I Am Returning to Trouble You Again Troll
F or the past three years or so, at least one stranger has sought me out pretty much every day to telephone call me a fat bitch (or some pithy variation thereof). I'm a writer and a woman and a feminist, and I write about big, fat, bitchy things that brand people uncomfortable. And because I choose to do that equally a career, I'm told, a abiding avalanche of abuse is just function of my job. Shrug. Nothing we can practice. I'thou request for it, plain.
Being harassed on the internet is such a normal, common part of my life that I'm ever surprised when other people find it surprising. You lot're telling me you don't have hundreds of men popping into your cubicle in the bookkeeping department of your mid-sized, regional dry-goods distributor to inform you lot that – hmm – you're too fat to rape, but perhaps they'll saw you upwards with an electric knife? No? Just me? People who don't spend much time on the cyberspace are invariably shocked to notice the atrocity – the eager abandonment of the social contract – that so many of usa face simply for doing our jobs.
Sometimes the hate trickles in slowly, just i or ii messages a day. Only other times, when I've written something especially controversial (ie feminist) – similar, say, my critique of men feeling entitled to women's time and attention, or literally anything virtually rape – the harassment comes in a drench. It floods my Twitter feed, my Facebook page, my electronic mail, so fast that I can't even keep up (not that I want to).
It was in the centre of one of these deluges two summers ago when my dead father contacted me on Twitter.
At the time, I'd been writing a lot nearly the problem of misogyny (specifically jokes nigh rape) in the comedy world. My fundamental point – which has been gleefully misconstrued every bit "pro-censorship" ever since – was that what we say affects the globe nosotros live in, that words are both a reflection of and a catalyst for the way our society operates. When you talk almost rape, I said, you get to decide where you lot aim: are you making fun of rapists? Or their victims? Are you making the earth better? Or worse? It's non well-nigh censorship, it's not most obligation, it'south non well-nigh forcibly limiting anyone's speech – it'due south nigh selection. Who are you? Choose.
The backlash from comedy fans was immediate and intense: "That broad doesn't have to worry about rape." "She won't ever accept to worry almost rape." "No one would want to rape that fat, disgusting mess." "Holes similar this make me want to commit rape out of anger." It went on and on, to the point that it was almost white noise. After a week or and so, I was feeling weather condition-browbeaten but fortified. Nothing could touch me anymore.
Merely then there was my dad'southward dear face twinkling out at me from my Twitter feed. Someone – bored, apparently, with the usual angles of harassment – had made a imitation Twitter account purporting to be my dead dad, featuring a stolen, beloved photo of him, for no reason other than to hurt me. The name on the account was "PawWestDonezo", because my father'due south name was Paul West, and a hard battle with prostate cancer had rendered him "donezo" (goofy slang for "done") merely 18 months earlier. "Embarrassed father of an idiot," the bio read. "Other two kids are fine, though." His location was "Dirt hole in Seattle".
My dad was special. The only thing he valued more than wit was kindness. He was a author and an ad man and a magnificent baritone (he could write y'all a jingle and record it on the same day) – a lost breed of lounge pianist who skipped dizzyingly from jazz standards to Flanders and Swann to Lord Buckley and back again – and I can genuinely say that I've never met anyone else and so universally dearest, nor do I expect to again. I loved him and then, then much.
There's a term for this brand of gratuitous online cruelty: nosotros call information technology internet trolling. Trolling is recreational abuse – usually anonymous – intended to waste matter the subject's time or get a rise out of them or frustrate or frighten them into silence. Sometimes it's relatively innocuous (like request contrarian questions just to start an argument) or juvenile (like making fun of my weight or my intelligence), but – particularly when the subject is a young woman – it oftentimes crosses the line into bona fide, dangerous stalking and harassment.
And fifty-fifty "innocuous" harassment, when it's coming at y'all en masse from hundreds or even thousands of users a day, stops feeling innocuous very quickly. It's a silencing tactic. The message is: yous are outnumbered. The message is: we'll stop when you're gone. The volume and intensity of harassment is vastly magnified for women of colour and trans women and disabled women and fat women and sexual activity workers and other intersecting identities. Who gets trolled has a direct impact on who gets to talk; in my personal experience, the fiercest trolling has come from traditionally white, male-dominated communities (comedy, video games, atheism) whose members would similar to continue information technology that way.
I experience the pull all the time: I should alter careers; I should shut down my social media; maybe I tin can get a chore in print somewhere; it's just too exhausting. I hear the same refrains from my colleagues. Sure, nosotros've all built up significant armour at this point, only, you lot know, armour is heavy. Internet trolling might seem like an result that but affects a sure subset of people, but that's merely true if you believe that living in a globe devoid of diverse voices – public discourse shaped primarily by white, heterosexual, able-bodied men – wouldn't profoundly impact your life.
Sitting at my computer, staring at PawWestDonezo, I had precious few options. All I could exercise, really, was ignore it: striking "block" and move on, knowing that that account was still out there, hidden behind a few gossamer lines of lawmaking, still putting words in my dad's mouth, still using his image to mock, abuse and silence people. After all, information technology's non illegal to reach elbow-deep into someone'due south memories and touch them and twist them and weaponise them (to print the ghost of Lenny Bruce or whatever). Nor should it be, of course. But that doesn't mean we accept to tolerate it without dissent.
Over and over, those of us who work on the cyberspace are told, "Don't feed the trolls. Don't talk back. It'southward what they desire." But is that true? Does ignoring trolls really stop trolling? Can somebody evidence me concrete numbers on that? Anecdotally, I've ignored far more than trolls than I've "fed", and my inbox hasn't get any quieter. When I speak my mind and receive a howling hurricane of abuse in return, it doesn't experience like a plea for my attention – it feels like a demand for my silence.
