Don't Ignore the Trolls. Feed Them Until They Explode.

Broadly speaking, the type of violent, choreographed, overwhelming hate speech currently battering Creasy and Criado-Perez is directly aligned with our male-supremacist power structure (race is a deeply salient factor too, and unpacking that deserves its own article). I’m trying to think of an instance when anonymous women descended, spewing violent rape or castration threats, upon a man for expressing an opinion as innocuous as Criado-Perez’s. I can think of instances of funny, political, retaliatory trolling—like when Twitter feminists co-opted the #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag, or when Rick Perry’s Facebook page was deluged with questions about menses. But those are not examples of aggression, they are self-defense. They are not analogous to “I will rape you in an alley” or “Don’t leave your phone at home, sweetie.” They are reactions to misogyny—the same brand of misogyny that fuels internet trolling. They are women speaking to power—the same power structure that empowers and perpetuates anonymous trolls.

If you genuinely think that trolling affects everyone equally, look at the response Patton Oswalt received to his essay on rape culture vs. the responses that Sady Doyle and Molly Knefel and I got for ours (not to mention all of the other women who have been absorbing abuse for years for complaining about misogyny in comedy). I’d say Oswalt received…90% praise? At least? The general consensus was that he was honest, he was brave, he was correct. And he does deserve praise—I personally praised him, because he wrote about a hard thing that I’ve been advocating for for years—but at the same time, I have a feeling that he could count the number of retaliatory rape threats he received on zero hands. I’ve written several lengthy essays on rape jokes too, and when I spoke out about my rape threats, I got more of this: “Oh, but that’s just what happens on the internet. Whatareyagonnadooooooooooooooooo.” Well, it’s not what happened to Patton on the internet. It is not, typically, what happens to men on the internet. It is gendered. It is the consequence for women if we complain about shit that is shitty for women.

So, world, we have a troll problem. And one of these days we’ll have to figure out what we’re going to do about it. From the first day the first troll king pooped out his first troll-sac full of butt-eggs (and then told his placenta to eat less/exercise more, fatty), the conventional wisdom has been to ignore them. Ignore them and they’ll go away. Stop feeding them and they’ll starve. Except…has that worked? That’s been the policy since day one, and has trolling gotten better or worse? I’d wager that the people who are drawn to trolling, for the most part, are people who are used to being ignored. Ignoring them is playing to one of their strengths. So instead of fading away, they’re intensifying. And if you disagree with that assessment, you’re probably not a woman.

Andrew Sullivan linked to a study a while back (on his comment-free blog) that suggests that aggressive, abusive comments actually hinder readers’ ability to absorb and synthesize new ideas:

Participants were asked to read a blog post containing a balanced discussion of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology … The text of the post was the same for all participants, but the tone of the comments varied. Sometimes, they were “civil”-e.g., no name calling or flaming. But sometimes they were more like this: “If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these products, you’re an idiot.” The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn’t a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience . . . Pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their pre-existing beliefs.

In other words, when we ignore the issue—leaving trolls to twist in the wind—not only does it not fix anything, it actively hurts us. It poisons healthy conversations. And, more specifically, it actively drives women off the internet and out of the conversation and back into our “safe spaces”—which is exactly what the trolls want. They want us to shut up. They want us out of their territory.

But engaging with the issue is exactly what trolls want too. They revel in attention. So that’s the conundrum: As soon as we acknowledge them, they win. But if we never acknowledge them, they also win, plus discourse shuts down and we all get dumber. So what are we going to do? Well, in light of that idiotic Catch 22, I know what I’m going to do. Whatever I fucking feel like doing. I’m sick of being told that I’m navigating my own abuse wrong. I am not interested in being anyone’s chew toy—you can chew on me, but I am full of poison.

I feed trolls. Not always, not every troll, but when I feel like it—when I think it will make me feel better—I talk back. I talk back because the expectation is that when you tell a woman to shut up, she should shut up. I reject that. I talk back because it’s fun, sometimes, to rip an abusive dummy to shreds with my friends. I talk back because my mental health is my priority—not some troll’s personal satisfaction. I talk back because it emboldens other women to talk back online and in real life, and I talk back because women have told me that my responses give them a script for dealing with monsters in their own lives. And, most importantly, I talk back because internet trolls are not, in fact, monsters. They are human beings—and I don’t believe that their attempts to dehumanize me can be counteracted by dehumanizing them. The only thing that fights dehumanization is increased humanization—of me, of them, of marginalized groups in general, of the internet as a whole.

Cumulatively, the sheer volume of hate that we’re expected to shoulder, in silence, every day, is wearing a lot of people out and shutting down rational discourse. Female bloggers are being hounded off the internet. Teenage girls are being hounded off the earth. There’s no good solution, but we have to do what we can to stop these people—unmask them, shame them, mock them, cement their status as social pariahs—for our own sanity and for those whose armor isn’t so thick (upgrade yo greaves, son).

Unmasking trolls, as we’ve seen, can produce some tangible and satisfying results. And I don’t mean just in a punitive way, I mean in a changing-the-larger-culture kind of way. People need to understand and internalize that online harassment, violent hate speech, rape threats, slut-shaming little girls until they hang themselves, and so on, are express violations of the social contract. They will not be tolerated and they will result in real-life consequences. That’s a long way off, and probably a bit of a pipe dream, but it might be our only hope for cleaning up this shitshow.

*Obviously the term “troll” is grossly overused and encompasses a million different species of special shitflakes—from indiscriminate outrage-stirrers to ideological pitchfork mobs—but I’m using it here as a catch-all for “gratuitous incivility.” We can call them trolls or dickheads or burners or Johnny Fappleseeds or salty nut-logs or whatever you like, as long as you know what I mean. Which I’m sure you do.

Illustration by Jim Cooke.