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5 Women Writers on Dealing With Election Trolls

From Cosmopolitan

The internet has always been a cesspool of racial intolerance, bigotry, and misogyny, but for female commentators and reporters during the 2016 election, the rhetoric of Donald Trump’s campaign seems to have intensified the nastiness. Perhaps due in part to a Republican presidential candidate who retweets white supremacists, advocates for stop-and-frisk, and brags about sexually assaulting women, women who write about politics say they are experiencing a heightened level of harassment for daring to offer political commentary and reporting. Cosmopolitan.com talked to five prominent female writers about the online harassment they have faced during the election and how they deal with it.

Elizabeth Plank, senior correspondent at Vox.com

Last night, a Twitter user who is probably a teenage boy threatened to kill me and the women’s editor at Huffington Post. That is just a glimpse of the online harassment and trolling of women generally, but [the level of it has increased because] one candidate, especially, is a troll himself and utilizes the tools of trolls to go after people publicly and privately. I’m not surprised that his followers employ some of the same tactics on people who dare call him out and dare demand that he is held accountable for his actions and for his words.

The way that I deal with it is I just don’t read my mentions. I should care and I probably should report all of these assholes, but I don’t have the fucking time. [Laughs.] I don’t have the patience, and I have a job, and I have shit to do, and it’s actually frustrating to have to spend time [dealing with trolls]. But obviously those threats often can have a real-life impact. It made me really depressed to read those things, and so that’s why I don’t read them anymore.

Unfortunately, I have not found another solution to preserving my mental health because there’s a whole other story here about how difficult it’s been as a women to cover a misogynist candidate and a person who employs abusive tactics like deflection, manipulation, gaslighting on a daily basis when you have been a victim of abuse before or you have friends, family members, women in your life who also have experienced abuse. Just to be exposed to that every single day, I actually have found that more taxing than like, you know, MrAmericaPride86 with an egg profile pic telling me to "suck a dick."

Soraya Chemaly, director at Women Media Center’s Speech Project

The most recent one that I got just said, "choke on my cock" and then it included a photograph that I chose not to open. Unfortunately, women writers and politicians are supposed to accept this as part of their work lives, which is ridiculous. This is a very complicated and difficult problem because if you’re talking about on the individual level, the fact is there is no jurisdictional authority that can keep track of these harassers. Someone might be harassing you from another country. Someone might be harassing you in a different language. If someone on the street says, "I’m going to rape you," that would be a threat. But for some reason when they say it online, we’re supposed to ignore it.

I think probably just for my own psychic well-being, I compartmentalize it and I put it out of my head. I need to do the work that I want to do, and there have been a couple of occasions where I’ve thought, Uh, I’ve got to pay attention to that one because he was stupid enough to use his name and his geo-location, and he’s only 20 miles away. And he’s just said he’s going to go house to house shooting feminists like me. So, in an instance like that, I’m like, “All right, let me call some other women to see if he’s threatened them as well and whether we need to file an FBI complaint.”

This is just an extremely difficult time for everyone nationally. It’s not that the harassment itself is qualitatively different. It’s just more of it and more intense. But what I did notice that is interesting is that in the week of the release of the Trump video and the responses to that - for example, the #NotOkay hashtag - there was a mass outpouring of women’s stories and with that came a completely unanticipated kind of collective triggering. I can’t tell you how many women have talked about how exhausted they are, how these stories of seeing other women’s harassment and abuse have caused them anxiety, pain, depression.

I don’t even like the word "trolls" frankly, because of what it implies. It’s just got too close of relationship to some random monster or some kids’ toy. But in reality, we’re talking about people we work with and people we study with and people who are in our religious communities and neighbors and friends. A lot of this harassment is not anonymous. I think that we need people to understand that it’s serious to us, that it matters to us, and when I say "people," I broadly do mean men because it’s very clear that it’s not a priority to them as much for women.

