The result of all this is a diminishment of women’s lives, a shrinking of their sense of possibility and ambition. As the New Delhi–based women’s rights group Jagori wrote in a report about building inclusive cities, “Insecurity and the threat and reality of violence prevent women and girls from participating as full and equal citizens in community life. Women and girls have a ‘right to the city.’”
“A right to the city.” You would think this would be self-evident, but the problem must be acknowledged before it can be addressed. The UN Women’s Safe Cities Initiative works around the world to create urban spaces where women feel they belong: Kigali, Rwanda, began a program to educate taxi drivers and installed better street lighting; in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, where there was a high level of violence toward female vendors in the central marketplace, the market was redesigned with input from the women involved. In New Delhi, thousands of stickers were placed in rickshaws that said, “Sexual harassment is a crime, not a joke.”
What if there’s not even acknowledgement of the problem? In 2015, a video called “Ten Hours Walking as a Woman in New York City” set social media on fire, because ten hours walking boiled down to a lot of minutes being harassed. The video was commissioned by Hollaback! and featured a twenty-four-year-old actress named Shoshana Roberts walking through New York in jeans and a T-shirt, being filmed by a hidden GoPro. She was subject to more than a hundred comments, ranging from “How you doin’?” to “Hey, sexy” and “Hi, beautiful,” to my favourite, “Somebody’s acknowledging you for being beautiful. You should say thank you more!”
Ah, yes. Thank you for allowing me to be attractive enough to walk the streets of my city. Plain gals, follow me to the Ugly Women Tunnel. Please watch your head.
“Ten Hours Walking as a Woman” was an instant sensation and created mini-tornadoes of controversy: Was it racist to include so many Black and Latino men making comments? How was it offensive to say “Hello” or “How are you?” to a woman out walking? Was this not mere politeness? This argument is particularly evident in the comments on YouTube, where the video has been viewed 44 million times. What is she complaining about? These are “first world” problems.
Except, as we’ve seen, they’re not. Around the world, men are incapable of allowing women an autonomous existence in a public space. Always, we have to be seen through the lens of male experience. Always we exist to be touched, commented on — and, if that fails, verbally assaulted — in ways men cannot possibly understand. Imagine a world in which men walk down the street in the morning, yelling “Smile!” at each other. I would pay to see that. I would watch a whole damn reality show involving nothing but men telling each other to smile.
I am old. Old in journalist years. Old if you count the rings on my liver. The harassment that happened to me on the street, which I’ve cited above, has died down. It is one of the great benefits of age: I no longer get chased, groped, whistled at, or told I’m an ungrateful bitch when I refuse to smile. Perhaps it’s the glint off my fangs that scares them away.
But we don’t just live in “meat space.” We live, increasingly, online. It is the road we travel for work and pleasure. And that road is inhospitable to women. Too often it resembles a highway from Mad Max: Fury Road, with no Charlize Theron for badass relief. In the same way that we have been made unwelcome in public spaces, except as flesh, we are now told that we do not have a right to occupy what was once quaintly called the “information highway.” There are signs, none of them subtle, indicating that we should exit as quickly as possible. This pervasive discrimination shows little sign of disappearing. We can try to ignore it or, pedal to the metal, smash this injustice flat and head for the open road.
ON A RAINY day in Toronto, I returned to the scene of some of my earliest crimes, Ryerson University. When I graduated with a journalism degree in 1988, it wasn’t even a university; it was “a polytechnic institute,” which in English means “a place to drink beer and nap for three years.” In other words, I’m not even really a university graduate. Don’t tell anyone.
I walked past a group of students lined up for free ice cream (some things never change) into Ryerson’s journalism school, which is now part of the Faculty of Communication and Design (some things do change). The building smelled less like unwashed socks and despair than I remembered.
About half the folding chairs were empty for this panel discussion — “Hate, Trolls and Freedom of Expression Online: What to Do?” — hosted by Ryerson’s Centre for Free Expression. The male guest was sick, so the panel consisted of two women who have been subject to online harassment, Toronto Star reporter Noor Javed and feminist activist Julie Lalonde, as well as Penni Stewart, an associate professor of sociology at York University. This was the second panel I’d been to in two weeks in which women described, in grotesque detail, the garbage hurled at them from the murky brown depths of the Internet.
I’m a newspaper columnist, so I recognized the outlines of the swamp and the toxic lumps that float in it. I take a fair amount of abuse — not as much as younger feminists, who seem to draw disproportionate ire, but enough that it causes steam to come out my ears. For example, in the brief lull between the two panels on cyber harassment, I found myself engaged in a Twitter debate with a gentleman who went by the name “Jalepeno Pooper” about whether I was as stupid as I appeared. This is not a debate I expected to have, at this stage in my career, with a man who cannot spell jalapeño. But there you have it: the modern world in all its glories.
