One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

by Scaachi Koul

  Or they just hate women. They hate brown women who do not fit a stereotype they’re comfortable with, but frankly, they hate those women too. Sometimes there isn’t logic. Sometimes they just think I’m a cunt.

  It is taxing to consider the circumstances that can take an unmarked human canvas and make it rage-filled and petty and lost. It’s not fun to have sympathy for the people who are trying to hurt you. But their actions can sometimes make sense: what’s easier than trying to get better is trying to break something else down. It gives credence to your power, a power you might not always feel. It tells the world that you have value, since the person who was supposed to tell you that you had value left in the middle of the night. Or didn’t give you medication when you needed it. Or touched you where they shouldn’t have. These men who harass women online were all owed something very simple at one time—respect, love, affection, the basic decency of living upwards and not curling inwards, a humane education—and someone, along the line, failed them.

  It’s so obvious that when these men yell at me and try to get me fired and threaten to have me killed they’re angry at both the entire world and specific people, people I don’t even know, people I have never met, people who did far worse things than my mere existence could ever do. It doesn’t make me feel better about it, it doesn’t make me like it, but it does give me an answer.

  —

  I probably should have been afraid sooner. People told me to be afraid, to reset my passwords weekly, to be wary of my address or my parents’ address getting posted online. But my fear does not come from an endless trove; I would much rather direct it to things that actually scare me. I’m afraid of my parents dying and having to settle their estate. I’m afraid of Raisin growing up to be a jerk and then reconciling my unconditional love with wanting to punch her in the mouth. I’m afraid of waking up to discover Hamhock has had a stroke in his sleep despite him being significantly healthier than me. Fear always reaches a breaking point and turns into anxiety or rage, and I don’t have enough storage space for more fear in my life. Namely when it involves people I’ve never even met.

  It took me six years of using Twitter before I snapped. I was brave, unthinkingly, for six years, fielding the odd crude comment or harassment campaign. But the day I broke, no physical space felt safe to me anymore, even though the problems I had were all virtual. My office felt poisoned and my home felt infiltrated and my friends seemed like enemies, all because there is no such thing as digital-only harassment—it bleeds into your life. I couldn’t go to the office because it was on my work computer, and I couldn’t go home because it was on my home computer, and I couldn’t talk to my friends because they were all online and so they all knew about it, and they wanted to ask, with good intentions, “Doesn’t it wear you down?” My answer, increasingly, was yes, of course it does.

  I had tweeted earlier that morning that I wanted to read and commission more articles by non-white non-male writers. I was editing at the time, and the whitest, malest landscape in the country is long-form writing. This is boring, like offering the same selection of toothpaste-flavoured ice cream for a century and then wondering why your business is failing. My version of media is one that looks like other people, because I remember being a little girl and wishing I read books or magazine articles or saw movies about people who even remotely looked like me. I became a writer because I read a David Sedaris book at thirteen; every word he wrote crackled in my brain, and he was a guy, sure, a white guy, but I knew he was different in a way that I felt different. Later that year, I read another book by an Indian writer about a first-generation Indian girl trying to date as a teenager, the plot alone blossoming in my heart when I read it. It changes you, when you see someone similar to you, doing the thing you might want to do yourself. That kind of writing—writing by people who aren’t in the majority—its sheer visibility on your bookshelf or your television or your internet, is sometimes received similarly to my call for more of that work. It’s responded to with racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia. We are deeply afraid of making marginalized voices stronger, because we think it makes privileged ones that much weaker.

  Maybe I was wrong and I shouldn’t have said that I wanted more “non-white non-male writers.” Maybe I should have said, “As much as I appreciate the contributions white men have made to the media landscape, and as much as I want to read another profile of a thin, blond actress where the writer quietly begs to have his virginity taken, that feels a little redundant, and maybe something worth examining.” But you know what, I don’t really give a shit. Those feelings are not my priority. That’s kind of the point.

  Media needs to diversify, and the only way to do that is to get non-white non-male non-binary people to work for and with you. It doesn’t mean they’re the only people you choose, but they are the ones we ignore the most. And when that message comes from a non-white non-male person themselves, someone young enough to not yet have any inherent gravitas and—this part is important—just enough privilege to be powerful, that’s when they target you.

  The response was fine, initially. I was handling it, the general misunderstanding of the worth of affirmative action. But then a few users twisted the knife and I started to get lightheaded. “Whites are literally GODS compared to all you shit colored freaks,” wrote one user, and for some reason, it gave me pause. “Act like an insufferable cunt and then turn around and play the victim when people put you in your place,” said another, and so I decided to go home early that day. “How many of your relatives are rapists? Hear that’s pretty common in Asia” dropped into my feed. I hid under my covers, but I took my phone. Knowing what complete strangers were comfortable saying to me was one cruelty, but not knowing, and pretending that it didn’t matter, was a worse kind of distress.

