If you tweet to your enemy "I'm gonna use my orbital laser to incinerate you from space, so that you're wiped clean off the map!" Your enemy will not be actually, literally scared. Because your threat is obviously imaginary. You do not have a space laser, and anyway few people have ever been incinerated by space lasers at all.<p>If you tweet to your enemy "I'm gonna toss a molotov through your window while you sleep, so that you and your family are cooked alive", they might be legitimately scared. Because that threat is not obviously imaginary. It could feasibly happen, and it is exactly the kind of thing that has been done by hate groups before.<p>So a threat only becomes a Threat when, in context, it's sufficiently plausible.<p>That context is key. The plausibility of a threat changes based on who makes the threat, and whom they threaten. If a misogynistic troll on the internet says that he's going to rape me (a man), I can pretty easily laugh it off. I feel safe in assuming the troll is a hetero-male, and therefore probably has little interest in actually raping me, and besides there's relatively little precedent for guys like me being stalked and raped by weirdos.<p>If the troll says the same thing to a woman, it's interpreted differently. Very many women are raped in our society, it is a constant real fear. And it's not at all unbelievable that a weirdo might seek to stalk and rape a woman he's become obsessed with. Rare, sure. But real enough to be scary.<p>Point being, yes both men and women are threatened with rape. But while to men it's obviously just an especially colorful way of expressing hatred, to women it can constitute a real and serious threat.