Unfortunately for Nolan, he had his workplace publicly listed on his Facebook page (which also happened to be chock-full of incredibly racist ‘jokes’). I sent a message containing some choice screencaps to his employer. It wasn’t long before I heard back from the serviced apartment group at which he was a supervising manager. They first told me they were looking into it and then, presumably fearful of the bad publicity that might come from letting it slide, made the decision to terminate his contract.
I posted a follow-up with this information, and that’s when the shit storm really started. The next few days saw me facing a relentless tide of abuse from people, most of them men, calling me a whore, a slut, a dumb cunt, a fat bitch who needs to get laid, a bitch who should kill herself and, in one particularly memorable moment, a woman who needed to be shot in the face and put in a grave.
If Lewis’ Law states that the comments beneath any article about feminism justifies feminism’s existence, then Ford’s Law asserts that the abuse received after exposing abuse proves how very prevalent this problem is.
But funnily enough, the circumstances of Nolan’s life began to twist and turn according to what my detractors wanted to believe about feminist retribution. Not only had I ruined a man’s life, I had done so just before Christmas, leaving him, his wife and all of their children destitute, homeless and without any presents from Santa. That Nolan was unmarried and childless is apparently irrelevant, as was the fact that he really didn’t seem to care about losing his job nor did he ever participate in the frenzy that occurred afterwards. Nope – an entire life had been manufactured for him in which he had not only done nothing wrong but was now a hard-working husband and father being punished by an evil, scheming (fat) feminist intent on destroying the fabric of society.
Even now, when months have passed, I still receive regular online comments from men outraged by my actions. ‘Slut,’ they write to me. ‘You just try and fucking get me fired!’ They tell me I’m thin-skinned, that I can’t handle ‘bad words’ and that, in addition to all my other faults, I’m stamping out free speech and ‘silencing’ people. Because being allowed to call someone a ‘cunt-faced ginger’ on the internet without them fighting back is what freedom’s all about, apparently. Quick, somebody raise the barricades. There are some angry men out there and they have some songs they need to sing.
Still, why did I choose to retaliate against Nolan in particular? As I’ve pointed out, ‘slut’ is hardly the worst thing I’ve ever been called. It wasn’t even the worst message I’d received that week. That would be the email I received saying (and I quote verbatim): ‘You deserve to be gangraped by a pack of aids infested niggers. Die, fucking bitch.’
The answer is simple. I did it because I’m sick and tired of men abusing women online and continuing to get away with it. Fuck all those entitled, bullying misogynists who act like the world fucking belongs to them and they can do whatever they like without consequences. I can withstand their boring tantrums (as tedious as they are) but I’m angry about how many women they manage to bully into silence. They think it’s their right to retaliate against any woman who disagrees with them or challenges them in any way, and their preferred methods always involve dehumanisation and degradation. They think they’re untouchable, because until now very few people have ever held them accountable for their behaviour. Instead, they’re coddled and protected, their actions defended as ‘harmless fun’ or ‘just a little mistake’. Women are expected to absorb their hostility without complaint, to let it diminish and shrink us all so we can ensure they never have to answer to anything.
And if we refuse to do all this, to cop their rape and murder threats on the chin because ‘they’re just words, get the sand out of your box’, then we’re demonising them and punishing them unfairly. It’s worse than violent harassment – it’s misandry.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been admonished for putting the abuse of men on display for the world to see. How often I’ve been told off for ‘humiliating them’ or ‘bullying them’, simply because I insist on showing everyone else the words they’re so proud to send me when they assume I’ll keep it ‘our little secret’. People have told me that this kind of retaliation makes me ‘just as bad if not worse’ than the men who get off on degrading me with their words and detailed descriptions. Really? I’m ‘just as bad’ as someone who tells me I need to have my ‘virgin smelly anal passage pierced by a mammoth cock’, because I took their courageously written words and broadcast them to a much bigger audience? That I might actually be even worse than them, because my actions could result in them losing their job or being publicly humiliated, and I need to be more responsible than that?
