Mostly this comes through on Twitter, where it was the protests against Governor Scott Walker and his union-busting that made me truly appreciate the medium. I was looking at a picture of the court order re-opening our state Capitol an hour and twenty minutes before it hit any local news site. (And yeah, I timed it.) I have made some really wonderful friends while tweeting about politics. And had some fascinating discussions.
So when I tell you that I've never been trolled, not seriously, you should understand that I do go through pretty long jags of political commentary. It's not that I've never been trolled because I stay away from that sort of thing. But, back in March when I starting getting the first inklings, I definitely did circle my wagons and clam up for a few days. And that's a strategy that's worked very well for me ever since. I am obnoxiously political for (at maximum) five days, and then I go back to tweeting about my love life or clothes or food or something safely domestic for a period of time that is at least three days longer than however long I spent tweeting exclusively about politics and current events.
This has had the interesting (and hilarious) effect of getting me on some really interesting public lists. Like "Almost Worth Following." I laughed pretty hard at that one. There was another one that was simply titled Liberal/Retard/Spam/Troll, which I thought was an interesting grouping of things to be. I didn't laugh so much at that as I did wince.
But my strategy of just never going for too long without backing off and becoming nonthreateningly girly again seemed to work. Aside from the most glancing, easy to identify, and non-personal trolling that exists, I've never had to deal with vitriol from strangers.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (one of those wonderful Twitter pals I met through politics and #wiunion) dropped a comment along the lines of "Remember when I didn't have my real name here and people thought I was a guy? That was fun."
And it made me think: I'm pretty obviously female, even on a gender-neutral platform like Twitter. My handle is "TheGirlOne" for crying out loud, and for a long while I had a picture of my actual face up there as an avatar, and I'm clearly female. What if the reason I never get trolled is less to do with my careful curated strategy, and more to do with my gender? A woman in politics isn't "worth" trolling?
I don't think that's seriously the case; I think it might be some combination of gender roles and my strategy, but after having read this piece, and this one, and this one, I am pretty convinced that my being a woman hasn't been the driving force in not being trolled, either on Twitter or here. Because there are, apparently, a lot of men out there, and a lot of people out there in general, that are willing to aim a lot of pent-up rage at women on the Internet.
And I think that the quote at the end of the Time article is intensely relevant to anyone that's about to tell me that it's *just* the Internet:
"This is 2011. It’s not “just” the Internet. It’s our culture. At this moment in time, you can work, socialize, date, learn, communicate and debate online. There is no longer a divide. What is happening online is happening in real life. This type of abuse reflects real-life attitudes, real-life misogyny and it’s prolific. It’s about time we started discussing it."
The Internet is, for better or worse, a part of the way we live these days. It is our culture. It's no longer a subculture, or an underground culture, or any other negating adjective you want to throw on it. The Internet is pop culture. We inhabit these spaces as surely as we do our bedrooms, apartments, cubicles, cars. And what happens here is real.
I've been lucky. Startling, beautifully, terrifyingly lucky. I have blogged about gender relations, and gender bending, and patriarchal political pundits, and my own sexual history. I have been, at times, uncomfortably personal. I have been, always, lucky that all of you that read this or have stumbled upon it have been kind and supportive.
I worked for a political office in Milwaukee for a year when I was in college. When the then-governor of our state, Jim Doyle, vetoed concealed carry legislation, a lot of people were understandably upset. Several of them called into the Mayor's office to express their disapproval. (Don't ask me why people upset with the governor were calling the mayor of a city. I don't know. People are dumb.)
One of the interns answering phones during that period was a lovely young woman, a friend of mine, and she took a call in which the man on the other end of the phone told her, after she tried to explain to him that the Mayor had no control over what the governor did and it wasn't under our purview, that he "hoped she got raped on her way home tonight, so [she'd] understand that carrying a gun is a good thing."
I cried when it was directed at her, and I certainly looked over my shoulder the entire walk from City Hall to my busstop, the whole bus ride home, the whole walk from that busstop to my apartment.
I have been (for me, anyway) remarkably open here, and I have been lucky. And I have been consistently supported in that. I hope that never changes. But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that putting this piece out there is taking slightly more courage than I probably have.
We should all be more compassionate. Telling that to a mysogynistic, scared little man in his basement spewing hate at all the women he can find on the Internet is probably a bit like spitting in the storm's eye, but I'll do it anyway. We should all be more compassionate. We should all be working to understand the ways in which we're all vulnerable and scared, and we should all be working to change those conditions. Life doesn't have to be nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. We can be better than that. So, let's be better than that.
And let's start by all being as civil to everyone as you've all been to me.
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