by Lindy West
To my surprise, the man used his full name and didn’t hide his face (most of my harassers stay meticulously anonymous). Even more unusually, his videos betrayed genuine vulnerability. He was the platonic form of an internet troll: bald, goateed, bespectacled, and doughy, fighting a stammer, broadcasting from a dreary, dark room. And he was sad. “I’m making this vlog because I am not happy with the direction my life is going,” he mumbled in a soft, high-pitched voice. “I don’t like my career, if you can call it that, I’m unhappy with the way that I look, I am not satisfied with myself as a man, and not just as a man but as a human being.”
Oh, I realized. Internet trolls have bad lives. Happy people don’t do this.
I don’t want horrible men to be doxxed and threatened online; I want them to be better. I want women to be able to fight for gender equality (or even just relay our lived experiences) without having to face years of libel, stalking, emotional labor, howling rage, and relentless degradation. I want feminists to be able to do our work. I want my daughters to be safe. I want men to understand that women’s sexual boundaries are not a gray area and women’s time and attention are not public commodities. I want men who feel frustrated and invisible, all those sad men in dark rooms, to find fulfillment in communities that don’t leverage female dehumanization for male validation.
You know what actually got them to leave me alone? Quitting Twitter. Refusing to play. Essentially, deplatforming them from my life. It works. The tech companies allowing white supremacy and violent misogyny to flourish on their platforms could do something about it. Never forget that they choose not to.
In December 2016, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “What’s the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?” One user responded, “Comprehensive plan for getting rid of the Nazis.”
“We’ve been working on our policies and controls,” Dorsey replied. “What’s the next most critical thing?” Oh, what’s our second highest priority after Nazis? I’d say number two is also Nazis. And number three. In fact, you can just go ahead and slide “Nazis” into the top one hundred spots. Get back to me when your website isn’t a roiling rat king of Nazis. Nazis are bad, you see?
Trump uses his Twitter account to set hate mobs on private citizens, attempt to silence journalists who write unfavorably about him, lie to the American people, and bulldoze complex diplomatic relationships with other world powers. I quit Twitter because it felt unconscionable to be a part of it—to generate revenue for it, participate in its profoundly broken culture, and lend my name to its legitimacy. Twitter is home to a wealth of powerful anti-Trump organizing, as well, but I’m personally weary of feeling hostage to a platform that has treated me and the people I care about so poorly. We can do good work elsewhere.
I’m pretty sure that “ushered in kleptocracy” would be a deal breaker for any other company that wanted my business. If my gynecologist regularly hosted neo-Nazi rallies in the exam room, I would find someone else to swab my cervix. If I found out my favorite coffee shop was even remotely complicit in the third world war, I would—bare minimum—switch coffee shops; I might give up coffee altogether.
We need systemic change, not whack-a-mole with one grandiose troll at a time. But change has been so slow, mystifyingly slow, even while the troll in the White House tweets threats and typos and personal attacks on individual citizens. In April 2019, Dorsey met with Trump in the Oval Office to reassure the president that Twitter was not artificially lowering his follower count. A month later, Twitter announced that it is launching—and remember, this is motherfucking May 2019—an in-house research project to START to TRY to figure out whether or not it is good to let white supremacists organize and radicalize others on their platform. “Is it the right approach to deplatform these individuals?” a Twitter executive told Vice. “Is the right approach to try and engage with these individuals? How should we be thinking about this? What actually works?”
It’s farcical. It’s literally a farce. Here’s an idea: maybe instead of trying to troubleshoot the Nazi factory inside a clown’s asshole, we just let it go.
It wasn’t brave to quit Twitter or righteous or noteworthy. Quitting Twitter is just a thing you can do. I mention it only because there was a time when I didn’t think it was a thing I could do, and then I did it, and now my life is better.
I’m frequently approached by colleagues, usually women, who ask me about quitting Twitter with hushed titillation, as if I’ve escaped a cult or broken a particularly seductive taboo. Here’s what my Twitter-free life is like: I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day, dreading what horrors accrued in my phone overnight. I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care or whether putting nice guys into the friend zone is a hate crime. I don’t spend hours every week blocking and reporting trolls and screen grabbing abuse in case it someday escalates into a credible threat. I no longer feel as though my brain is trapped in a centrifuge filled with swastikas and Alex Jones’s spittle. Time is finite, and now I have more of it.
At the same time, I know this conversation is more complicated than that. I’ve lost a large platform to promote my work and make professional connections, which isn’t something many writers can afford to give up (less established writers and marginalized writers most of all—in a horrid irony, the same writers who are disproportionately abused on Twitter). I get my news on a slight delay. I seethe at the perception that I ceded any ground to trolls who were trying to push me out. I will probably never persuade RuPaul to be my friend. Also, I loved Twitter. Twitter is funny and smart and validating and cathartic. It feels, when you are embroiled in it, like the place where everything is happening. The president of the United States makes major policy announcements there. This is the world now.
