Increasingly, women's experience of online life seems to run counter to the optimistic expectations of the cyberfeminists of the 90s and the utopian fervour of the present. Female journalists and internet users find themselves at the receiving end of a level of verbal abuse online previously unthinkable in the public sphere. Women are showing greater signs of alienation from the online arena of political debate than in the culture of parliamentary politics and "old media" institutions. In spite of the ever mounting evidence that digital liberation is not for all, the polemic of the universal emancipatory power of the internet continues to shape mainstream opinion and capture the political Left's imagination. While there have been sceptical female voices challenging these ideas since the early 90s, they have tended to be too rare, too marginal and too unwilling to make strident and fundamental challenges to the dominant cyberutopian narrative. This has meant that the women who speak out about the phenomenon of the remarkable prevalence of misogyny in online culture have been unable to link their experience to any wider politics and have been unable to articulate a coherent feminist critique to challenge the largely gender blind utopian orthodoxy. Focussing on one particular media moment sparked by the "New Statesman", this chapter argues for the need to build such a discourse. [For the complete book, "Internet Research, Theory, and Practice: Perspectives from Ireland," see ED575997.]