When women complain about the abuse we receive, we’re told to ‘get over it’ or ‘harden up’, two pieces of advice that completely miss the irony of the fact that the most thin-skinned, sensitive and retaliatory people online are white men aged between fifteen and thirty-five. You only need to read any of the comments on a post gently making fun of people who think ‘misandry’ actually exists to see that. After the Nolan incident happened, an extremely irate man tweeted at me (very seriously, I might add) that I wouldn’t stop until I had succeeded in having all men in the world fired from their jobs.
I replied, ‘I won’t stop until all men are fired . . . into the sun!’
To highlight just how incapable some men seem to be at reading humour when it’s directed at them, this response was shared around as apparent ‘proof’ that I not only wanted to see an end to all male employment, but that I actually wanted to catapult them directly into the blazing ball of fire the earth rotates around. A young chap even contacted me a few months after this to argue with me about how much I supposedly hate men.
‘You said you wanted to fire them all into the sun!’ he exclaimed.
‘Do you think it’s possible that I might have been joking?’ I replied, with far more patience than I usually possess.
‘But you said it,’ he answered, as if this settled the matter.
And in the minds of boys and men like him, I guess it does. They can ‘joke’ about rape, abuse, violence, sending women back to the kitchen, fucking women up, beating the shit out of us, telling us with their fists to know our place and whatever other reprehensible horrors you can conjure up in your mind, and these are nothing but festive japes. But a woman jokes about building a cannon in the desert to blast the world’s men into the atmosphere and this is A VERY SERIOUS CRIME THAT MUST BE TAKEN VERY SERIOUSLY.
Chaos ensues.
Once again, women are expected to absorb the brunt of the hate sent our way because nothing we do in response – even when it’s directly following the advice of those people who love to tell women what to do – is ever acceptable.
Here’s how a typical interaction with the defenders and perpetrators of online abuse goes.
‘Just block and delete them like a grown-up!’
*blocks and deletes*
‘Oh, so you’re censoring people now? What, can’t you handle debate?’
*attempts to engage in a meaningful discussion, explaining why harassment is unacceptable*
‘Get over it, it’s just a word. I get called words all the time and I don’t cry like a baby!’
*loses temper, resorts to name-calling and/or sarcasm*
‘I should have known you’d resort to ad hominem attacks. You feminists are all the same: you can’t even defend your position without becoming abusive!’
This is doubly frustrating considering the majority of these conversations take place in online spaces with crude mechanisms for dealing with interactions like these. Facebook, the platform I use most frequently, is shockingly bad when it comes to responding to abuse. Time after time, posts featuring women’s bruised and bloodied faces have been declared ‘not in violation’ of the site’s community standards, as have the countless posts joking about rape and intimate partner homicide or comments calling for women to be tortured.
In mid-2015,
hundreds of girls and women in South Australia had their private photographs stolen and shared online without their consent. The social media team at Channel Seven’s morning ‘news’ program Sunrise (which look, let’s be honest, is the televisual equivalent of a drophole toilet in a country town famed for its racism) linked to the story with a caption asking, ‘When will girls learn?’ In protest, I posted a near-topless photograph of myself with extensive commentary condemning this kind of victim-blaming bullshit. Across my chest, I had scrawled #getfuckedsunrise.
The post went bonkers almost immediately. To date, it has been shared over 700,000 times. That night though, astonishment quickly turned to discomfort as I began to be inundated with private messages and public comments from men, most of them hostile. Some demanded I send them nude photographs, and then called me names like ‘fat whore’ and ‘slag’ when I either ignored them or told them to fuck off. Others dropped by uninvited to talk about my ‘saggy tits’ and how, as one man put it, they’d ‘seen better on a pit bull’. I was called an attention seeker and an idiot, told that I was irresponsible for encouraging girls to behave ‘like sluts’. One man publicly requested that I ‘sit on a butcher knife’ so that I could ‘never reproduce’. Another privately messaged to say he was going to come to my house and rape me.
