Mia Matsumiya, a violinist who has performed in rock bands in New York for the past 10 years, recently decided to reveal another secret hobby she’s kept up: the vast collection of her internet harassment, which she is posting one by one on her Instagram account @Perv_Magnet.
“Being 4’9”, Asian-American, and a musical performer has sort of been a nightmare combination when it comes to harassment—it seems to attract an insane amount of unacceptable, predatory behavior,” she said in an interview.
Matsumiya reportedly developed an internet following when she started blogging about her performances in 2003. The posts soon became anthropological case studies in a certain kind of vile male internet commenter.
One particularly scary instance occurred with a man who was arrested for stalking another Asian woman.
“The guy would write me all the time, and even though his messages weren’t over-the-top creepy, they were definitely a little sexually aggressive,” she told BuzzFeed. “When the police arrested him at the public library, he was found with a hard drive containing a bunch of pictures of me and hundreds of pages of stories he had written about stalking and raping me. It was really terrifying.”
Matsumiya said that while the responses to the Instagram account are mostly positive, some people have been predictably grotesque.
“There are people who think I started this account in order to brag about how many ‘compliments’ I get,” she said to the Huffington Post. “I’m guessing these people are the same people delivering these messages. But make no mistake, I don’t take these messages as compliments and never have. In fact, they make me feel objectified, dehumanized, and degraded. I think the more time you spend reading them, you really begin understanding my position.”
Contact the author at joanna@jezebel.com.