I shouldn’t have had to walk away from all that because for Twitter to take a firm stance against neo-Nazism might have cost it some incalculable sliver of profit. No one should. As in everything, global culture change would have been better. But I didn’t have global culture change, and I’m better equipped to fight for global culture change now that I’m not trapped in an eternal siege by a sea of angry boy-men, an unknown percentage of whom are probably robots.
When you deactivate a verified Twitter account (nail polish emoji), you have one year to log back in or your account—everything you ever tweeted, every reply in every thread—is permanently deleted. I always planned to log in and then immediately deactivate again, to re-up for another year. I figured I’d eventually reactivate, even if just for posterity. I was part of some important cultural conversations; I had said some smart things before other people said them; I had made some good jokes. One time the actor Michael McKean called me “doodlebug” in an affectionate manner because he liked one of my movie reviews. I wouldn’t have minded preserving that.
But in January 2018, I realized: it was too late. I’d forgotten to log back in. More than a year had passed. It was all gone. It’s as though a great wind came and blew my problem novel into the river. It’s as though I ate a very good sandwich without taking a picture of it. Sometimes it is okay to just let things go.
Anger Is a Weapon
I did not call myself a feminist until I was nearly twenty years old. My world had taught me that feminists were ugly, angry, and ridiculous, and I did not want to be ugly, angry, and ridiculous. I wanted to be cool and desired by men, because even as a teenager I knew implicitly that pandering for male approval was what women were supposed to do. It was my best shot at success, or at least safety, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to see that success and safety, bestowed conditionally, aren’t success and safety at all; they are domestication and implied violence.
To put it another way, it took me two decades to become brave enough to be angry.
In October 2017, as the full horror of what Harvey Weinstein had done came into public view, an Access Hollywood correspondent asked the actress Uma Thurman to
comment on abuse of power in Hollywood, presumably in light of the sexual assault allegations against Weinstein. Speaking slowly and deliberately, through gritted teeth, Thurman responded, “I don’t have a tidy sound bite for you, because I’ve learned—I am not a child—and I have learned that when I’ve spoken in anger I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry. And when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”
Thurman was seething, as we have all been seething, in our various states of breaking open or, as Thurman chose, waiting. It took her a few more months until she decided she was ready, and at last she explained how even at the height of her fame, making money for Weinstein as his cool girl star, he had gone after her, too.
Women are seething at how long we have been ignored, seething for the ones who were long ago punished for telling the truth, seething for being told all of our lives that we have no right to seethe. Thurman’s rage was palpable yet contained, conveying not just the tempestuous depths of #MeToo but a profound understanding of the ways in which female anger is received and weaponized against women.
There is a woman who became a meme. In 2013, she went to a protest, and a clip of her anger went viral. The stalking and harassment she has endured since are on a scale beyond comprehension. She was participating in a protest against a men’s rights group, proponents of a male supremacist movement that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a hateful ideology advocating for the subjugation of women.”
The men’s rights movement (which fed directly into the alt-right) was in itself an elaborate troll, preying on disaffected young men’s resentments and insecurities to entice them to join what was framed as a social justice movement, then deploying them to make women’s lives hell both online and off. They did not fight for paid paternal leave, raise money to build domestic violence shelters for men, or encourage men to go to therapy and learn to be vulnerable and share their feelings instead of seeking cruel catharsis in degrading and abusing women. Instead, they spent their time doing things like flooding Occidental College’s online rape reporting tool with false rape reports. Or advocating for the legalization of rape on private property. Or declaring “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” in protest against women, supposedly, being allowed to beat their male partners with impunity. Or, mainly, just writing lots and lots of blog posts about how women are bad and harassing lots and lots of women on Twitter.
It was a movement designed to make women angry, so that men could take that anger and hold it up and say, “See? See? They are hysterical. They are violent. They do hate men.”
That’s what they did to the woman who became a meme. She was angry that day—and why shouldn’t she have been?—attempting to read a statement, her voice rising to compete with the crowd, and when she was interrupted she would stop and say something such as “Can you shut the fuck up for a second, so I can read my fucking list?” In keeping with their model, one of the men’s rights advocates filmed her and uploaded the video to YouTube. What followed was six years (and counting) of threats, abuse, mockery, and privacy violations. She became the face of vicious feminist hysteria, her image replicated and caricatured over and over and over, ceaselessly, on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the damp underbelly of every fetid “manosphere” message board. The revered evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted a video in which a grotesque caricature of the woman (a real person) encourages a grotesque caricature of a Muslim man to rape her, a nod to one of the online Right’s favorite tropes—that supposedly PC feminists shrug at sexual assault when it’s committed by Muslims, because to accuse them of rape would be Islamophobic.
