to its previous existence.
Relevance to A level sociology
This example is relevant to the media and crime and deviance.
I thought this was of particular interest given that it specifically involves journalists, so it’s very relevant to the media and crime – being an example of how a group of male journalists can effectively belittle and thus prevent female and minority journalists from making the most of their careers. Shows journalism in France is far from objective and value free.
It’s also an explicit example of Heidensohn’s control theory of crime – this is a group of men quite literally ‘keeping women in line’ through the use of co-ordinated sexist attacks, although it shows how the practice has moved on (or moved online, excuse the pun!)
Then there’s the ‘denial of responsibility’ on the part of the equation – members of the league justified their actions by claiming that they were just doing it all for the laughs, it was basically banter rather than done with the intention of harming anyone.
This example may be several years old now, but it really stood out for me given the explicit use of a closed group for malicious purposes. It’s also quite possible that such closed groups exist today, possibly on more secure platforms such as Telegram.
Sources
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