Newsletters have become “safe spaces” for women to share news without encountering harassment, reports Lyz Lenz at The Cut.

TinyLetter—a subsidiary of MailChimp—has particularly “streamlined the process and helped provide a platform for women to share writing and stories without wading through a commenter cesspool,” writes Lenz.

According to a 2005 Pew Research Study, while both American women and men use the Internet, women in particular report “worrisome behavior,” and as Amanda Hess writes in the Pacific Standard, that “worrisome behavior” currently includes violent threats of rape and murder, which female writers receive in greater amounts in comparison to men.

Writers Rachel Verona Cote, Sarah Galo, Hayley Krischer, and Charlotte Shane (which is a pen name), are using TinyLetter to connect more intimately with their readers, without opening their writing to a barrage of criticism.

Galo, for instance, writes a TinyLetter that presents her everyday experiences, titled “Things I Tell Myself (and You).”

“It feels like a throwback to letter-writing,” she explained in a Guardian article. “We share personal and often political stories, and feel closer as an online community, even if many of us do not live near each other.”

Other women use TinyLetter to discuss women’s bodies and sex lives in more protected space.
Shane told The Cut that, in contrast to her blog about her life as a sex worker, her TinyLetter, “Prostitute Laundry,” receives feedback that is “overwhelmingly sensitive and undemanding and mercifully somewhat rare, too.”

“Which is probably the greatest compliment of all—people just keep reading with just a few encouraging and grateful words here and there but without trying to strike up extended one-on-one correspondence about it,” she said.

Related news: Lena Dunham and “Girls” executive producer Jenni Konner will produce Lenny, a weekly newsletter for young women, later this year.

Image credit: David Sizemore—TinyLetter graphic.