The panel’s moderator was Fuyuki Kurasawa, also from York’s sociology faculty. He began by talking about the “digital injustice” that occurs when abusers drive their victims from social media: “Online abuse and online harassment create systematic barriers to participation. The members of groups disproportionately targeted by online hate and abuse are, and a lot of research demonstrates this, likely to withdraw from participation on social media platforms or modify the type of behaviour they engage in on social media, how they act, and what they say both online and offline.”
In other words, the harassment ain’t worth the harassment. It’s bad enough being a woman on social media: try being a woman from an ethnic or religious minority, or LGBTQ. Try being a woman wearing a hijab. As Noor Javed said about her life as a reporter wearing a headscarf: “For years, anything I wrote would get hate mail. I was tired of it . . . I just wanted to go to work and not have people hating me just because I wore hijab, which is really what it sometimes comes down to.”
All journalists are familiar with the dark byways of the digital utopia: The abuse that used to arrive in a stamped envelope, for your eyes only, is now spread like toxic waste across millions of pixels. For Javed, it was worse, as she and a colleague found out when they wrote a series of stories about a school principal who’d posted anti-Muslim opinions on a Facebook page. Javed’s white colleague did not face any retaliation, but she did: “I started getting lots of online hate . . . There was an email smear campaign. There were libellous letters that went out calling me ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood.”
Javed’s colleagues and bosses and others in the online community stood up for her. She’s a seasoned reporter, and not easily swayed, but even she felt the chilling effect of public abuse: “Hate has a toll on journalists, no question. It impacted me, it impacted editors dealing with me, it impacts what people want to write and say . . . If you’re a young Muslim woman who’s an intern, you don’t even know if you should bring it up with your seniors.”
For Julie Lalonde, an educator and advocate for victims of sexual and domestic violence, online threats and abuse are a daily constant. In 2014, Lalonde was conducting sex-assault education workshops at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, when she was subject to a torrent of abuse from the cadets she was supposed to be teaching: catcalls, laughter, taunting. Months later, the school apologized, but even that opened the floodgates of hate, and she was continually
harassed via email and Twitter.
This drip-drip of misogyny would wear down the toughest stone. At the end of the panel, Lalonde said something that would become perhaps my favourite descriptor of the current digital landscape: “Online harassment is the equivalent of having a parrot on your shoulder who tells you you’re a piece of shit 24/7.” It made me laugh when she said it, but my laughter died pretty quickly. Then it made me want to hurl my laptop from the nearest bridge.
You only have to be a woman with an opinion and a wifi connection to understand precisely how annoying, damaging, and enraging it is to live in the digital age. Not all the time, of course, and not on all platforms. But for a not insignificant number of women — those who are doxxed (the public sharing of personal information), threatened with rape and dismemberment, told that they are grotesquely fat, ugly, and stupid, or that they’re little better than animals — social media is a daily slog through a toxic swamp.
Female journalists know this. I write an opinion column and am told fairly regularly that I am, in the words of one of my gentleman callers, “a man-hating cunt.” In the comments under my columns, I am regularly told that the sexism I am writing about does not exist and that I’m too stupid to know this. I have been told that I couldn’t get a job working at one of Donald Trump’s hotels because “Trump only has attractive people interacting with the public.” Another of my pen pals wanted me to know that I am “too old for Trump to grope.”
“Don’t read the comments,” journalists whisper to each other. If you’re a female journalist, you might choose to do something more pleasant, like dig out your own liver with a rusty spoon. As the British journalist Helen Lewis has decreed in Lewis’s Law: “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”
Dawn Foster, who moderated the comments section at the Guardian newspaper for two years, wrote about the nastiness of the experience: “The vast majority of commenters are men, and the Guardian’s own research shows that the writers most often abused on their site are women and Black journalists, and the least abused contributors — surprise — are white men.” Many news organizations have abolished the comments, or drastically reshaped them to discourage cruelty. My own newspaper has implemented a “civil commenting platform” so that now that the threads are peppered with the phrase
“What should I do?” young women journalists sometimes ask me, because as you get older you start to look like an oracle, especially in the cracked bits around the edges (unless you’ve had some work done, which of course I HAVE NOT). These young women are already exhausted: they’re called “bitches” on Twitter, condescended to by male political journalists, savaged by drive-by assaults on Facebook. There is an oddly public nature to this abuse. I try to imagine a dentist happily drilling a tooth when a band of random nutcases breaks into her office and begins to scream, “Where did you learn to drill anyway, bitch? Where did you get your licence — the Whore School of Dentistry?”
You think I’m exaggerating, but it’s so much worse than that. One of my newspaper colleagues told me that she had taken a dive into the comments on one of her stories — without a HazMat suit! — and found that one reader believed she was “only good for spreading her legs.” It took two days for the comment to be removed.
The British activist Laura Bates set up the website Everyday Sexism as a repository for women’s stories of mundane discrimination, only to be greeted on Twitter with “brutally graphic” rape threats. This was the moment, Bates writes, “that I became aware of the sheer force of hatred that greets women who speak out about sexism.”