  What followed were several days of rape threats, death threats, encouragements of suicide, racial slurs, sexist remarks, comments on my weight and appearance, attempts to get me fired or blacklisted, and even a quality jab about Hamhock failing to “civilize” me with his white penis. Nothing was unique, nothing was new, nothing unheard of. Calling me a cuckold and a bitch and a nigger, suggesting I should be raped by a beer bottle, followed home and attacked at night, or anally raped sans lubrication (thank you for this elegant distinction, sir) were hardly clever attacks.

  Abstractly, the things they were saying meant nothing. There is no value, no consequence to someone calling me a dumb bitch. These people are the same ones who would be afraid of me if we ever met. But the volume of it was more than I could keep up with, the longest and largest and harshest string I’d faced. I was getting a few hundred notifications a day, all largely negative, all vaguely menacing. (Just vague enough, apparently, that Twitter did nothing to intervene.)

  The internet used to be funny to me, this big global joke we were all in. Before, when I replied to users who, at their best, respectfully disagreed with me and, at their worst, wanted me murdered, it was a joke. It was a way to show how few emperors even owned clothes, never mind wore them. I thought we were laughing. I thought I was laughing. But after a few hours of answering and ironically engaging this time, I didn’t find it funny, and Hamhock didn’t find it funny, and my friends who were texting me, asking if I was having a very public meltdown, didn’t find it funny. My dad, who found out about this spat of online harassment because a prominent international media organization wrote about it, did not find it funny. He called in near tears, trying to make sense of what Twitter was and why he couldn’t read it himself. He wanted to see what people were saying, and I was thankful he couldn’t.

  I was still reading the comments and I replied to nearly every user, because hadn’t they earned it? I had made myself available, and I had asked people to listen to me, so shouldn’t I extend the same to someone who wanted me to miscarry a child I was not even bearing? It wasn’t enough to exist online; I felt I had to engage because so many strangers demanded an answer. I owed them an answer. I was property, something entertai
ning or enticing or infuriating, but I was owned.

  I refused to go to sleep unless my phone was glued to my hand so I could wake up at three in the morning and see if anyone had said something needlessly cruel about me. (They had.) I woke up the next morning and cried in bed while Hamhock rubbed my back and begged me to get up. He tried to tell me it wasn’t real, but I knew it was, because we’d made extra sure to lock the back door in case someone decided, just once, to step away from their keyboard.

  Throughout this ordeal I spoke with Jordan, who had since gone from being my boss to my friend. He was my first real editor at my first real job, the one who told me to write instead of hide, who rarely made eye contact for the first two years I worked with him but wrote me elegant emails telling me how to fix my work and how to be bolder. Jordan published my work, week after week, even when I didn’t trust it and even when it felt risky. “It’s good,” he’d tell me through a thick beard, this assessment his highest bar for achievement. When the fallout would come, when people would come down hard on it or judge the work, based on my age or my gender, as futile and flimsy, he’d tell me to get off the internet and keep writing instead. He pulled some of my best work out of me, offline, in tangible places where his was the only voice I heard. Years ago, when another writer accused me of fabricating sources in my work, I went to Jordan, devastated and furious. “The thing to remember about him,” he said, “is that he’s nobody. Nobody at all. Fuck that guy in the ear.”

  Jordan is, in all the best ways, the opposite of me: he is incredibly calm, methodical, patient, and he can wait a full five minutes between a thought forming in his head and hurtling its way out of his mouth. When I worked for him, I used to sit on his desk and try to get him to talk because he is one of the few people I want to listen to. His online presence is sparing, detached, funny, and dry. But he is a man, a white man, who can get away with more than I could dream of. “There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation,” he said when I told him about my Twitter account burning down before my eyes. “You shouldn’t feel like you have to play.” I complained about how unfair the world is, how hard it is to be a woman anywhere, how hard it is to be a non-white woman, how impossible it is to avoid getting the shit kicked out of you online for having an opinion, any opinion, and how resistant an entire industry is to positive change.

  “I know,” he said. “But you don’t owe anyone anything. You don’t have to be available to everyone. You can stop.”

  I deactivated my Twitter account that night.

  —

  If I were a beautiful person, a writer of beautiful things where everything ends with Our Noble Quirky Heroine learning a lesson about life, love, and the things that truly make us happy, I would have stayed off the internet for the rest of my life. I would be one of those people who eats lunch alone in a crowded restaurant without even bringing my phone. I would go on vacation with every intention of leaving my hotel room to learn some of the local language rather than staying inside to watch poorly translated reality television. I would make eye contact and I would bake nut loaf and I would read books, like you are, like some adorable idiot.

  But, naturally, I did the opposite. I was furious that a platform that felt like mine, that I had ownership of, was ruined for me and people like me because a cabal of talking thumbs couldn’t avoid calling me a bitch for more than a single day. The worst part—if it’s possible for us to hit bottom in a bottomless pit filled with jagged anthropomorphic rocks chirping “BUT NOT ALL MEN”—is that the treatment I received was still better than many have experienced. I’m brown, but I have fair skin, I don’t identify as queer or trans, I have no experience with visible disabilities, and though I am the child of immigrants, English is my first language. I am lucky, and I didn’t deserve half of it. No, I was right the first time: there is no bottom. You just sink and sink and sink until the force of your fall pulls the skin clean off your bones. I’d say it’s over before you know it, but I’m still waiting.

