Calling out misogyny online is worth the effort
Normally, I don’t have much time for International Women’s Day. I subscribe to the school of thought which says that women make up half the population and there’s something patronising – not to mention bizarre – about lumping all their enormously varied achievements together. We don’t celebrate Shakespeare and Louis Pasteur in one breath, so why Jane Austen and Serena Williams?
Usually, I also feel a bit queasy when I hear the word ‘empowerment’. Cynical advertisers on a mission to monetise fourth wave feminism have described everything from undergraduate chemistry degrees to incontinence pads as ‘empowering’ – and the word is now worse than meaningless.
But today, I’m breaking out of character to applaud five female Conservative MPs who, in aid of International Women’s Day, have made a video urging women to empower themselves by calling out misogynistic abuse online.
In the video, which you can watch here, the women read out some of the vile hate messages they’ve received on social media – and defiantly respond to them. The insults range from “silly lassie” to “Medusa’s fugly sister”, but every single one of them is, as one of them points out, gender specific.
Like all millennials, I’ve always been aware of the trolls who sit around insulting the clothes, hair, makeup and bodies of women in the media, but it wasn’t until I started doing a little bit of TV myself that I realised the staggering extent of it. Shaking and clammy after my first prime time appearance, I checked my phone to find over 300 Twitter notifications – exclusively from men – commenting on my “whiny voice”, “fat face”, “cheap necklace”, and much more which wouldn’t get through your office filters. Each and every one of them had chosen to tag me in the tweet to make 100% sure I saw it.
Of course, I knew they were “not worth my time”, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit miserable. If they’d disagreed – however vociferously, with my political opinions, I would have been delighted to debate, but when it’s personal, it’s impossible to engage. I stopped wearing the necklace, and went quiet in conversation when I caught myself erring towards shrill.
A few days later, I noticed a more senior female journalist on Twitter getting similar abuse after appearing on Question Time. But instead of ignoring the messages – as everyone will tell you to do – she retweeted them, adding her own witty and/or furious comebacks. Faced with a storm of indignation from her followers, the abusers deleted their original messages, and, in some cases, their Twitter accounts. From then I took the same approach – with equally satisfying results.
Although men too can experience violence and abuse online, the abuse experienced by women is often sexist or misogynistic in nature, and online threats of violence against women are sexualized, and include specific disturbing references to women’s bodies. The aim of violence and abuse is to create a hostile online environment for women with the goal of shaming, intimidating, degrading, belittling or silencing.
And in insidious ways, it’s working. On one end of the scale, self-harm is on the rise among digitally active, vulnerable teenage girls, while on the other, ambitious young women who may once had political dreams are now shying away from Westminster, worried that their “skin won’t be thick enough”.
The idea that an ‘International Day’ (a naff concept at the best of times) will ‘raise awareness’ for women’s causes in general still doesn’t quite ring true for me. The young girl in Croydon who missed school because she can’t afford sanitary protection has very little in common with the wealthy Saudi woman unable to escape her abusive partner because of an app – and anyway, both will need more than the tacit support of a few woke men if their lives are to improve.
But for the first time this year, I’ve understood that if done properly, International Women’s Day really can be a force for good. Standing up for women doesn’t have to involve pious virtue signalling or awareness-raising gimmicks. To take a step towards help make the internet – and by extension the world – a better, happier place for women, all you need to do is tell those trolls exactly what you think of their pathetic abuse. And watch them melt away.