Interestingly, the statement that the woman was trying to read in the video that would eat her life wasn’t actually particularly angry at all. I know because I wrote it.
She was reading from an article I had written in Jezebel in 2013 called “If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?” The point of that piece was that feminists are already doing many of the things that men’s rights activists claim to be fighting for. Their anger is not at cross-purposes.
But it didn’t matter what she was saying. None of it was ever about communication, a good-faith exchange of ideas. It was about making women mad so you can call them crazy and justify hurting them to make yourself feel better about your broken little life and cling to your pitiful scraps of institutional power because you have no power as a person.
In April 2016, more than three years after the protest, the woman was shopping at a state-run liquor store when an employee recognized her from his antifeminist internet circles. National Post reported that the employee then downloaded security camera footage of her and posted it on social media.
This is what the (government!) employee’s Facebook post said:
I helped her select something for about 5 minutes, some guy interrupted us and I fully expected her to go off on a rant but it appears that she’s selective about when to explode. And now I can safely say that after speaking with [REDACTED] that I work with a woman more unstable than her. I deliberately asked her if she needed help to confirm her voice, and my God everything checks out.
She was just shopping in a liquor store—buying tequila for margarita Monday, maybe, or a retirement gift for Bob in sales who loves Scotch—a full three years after losing her temper one time, and a person purporting to help her pick the right bottle, who is paid by her tax dollars, lay in wait. He “helped her select something,” he expected her to “rant” while being interrupted. She surprised him by not being as “unstable” as he expected, almost as though her individual personhood had been deliberately flattened into a meme to justify discrediting and abusing not just her but women as a whole. Almost!
His post led people “to suggest they should search for her in the suburb West of Toronto in order to sexually assault her,” National Post reported.
By July, when she went to the press with the story, the woman said that she still did not know whether the employee had been fired and that local police had not followed up on her complaint. “They refuse to communicate with me, and all I want to know is did this guy get fired and should I prepare for any kind of retaliation,” she said.
In the story, the government official who oversees the liquor board said he thought the retailer would figure out what had happened but that he condemned all forms of harassment. He “pointed to the government strategy to combat sexual violence: It’s Never Ok.”
“It’s Never Ok.”
In the fall of 2018, the world saw that actually, sometimes, it seems like it is okay.
At the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford told the House Judiciary Committee, and everyone else, about what she remembered happening to her when she was fifteen and Kavanaugh was seventeen and they were both in the suburban Maryland high school world of drinking, parties, and meticulously up-to-date teenage datebooks.
Ford told lawmakers that on a summer evening at a party in Montgomery County, Kavanaugh had forced her onto a bed, groped her, tried to pull off her clothing and bathing suit, and put his hand over her mouth.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” she said when she spoke publicly for the first time, to the Washington Post.
On the day of the extra hearing to go over the allegations, Kavanaugh was angry. He wasn’t seething, he was shouting. Indignant. Spittle flying, frustrated tears welling up in his small black eyes. He felt no need to suppress his anger—his anger, by the way, not at being sexually assaulted but at being credibly accused of sexual assault.
Blasey’s testimony was achingly, supernaturally poised. She was so, so careful. The microphone wasn’t quite where it was supposed to be.
“I’ll lean forward,” she said. “Is this good?”
Am I doing it right? I am not angry.
Blasey let herself be grilled in front of the entire nation—reliving a moment when she thought she might be raped or killed
—to save us. She put her body in between Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh and Roe v. Wade, Kavanaugh and what he wanted. She stayed serene for us, and she was perfect for us.
He won. She was nice, and she lost.
Ford was still receiving threats and harassment months after the hearing. She was forced to move four times for her safety. She had to pay for private guards and has not yet returned to her professorship at Palo Alto University. She essentially lives in hiding.
Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court.
If we lose either way, why the fuck shouldn’t we just let our anger out?
Is there a woman who has lost her temper in public and didn’t face ridicule, temporary ruin, or both? Can you think of one? Solange? Britney Spears? Sinéad O’Connor? The Dixie Chicks? Rosie O’Donnell?
Women are supposed to be compliant and helpful and nice and play the support role for men who are the real actors in the world. We are supposed to absorb, not project.
We don’t even have to be angry to be called angry—that’s the power of stigma. Accusations of being an “angry black woman” chased Michelle Obama throughout her tenure at the White House, despite eight years of unflappable poise (black women suffer disproportionately under this paradigm). The decades-long smearing of Hillary Clinton as an unhinged shrew culminated in November 2016 when, despite maintaining a preternatural calm throughout the most brutal campaign in living memory, she lost the election to apoplectic masculinity itself.
Like every other feminist with a public platform, I am perpetually cast as a disapproving scold.
But what’s the alternative? To approve? I do not approve.
Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it.