  A small fraction of the internet took my departure from Twitter as a statement. Four mainstream outlets wrote about it, as did a few neo-Nazi blogs. I was either a victim and a champion for women who get harassed online, someone so strong and powerful that if I left, there must really be a problem with the web, or I was a cunt who ran away when it got too hard to deal with.

  But frankly, I just felt lonely. When I send my writing out into the world without checking Twitter, I’m left out of a conversation that I want to be in on. I want to know what I missed, what I fucked up, what I need to know for next time. I want to know that the work, hopefully, made you feel less lonely. Writing as one-way communication is rarely satisfying to me, probably because I’ve had some form of digital connection with the world and the strangers on it for most of my life. But with that comes a trove of unhelpful suggestions, attacks or attempts to demean my work for little reason other than people not liking me. If I want one, I have to have both, even if the conversation so frequently feels aggressive and cruel and destructive. I don’t like feeling lonely.

  Shutting off without warning was jarring and isolating, like having a friend you rely on just vanish with no explanation. Jordan was right: I didn’t have to be there, be it for work or for personal gain. I didn’t have to play. I realized, though, that I wanted to—I like attention and I like being able to control my own narrative. Above all, I like bothering people. I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you’re racist or sexist or small-minded. Something about ceding this territory, this part of the digital world that I felt ownership over, felt so deeply unfair. It’s my house; why should I leave? I hated being offline, because I wasn’t a martyr and I wasn’t brave and I wasn’t weak. I just didn’t like the game, the rules of which I had helped write.

  During my hiatus from Twitter I was hoping for some peace, for people to stop asking me if I was “doing okay” and to stop inserting themselves in what was salacious drama to them but structurally heartbreaking for me. But it was a lot like watching your own funeral. People I hated picked up the mantle and started advocating for me in a way I loathed, but I couldn’t say anything because I was dead, remember? People who I thought were my friends (or whatever approximation of “friend” is possible if you met the person once at a crowded bar) turned against me as soon as it was clear I wouldn’t retaliate. A former co-worker referred to me as a “tire fire” of a human being, and another acquaintance called me stupid and childish. Another established (Caucasian! Male!) national journalist said my call for writers was both “edgy” and a violation of human rights. (The Hague has yet to call.) Most didn’t have much to say at all, because when you die, a shocking few will be sad. Once, when I thought I had embarrassed myself in front of a group of girls I was trying to impress, my then boyfriend told me, “You’d be shocked by how little people think about you.” I broke up with him immediately, obviously, because everyone needs to look at me all the time, but it didn’t make him wrong. No one cares more about your successes and your foibles than you.

  This is the mistake I made. Everything felt personal. Every time I didn’t like someone, I didn’t like their character, I made them human and hated their humanity. I was irate when the “right” people didn’t agree with me online, when I felt abandoned by people who should’ve said something, said it louder. But no one on the internet is actually a person; they’re just an amalgamation of human parts, like a robot made from all the components of a person but missing the essentials, like a brain or a lymphatic system. It sounds like a person and, sometimes, looks like one, but it’s not. It’s an idea. You can’t get mad at ideas as if they’re people. An idea isn’t going to hold your hand. Ideas don’t owe you anything.

  The harassment was bad, no question—and that’s exactly what it was, a targeted attempt to make me question my physical and emotional safety. But it also had to do with my expectations. It’s no wonder I keep fighting
with riff-raff on the internet. I’m expecting human interaction, and all they’re offering are beeps. I was dumb enough to want a hug from a machine.

  After two weeks, I reactivated, the way anyone would: I posted a string of GIFS of noted wrestler The Undertaker coming back to life. The Undertaker popping out of a casket, The Undertaker reviving himself on the mat, The Undertaker running towards a large white man. The last one, perhaps my favourite: The Undertaker hanging his arms over the ropes, face bloodied, hair matted with sweat, barking defiantly, “This is my yard.”

  —

  Solutions for how to handle social media tend to be all or nothing. You either succumb to the rules of the ruthless web, or you stay off it completely, out of fear or apathy or a refusal to let arbitrary arguments ruin your day. Neither option is realistic, and none are possible for women who rely on the internet for work or play. The platforms themselves hardly acknowledge that their infrastructure is a problem. At sixteen, we balked at Facebook because it wanted our real names and we still liked the perceived anonymity the internet gave us because it made it easier to be mean. Now, we still hate that we have to use our real names because it makes it easier for abusers and harassers to find us on yet another platform. (Some of us, with unusual monikers and silent letters and atypical spellings, for example, are even easier to find.) Twitter still can’t agree on what harassing behaviour is, so while you might block or mute a person from your page, they can keep talking about you, keep sending their minions to flood your account, keep opening new accounts.