Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(59)

Then: “We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them. Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.”

“We’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo went on. “We’re going to fix it.”

I was floored. Like, literally on the floor, rolling around. Bloggers, activists, and academics had been throwing ourselves against Twitter’s opaque interface for years—begging for help, compiling sheaves of data on online abuse, writing heartfelt personal essays and dry clinical analyses—and suddenly, in one stroke, we had their ear. There was a human being behind the bird, and he actually gave a shit.

The jury’s still out on the long-term efficacy of Twitter’s “fixes.” It’s notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to retroactively change a community once bad behavior has taken root—once users know how to exploit a system, it’s hard to evict them without rebuilding the system itself from scratch. Still, to know that Twitter is aware and they’re trying—to have the CEO publicly throw his hat in with the feminazis rather than the trolls—is a victory, and a sign that our culture is slowly heaving its bulk in the right direction.

Decisive victories are rare in the culture wars, and the fact that I can count three in my relatively short career—three tangible cultural shifts to which I was lucky enough to contribute—is what keeps me in this job. There’s Costolo and the trolls, of course. Then, rape jokes. Comedians are more cautious now, whether they like it or not, while only the most credulous fool or contrarian liar would argue that comedy has no misogyny problem. “Hello, I Am Fat” chipped away at the notion that you can “help” fat people by mocking and shaming us. We talk about fatness differently now than we did five years ago—fat people are no longer safe targets—and I hope I did my part.

All of those changes are small, but they tell us something big: Our world isn’t fixed, the way those currently in charge would have you believe. It’s malleable.


When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with a video-game developer named Roberta Williams. She made point-and-click adventure games—King’s Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory—a largely extinct genre in which exploration, curiosity, and problem solving took precedence over combat and reflexes. As a corny king or a dopey spaceman, you wandered through brilliant, interactive landscapes, picking up random shit in the hope that it might help you rescue a pissed-off gnome from a swarm of bees, or break a talking collie out of dog prison so he’ll reward you with the magic kerchief you need to blindfold the King of the Dead.

I wanted to be Roberta Williams; I wanted to build worlds.

In ninth grade, I enrolled in a beginners’ programming class at a community college near my house. I was the youngest one there, the only girl, and the only one with no previous knowledge of coding (which wasn’t a prerequisite); the teacher ignored me and chattered away with the boys in jargon I couldn’t follow. I sat through two classes in a humiliated, frustrated fog and never went back. I drifted away from video games; they didn’t want me. I forgot about Roberta and grew up.

I think the most important thing I do in my professional life today is delivering public, impermeable “no”s and sticking to them. I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet.

Nah, no thanks, I’m good, bye. Ew, don’t talk to me. Fuck off.

It’s a way of kicking down the boundaries that society has set for women—be compliant, be a caregiver, be quiet—and erecting my own. I will do this; I will not do that. You believe in my subjugation; I don’t have to be nice to you. I am busy; my time is not a public commodity. You are boring; go away.

That is world-building.

My little victories—trolls, rape jokes, fat people’s humanity—are world-building. Fighting for diverse voices is world-building. Proclaiming the inherent value of fat people is world-building. Believing rape victims is world-building. Refusing to cave to abortion stigma is world-building. Voting is world-building. So is kindness, compassion, listening, making space, saying yes, saying no.

We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better.