Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(57)

Within a few days, there I was in a recording studio with a phone—and the troll on the other end. We recorded it for This American Life, a popular public radio show.

I asked him why he chose me. In his e-mail he wrote that it wasn’t because of the rape joke thing, so what exactly did I do?

His voice was soft, tentative. He was clearly as nervous as I was. “Well,” he said, “it revolved around one issue that you wrote about a lot which was your being heavy—the struggles that you had regarding being a woman of size, or whatever the term may be.”

I cut in. I hate euphemisms. What the fuck is a “woman of size,” anyway? Who doesn’t have a size? “You can say fat. That’s what I say.”

“Fat. Okay, fat.”

He told me that at the time he was about seventy-five pounds heavier than he wanted to be. He hated his body. He was miserable. And reading about fat people, particularly fat women, accepting and loving themselves as they were, infuriated him for reasons he couldn’t articulate at the time.

“When you talked about being proud of who you are and where you are and where you’re going,” he continued, “that kind of stoked that anger that I had.”

“Okay,” I said, “so you found my writing. You found my writing, and you did not like it.”

“Certain aspects of it.”

“Yeah.”

“You used a lot of all caps,” he said. I laughed, and it got him to laugh a little too. “You’re just a very—you almost have no fear when you write. You know, it’s like you stand on the desk and you say, ‘I’m Lindy West, and this is what I believe in. Fuck you if you don’t agree with me.’ And even though you don’t say those words exactly, I’m like, who is this bitch who thinks she knows everything?”

I asked him if he felt that way because I’m a woman.

He didn’t even hesitate. “Oh, definitely. Definitely. Women are being more forthright in their writing. There isn’t a sense of timidity to when they speak or when they write. They’re saying it loud. And I think that—and I think, for me, as well, it’s threatening at first.”

“Right.” It was a relief to hear him admit it. So many men cling to the lie that misogyny is a feminist fiction, and rarely do I get such explicit validation that my work is accomplishing exactly what I’m aiming for. “You must know that I—that’s why I do that, because people don’t expect to hear from women like that. And I want other women to see me do that and I want women’s voices to get louder.”

“I understand,” he said. “I understand.” I really felt like he did. “Here’s the thing,” he went on. “I work with women all day, and I don’t have an issue with anyone. I could’ve told you back then if someone had said to me, ‘Oh, you’re a misogynist. You hate women.’ And I could say, ‘Nuh-uh, I love my mom. I love my sisters. I’ve loved my—the girlfriends that I’ve had in my life.’ But you can’t claim to be okay with women and then go online and insult them—seek them out to harm them emotionally.”

In my experience, if you call a troll a misogynist, he’ll almost invariably say, “Oh, I don’t hate women. I just hate what you’re saying and what that other woman is saying and that woman and that one for totally unrelated reasons.” So it was satisfying at least to hear him admit that, yeah, he hated women.

We talked for two and a half grueling hours. They flew by, but every second hurt. He was shockingly self-aware. He said he didn’t troll anymore, that he’d really changed. He told me that period of time when he was trolling me for being loud and fat was a low point for him. He hated his body. His girlfriend dumped him. He spent every day in front of a computer at an unfulfilling job. A passionless life, he called it. For some reason, he found it “easy” to take that out on women online.

I asked why. What made women easy targets? In retrospect, I wish I’d been even more plain: Why was it so satisfying to hurt us? 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 hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.

He did explain how he changed. He started taking care of his health, he found a new girlfriend, and he went back to school to become a teacher. He told me—in all seriousness—that, as a volunteer at a school, he just gets so many hugs now. “Seeing how their feelings get hurt by their peers,” he said, “on purpose or not, it derails them for the rest of the day. They’ll have their head on their desk and refuse to talk. As I’m watching this happen, I can’t help but think about the feelings that I hurt.” He was so sorry, he said.

Finally, I brought up my dad.

“How did you even find out that my dad died? How did you—” I trailed off as my voice broke. He saved me the trouble of finishing the question. “I went to my computer. I Googled you—found out you had a father who had passed. I found out that he had—you had siblings. I forget if it was three total.”

“I have two siblings.”

“So—”

“Did you read his obituary?”

“I believe I did,” he said. “I knew he was a musician.”