Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(26)
At pretty much every blogging job I’ve ever had, I’ve been told (by male managers) that the reason is money. It would be a death sentence to moderate comments and block the IP addresses of chronic abusers, because it “shuts down discourse” and guts traffic. I’ve heard a lot of lectures about the importance of neutrality. Neutrality is inherently positive, I’m told—if we start banning trolls and shutting down harassment, we’ll all lose our jobs. But no one’s ever shown me any numbers that support that claim, that harassment equals jobs. Not that I think traffic should trump employee safety anyway, but I’d love for someone to prove to me that it’s more than just a cop-out.
Years later, when I moved on to a staff writer position at Jezebel (and trolls like sex-alien guy had become a ubiquitous potpourri), Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton unrolled a new platform called Kinja, with the express mission of “investing in commenters.” On Kinja, any commenter could start their own blog, hosted by Gawker, which could then be mined for re-posting on the main sites. Your commenter handle became the URL of your blog—so, for example, mine was lindywest.kinja.com. This was an alarming precedent from an editorial standpoint: Our employer was intentionally blurring the lines between our work as professional, experienced, vetted, paid journalists and the anonymous ramblings of the unpaid commentariat, which seemed to exist, most days, simply to antagonize us. It did not go over particularly well at the all-hands meeting. In Kinja, as the trolls quickly learned, comments are moderated by the writers, so to keep our work readable we had to dismiss and ban each one by hand. At Jezebel, that meant fielding a constant stream of gifs depicting graphic violence and rape. It was emotionally gruesome. But it was “part of the job.”
The problem with handing anonymous commenters the tools of their own legitimization soon became even clearer for me. One user registered the handle LindyWestLicksMyAsshole” and began merrily commenting all over Gawker. Under Kinja, that meant there was now a permanent blog, hosted by my employer, side by side with my work, called lindywestlicksmyasshole.kinja.com. Can you imagine? At your job? That’s like if your name was Dave Jorgensen and you worked at Walgreens, and one day you got to work and right in between the fiber supplements and the seasonal candy there was a new aisle called Dave Jorgensen Is a Sex Predator. And when you complained to your manager she was like, “Oh, you’re so sensitive. It’s a store! We can’t change what goes in a store—we’d go out of business! We all have stuff we don’t like, Dave. I don’t like Salt and Vinegar Pringles, but you don’t see me whining about aisle 2.”
I e-mailed my boss and insisted the page be taken down. She told me she’d see what she could do, but not to get my hopes up. Sure enough, Gawker higher-ups claimed it didn’t violate the harassment policy. It isn’t explicitly gendered or racist or homophobic. Anyway, that’s just how the Internet is! If we start deleting comments because people’s feelings are hurt, it’ll stifle the lively comment culture that keeps the site profitable. What if LindyWestLicksMy Asshole has some really tasty anonymous tip about a congressman who did something weird with his penis? Don’t you care about free speech and penis news?
It is gendered, though. Of course it’s gendered. It’s sexualizing me for the purpose of making me uncomfortable, of reminding my audience and colleagues and detractors that I’m a sex thing first and a human being second. That my ideas are secondary to my body. Sure, if you strip away cultural context entirely, you could construe “Lindy WestLicksMyAsshole” as having nothing to do with gender, but that’s willful dishonesty.* I didn’t have a choice, however, so I put LindyWestLicksMyAsshole out of my mind and tried to stay out of the comments as much as possible.
It’s just the Internet. There’s nothing we can do.
When I was right in that sweet spot—late Stranger/early Jezebel—when the trolls were at full volume about my Michelin Man thorax and Dalek thighs, but my only line of defense was the fetal position, I was effectively incapacitated. I had no coping mechanisms. I felt helpless and isolated. I stayed in bed as much as possible, and kept the TV on 24/7; I couldn’t fall asleep in silence. I don’t know if trolls say to themselves, explicitly, “I don’t like what this lady wrote—I’m going to make sure she never leaves her apartment!” but that’s what it does to the unprepared.
I know those early maelstroms pushed some of my friends away. To someone who’s never experienced it, large-scale online hate is unrelatable, and complaints about it can read like narcissism. “Ugh, what do I do with all this attention?” The times I did manage to get out and socialize, it was hard not to be a broken record, to recount tweets I’d gotten that day like a regurgitating toilet. Eventually, people got bored. Who wants to sit around in person and talk about the Internet?
Gradually, though (it took years), I got better. I learned how to weather the mob without falling out of my skin, becoming my own tedious shadow.
PLAN A: Don’t click on anything. Don’t read anything. Don’t look at any words below any article, or any forum to which the public has any access, or any e-mail with a vaguely suspicious subject line like “feedback on ur work” or “a questions about womyn” or “feminism=female supremacy?” EVER. Because why on earth would you do that? I can understand if the Internet had just been invented Tuesday, and you sincerely thought, “Oh, perhaps sniffmychode89 has some constructive perspective on the politics of female body hair.” However, I, Lindy West, have now been using this virtual garbage dispenser for literally twenty years, and maybe one comment in fifty contains anything other than condescending, contrarian, and/or abusive trash. I have no excuse. When I click, it is because I am a fool.