All of that, just because I posted a photograph with commentary protesting the idea that women sacrifice our right to be treated with respect the moment we share an intimate image of ourselves with someone we’ve been led to believe we can trust.
Despite reporting most of these comments and messages, none of them were considered to violate the (extremely lax) community standards at Facebook HQ. If I wanted to, I was told I could block the users, but that was about it. Deciding this was inadequate, I instead began the laborious process of screencapping as much as possible, posting everything I could to show just how viciously some men react to the sight of a woman standing up for herself and other women. Unfortunately, men like that don’t like having their words put on display for everyone else to see. They don’t like being publicly associated with their vile misogyny, because it makes it that much harder for them to claim the title of Good Guy. So, despite frequently being among the many who mock women for being ‘unable to handle’ the onslaught of abuse online, they started reporting the posts.
And this was where Facebook suddenly drew the line. Not only did they remove the multiple posts I’d made, they also slapped me with a thirty-day ban. To be clear, all I had done was post images of the messages and comments sent to me that had been declared fine by Facebook’s standards. But while it was evidently acceptable for these men to send these messages in the first place, it suddenly became an act of hostility for me to make an example of them.
What can be concluded from this? That misogynist abuse, whether it happens in the online world or not, is considered the responsibility of women to handle quietly, timidly and without any sudden movements or retaliation lest men be unfairly embarrassed. The people who baulk at the thought of men being forced to adjust their behaviour have absolutely no problem advocating for solutions which involve women removing ourselves from public life entirely. Basically, it isn’t fair to demand that men change behaviour that’s ultimately harmless, and if women don’t like this we should just get off the internet.
But listen. I didn’t force Michael Nolan to violate his company’s social media policy by writing the word ‘Slut’ on the Facebook wall of a woman he’d never met. In fact, I’ve never invited anyone to invade my little corner of the internet and bombard me with the weight of their frustrated masculinity. I don’t seek men out to conduct Facebook or Twitter drive-by shootings, turning up unannounced to call them names, query their mental health or cast aspersions on the relationships they have with their mothers. All I have ever done is exercise my right to post on a page attributed to my name on a publicly accessible website, and defend myself against an onslaught of attacks.
But the fact of my existence is still so enraging to some men that they can’t help but persistently, incessantly harass me in the hope that they might one day be successful in getting me to shut up shop. And in keeping with most executions of abuse or violence against women, the responsibility for their behaviour falls to me. I’m making them do this with my outspoken views. I’m encouraging their abuse by being such an angry feminist. I’m making it worse by fighting back. Just ignore it and they’ll go away. Grow up. Stop being so sensitive.
Listen, I have been a human-being woman person for approximately thirty-five years now and at least ten of those traverses around the sun have been since the internet became widely accessible. I’ve been called every name you can think of, often multiple times in a day. Men call me names on my Twitter account, on Facebook, via my email address, on the radio, at public speaking events and sometimes even through letters forwarded on to my home address. I’ve amassed such a huge scrapbook of abuse that I actually present a comedy lecture on it, so ridiculous and laughable is most of it. Those inclined to pen such prose draw on every anti-feminist and anti-woman slur that’s been made available to them through the gross collective imagination of the misogynists at large, and I haven’t retreated yet. I can handle pretty much anything they throw at me. What I can’t handle is their hypocrisy – because do you know who crumbles quicker than you can say ‘whiny man baby who loves the sound of his own voice’? Dudebros. If I had a dollar for every time a man complained that I was ‘bullying’ him just because I shared an example of his gendered, abusive name-calling, I could build my own fucking social media site and install an automatic no-join policy for all the douchelords who think misandry is really A Thing.