And some trolls are explicit almost it. "If you lot can't handle it, get off the internet." That's a persistent refrain my colleagues and I hear when nosotros face our harassers. But why? Why don't YOU get off the cyberspace? Why should I have to rearrange my life – and change careers, substantially – because you wet your pants every time a woman talks?
My friends say, "Just don't read the comments." But just the other day, for instance, I got a tweet that said, "May your bloodied head rest on the edge of an Isis blade." Colleagues and friends of mine have had their phone numbers and addresses published online (a harassment tactic known as "doxing") and had trolls show upward at their public events or threaten mass shootings. So if nosotros don't keep an centre on what people are saying, how do we know when a line has been crossed and law enforcement should be involved? (Not that the police take any clue how to deal with online harassment anyway – or much interest in trying.)
Social media companies say, "Merely report any abuse and motility on. We're handling information technology." And then I do that. Only reporting corruption is a wearisome, labour-intensive procedure that tin eat up half my working day. In any case, most of my reports are rejected. And once whatever troll is blocked (or even if they're suspended), they tin can simply make a new account and start all over over again.
I'm enlightened that Twitter is well inside its rights to let its platform be used every bit a vehicle for sexist and racist harassment. But, as a private company – simply like a comedian mulling over a rape joke, or a troll looking for a target for his anger – it could choose not to. As a commonage of human beings, information technology could choose to be meliorate.
Then, when information technology came to the case of PawWestDonezo, I went off script: I stopped obsessing over what he wanted and just did what felt best to me that day. I wrote about it publicly, online. I made myself vulnerable. I didn't hibernate the fact it hurt. The next morning, I woke up to an e-mail:
Hey Lindy, I don't know why or fifty-fifty when I started trolling yous. It wasn't because of your stance on rape jokes. I don't detect them funny either.
I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because information technology served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self.
I have e-mailed you lot through 2 other gmail accounts merely to send yous idiotic insults.
I repent for that.
I created the PaulWestDunzo@gmail.com account & Twitter account. (I have deleted both.)
I can't say sorry plenty.
It was the lowest matter I had ever done. When you lot included information technology in your latest Jezebel article it finally striking me. In that location is a living, breathing human existence who is reading this shit. I am attacking someone who never harmed me in any way. And for no reason whatsoever.
I'm done being a troll.
Again I apologize.
I made donation in retentivity to your dad.
I wish you the best.
He had donated $50 to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, where my dad was treated.
That email all the same unhinges my jaw every time I read it. A reformed troll? An admission of weakness and self-loathing? An amends? I wrote back once, expressed my disbelief and said thank you – and that was that. I returned to my regular routine of daily hate mail, scrolling through the aforementioned options over and over – Ignore? Block? Study? Engage? – but every fourth dimension I faced that choice, I thought briefly of my remorseful troll.
Last summertime, when a segment of video game fans began a massive harassment entrada against female critics and developers (if you want to know more, Google "GamerGate", then shut your laptop and throw it into the sea), my thoughts wandered dorsum to him more and more. I wondered if I could learn annihilation from him. And then it struck me: why not discover out?
We merely had fabricated that one, cursory exchange, in the summer of 2013, but I still had his email address. I asked the popular US radio programme This American Life to assistance me reach out to him. They said yep. They emailed him. Subsequently a few months of gruelling silence, he finally wrote back. "I'd exist happy to help y'all out in any way possible," he said.
So, in that location I was in a studio with a phone – and the troll on the other end.
We talked for 2-and-a-half hours. He was shockingly self-aware. He told me that he didn't hate me considering of rape jokes – the timing was just a coincidence – he hated me because, to put it only, I don't hate myself. Hearing him explain his choices in his own words, in his own vox, was heartbreaking and fascinating. He said that, at the time, he felt fat, unloved, "passionless" and purposeless. For some reason, he institute it "like shooting fish in a barrel" to take that out on women online.
I asked why. What made women piece of cake targets? Why was it so satisfying to hurt the states? Why didn't he automatically see us as human beings? For all his self-reflection, that's the one thing he never managed to articulate – how anger at one woman translated into hatred of women in general. Why, when men detest themselves, it's women who take the beatings.
But he did explain how he changed. He started taking intendance of his wellness, he institute a new girlfriend and, near importantly, he went back to school to go a teacher. He told me – in all seriousness – that, equally a volunteer at a school, he only gets so many hugs now. "Seeing how their feelings go injure by their peers," he said, "on purpose or not, it derails them for the rest of the day. They'll accept their head on their desk-bound and turn down to talk. Every bit I'm watching this happen, I tin't help but call back well-nigh the feelings that I injure." He was so sad, he said.
I didn't mean to forgive him, only I did.
This story isn't prescriptive. It doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to forgive people who corruption them, or even that I program on being cordial and compassionate to every teenage boy who tells me I'grand also fat to go raped (sorry in advance, boys: I yet bite). But, for me, it's inverse the timbre of my online interactions – with, for instance, the guy who responded to my radio story by calling my dad a "faggot". It'southward hard to experience hurt or frightened when yous're flooded with pity. And that, in plough, has fabricated information technology easier for me to proceed talking in the confront of a mob roaring for my silence. Keep screaming, trolls. I come across you.
Hear Lindy West's evidence at This American Life
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/02/what-happened-confronted-cruellest-troll-lindy-west
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