Sometimes the forces of hatred win, and we lose a valuable public voice. Consider the case of Lindy West, a whip-smart feminist and author of the hilarious essay collection Shrill. In early 2017, West announced that she would leave Twitter, not just because of the abuse she’d suffered, but because the platform had become a playground for the boy fascists of the alt-right. West wrote about her online battles:
I talk back and I am “feeding the trolls.” I say nothing and the harassment escalates. I report threats and I am a “censor.” I use mass-blocking tools to curb abuse and I am abused further for blocking “unfairly.” I have to conclude, after half a decade of troubleshooting, that it may simply be impossible to make this platform usable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators.
In 2016, the actress Leslie Jones was forced off Twitter by an organized campaign of racist, sexist abuse; trolls even impersonated her to make false homophobic attacks on other users. The only saving grace of that episode was the huge wave of support for Jones, which eventually led to her return to Twitter: “Welp . . . a bitch thought she could stay away. But who else is gonna live tweet Game of Thrones!!”
I am completely in sympathy with women who leave social media platforms; the energy required to joust online orcs could be better used for — well, just about anything, from making love to making blue Jell-O. Every time I see a sister leaving, though, I feel a pang of sorrow.
Because the point of this garbage landslide is to suffocate our voices. There is no other outcome that would make the goblins happier. They will dance around their midnight bonfires, clutching their Dorito bags, if they can force us to step away from our computers. If we can’t be driven off the streets entirely, then they can at least drive us from the digital agora. And we can’t let that happen.
The effort to address online misogyny will require a wide-reaching, coordinated response from powerful players within the digital realm. Social media platforms will need to do a better job of enforcing their codes of conduct; employers need to have solid anti-harassment policies to protect employees; police need to take threats seriously; schools need to enforce norms around cyberbullying.
In other words, don’t hold your breath. So far, the efforts to address abuse have been weak and ineffectual. Presented with that (altogether unsurprising) leadership vacuum, warrior queens have stepped in to light the way. Mona Eltahawy, who I wrote about at the beginning of this chapter, likes to dismiss Twitter tormentors with the delectable phrase “Fuck off, kitten.” Caitlin Moran, who likened the deterioration of Twitter to a “zoo set on fire,” once led a two-day strike of Twitter to protest the misogyny that flooded the site.
When I interviewed Moran about her book Moranifesto, I asked what her solution would be for an online space that is welcoming to everyone — old and young, male and female, introvert and screamer. “I suspect we’ll have to invent a new space,” she said. “And what would be great is if that was a space that was invented by women, for once, from the ground up. And it would be more like sitting around a dinner party talking, rather than someone coming through the door and firing off one-liners.”
I asked if boys would be allowed.
“Absolutely,” Moran said. “They’d just need to be told the rules.”
Until this femtopia arrives, women will have to stick up for each other or risk being drowned separately in silence. This is already happening, in the most heartening ways, at ground level. Whether it translates into action, in a profit-driven digital landscape largely inhospitable to the female experience, is another matter.
Here’s a story that begins in horror but ends in some hope. The British Labour MP Jess Phillips is an outspoken advocate for women’s rights. “Gobby” is how such women are described in Britain. Sometimes it’s even a compliment. But a gobby woman, especially one who speaks out in Parliament, is asking for a particular kind of muzzling. One day Phillips was wrapping her son’s birthday presents when she was alerted to vicious online comments about a speech she had given in Parliament. She described the comments written by an anonymous citizen in her recent memoir, Everywoman: “Yo
u know what would be funny. Pouring molten iron down this cunt’s cunt till she starts vomiting bullets.”
When she read that, Phillips burst into tears. Not because this kind of vitriol was new — in fact, she received threats, abuse, and insults about her appearance every day — but because she was, like so many women, tired of the fight: “I was just sick and angry at how acceptable it was to still hate women.” Still, she knew precisely what her tormentors hoped: that she would shut up, shut down, go away. “The crux of why these people hate me is because I have a voice, and people listen to it. A woman with power is intolerable to them.”
In her book, she begs young women not to give up. To refuse to be silenced. She encourages them to keep writing, and publishing, and sharing their opinions — which is, of course, their goddess-given right. It is easier said than done: Women of colour who are politicians are even more likely to be abused online than their white counterparts. In an Amnesty International survey of tweets sent to British members of parliament in the first six months of 2017, fully 45 percent of abusive tweets were sent to one person — Diane Abbott, a Black Labour MP. Female, Black, and Asian MPs received 35 percent more hateful messages than their white counterparts.
Instead of abandoning the digital ship, Phillips learned ways to steer her own course. She writes snarky retorts (this level of combativeness, she admits, is not for everyone). She asks for pictures of pets to be sent to her when she’s going to be speaking on a subject that will draw the trolls, so that she sees something pleasant alongside the turds floating in her tweetstream.
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