If I couldn’t ‘handle’ it, I would have retreated into private life a long time ago. But I’m still here. I’m still writing, still speaking and still refusing to be the kind of woman that makes men like this feel comfortably in charge. They hate it and they retaliate viciously, but all of that just proves how much power I actually have over them. Much like the gaping cavern of my gigantic cunt, they can’t touch the sides of me. Beyond using them as an example to others of what fear does to people, I never think about them. I don’t care whether or not they like me or agree with me, whether they feel personally victimised by my views or what they think of my body, face or sexuality. And judging by how furiously they react to even the remotest slight or gentle joke had at their expense, I also know that they’re the ones wrapped in thin skin, breaking at the slightest provocation, yelling fiercely about their rights and humanity.
There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from this, and that is the boys and men who feel most entitled to ridicule everyone they enjoy power over cannot handle it when that spotlight is turned on themselves. This is their perception of oppression: being laughed at on the internet.
This fear of being laughed at is what we can use to win against them. As hard as it might sometimes be to summon cheer in the face of their toxic bilge, laugh loudly and laugh often. Don’t give them your earnest energy or sensitivity, because they don’t respect that. In fact, they get off on mocking it and stomping all over it. They don’t care about the issues you care about, so they feel no obligation to treat your emotions about them with any shred of respect. Attempting to engage with them seriously or convince them of your position only ends up making you feel more frustrated and upset. Trust me, I know – I tried this approach for years.
Instead, treat them like the boggarts they are, and use that knowledge to destroy them. For those people unfamiliar with the world of Harry Potter, a boggart is a spirit that lives in dark and dusty places and whose power comes from taking on the appearance of the thing a person fears most. This is a fairly apt description for the losers who troll women on the internet, because underneath all their bravado lies little more than a glorified black hole of rage and dust mites. The only way to defeat a boggart is to cast the Ridikulus spell – you summon the spectre of your fear either dressed in something ridiculous or cast in an absurd situation, and
the resulting howls of laughter progressively weaken it until it explodes.
Online trolls are the boggarts of the internet, and laughter kills them. So laugh. Laugh and watch them wilt. They’ll fight back, of course. But the more they shrink before us, the more strength you’ll have to go on fighting. That’s what all of us need to do – we need to fight back and take the space that belongs to us, no matter how angry it makes these men feel and no matter how viciously they try to tear us down.
For too long, women have been subjected to the rage of men as a means of keeping us quiet and compliant. Our bodies, sexuality, physicality, behaviour and temperaments have all been stolen and distorted to try to humiliate us into silence. We are punished for acting out, tormented for speaking up and ridiculed for fighting back. The abuse we suffer online is just the latest iteration of this, and it can be overwhelming in its intensity.
But the good news is that we are winning against it. More and more women are finding the strength to push back. More of us are laughing at the sad little troglodytes who think their pathetic insults can still make us cry into our pillows. We’re not letting misogynist rage consume us to the point of mass silencing anymore, but are shouting back into the hurricane without fear. Women are standing in solidarity with one another against the onslaught of this abuse, and simply bearing witness to that encourages more of us to join the line. These words that have been used to cut us, wound us and destroy us have suddenly lost the power they once had, and the men who’ve wielded them are going to have to accept the dawning of a new era.
Because out there, on that vast ocean of male tears, the tide is turning. Women are finally captaining the ship.
Men can either get on the boat, or they can drown.
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11 –
DICKTIONARY
Fellow feminists, it’s true what people say: feminism is a dirty word. But contrary to popular opinion, this isn’t because of the way feminists look or the things they say or even the way they say them. Feminism is a dirty word because, no matter how much they might try to argue otherwise, the concept of gender equality is still so deeply horrifying to a lot of people that they feel entitled to lash out at feminists using all the tools a gender unequal world has given them. If the weight of history and power instructs women to behave in particular ways so that the patriarchy can maintain its foundational support, it stands to reason that any challenges to this status quo are reacted to swiftly and mercilessly.
Fight Like A Girl Page 17