Sally Kohn, columnist and CNN commentator

I don’t want to brag, but I’ve had some pretty bad trolls for a long time. I have a little bit of a sense that maybe the trolls are spreading their wings more, but I’ve always had some pretty bad ones. I’ll be honest though - at least when it comes to Twitter, I’ve also stopped paying as much attention. That has something to do probably with just being busier this election. It has something to do with just having a higher volume of tweets.

I always marvel at how straight white male colleagues, when they go on air, they get attacked, they get called stupid. Whereas, if I go, I get attacked as stupid and a dyke who wants to be a man, who can’t comb her hair, who is fat - it’s much more tinged with anti-gay, misogynistic smears. And I see this with my black friends. If they kind of share a public opinion, whether it’s on television or even just on Twitter, their attacks have a racial tinge to them. I will say there’s definitely a more openly, kind of proudly KKK-style racism and misogyny that I think would’ve been a little more thinly veiled or even kind of silent before the election cycle. But it’s not a new phenomenon - it maps onto this problematic dynamic where women and queer folks and people of color have always been shamed and smeared and attacked around their identity. And that reflects a sort of deep-seated strain of intolerance in our country, which is not created in this election, but exploited in this election.

I’ve become more immune to it. And part of that is just not reading it, not engaging it. I do share them because I think people should know the cost of being a gay woman with a public opinion in America today. But I try to share with humor as opposed to with any kind of meanness in response. But of course it takes its toll. It’s crummy not because I take it personally; it’s crummy because it’s sad that there are people in our country who look at all these ways we’ve progressed and become more inclusive - which I tend to think of as great and a source of pride for me, pride in our country - and they see it as the opposite, as something to be ashamed of and to fight against. That’s the part that I find really heartbreaking.

Angela Rye, CEO of political advocacy organization IMPACT Strategies, NPR political analyst, and CNN commentator

I’ve received everything from “you don’t even deserve to be on TV,” “you’re stupid,” “you’re ghetto,” the N-word, the B-word, the N-word B-word combination - just kind of everything if that you can think of. This literally happens every time I go on air. I’m almost numb to it now. If I talk about Donald Trump, racism, bigotry, and xenophobia, then I get called a race-baiter. At first, it really impacted me emotionally and then I decided, if I’m going to be trolled, I’m going to troll right back. And there are definitely examples consistently on my Twitter feed. At least I don’t do that on Facebook because I don’t manage my page.

Somebody actually issued a threat [this summer]. I can’t remember the exact text of the message on Twitter but I did report it, and Twitter allowed this person to keep their account open for some time until it was retweeted - I think over 500 times - that this is clearly a threat and clearly grounds for someone to be banned from Twitter. [The tweet] said something like, "You’ll get what’s coming to you." But it was clearly violent. There are people who say things when they see me on the street. I was in Georgia, Atlanta, with my mom, and a guy walks up and said to me, "You know, I check you out every time I see you on TV," and sometimes people are joking and they say that, but he sounded serious, and it was jarring to my mom, who quickly turned around to see who it was because it shocked her. And so it makes you more aware of what you’re doing and where you are. You want to be a little safe.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Angela Rye
Photo credit: Courtesy of Angela Rye

There is someone who is running to be commander-in-chief who utilizes these same words, who calls a senator "Pocahontas," makes fun of disabled people, who talks about black people in a way that makes them seem inherently violent and criminal, and so of course [his supporters] feel like it’s OK for them to talk to people who they see as "other" or "less than" in a certain way. I can’t believe we’re going from the candidate of hope with President Obama to the type of just fear, anger, frustration, and rage with Donald Trump’s candidacy. I can’t wait ’til Nov. 9. Maybe it’ll go away.

Michelle Fields, reporter at the Huffington Post

When I was at Breitbart, I didn’t really experience much harassment on Twitter and social media. It wasn’t until I left Breitbart that I experienced a ton of it. A lot of Breitbart readers felt like I had turned on them by leaving Breitbart. Most of my tweets that are really awful - if you look at their Twitter accounts, it’ll say "Trump 2016" and they tend to be men. They’re Breitbart readers, they’re a part of the alt-right, and they’re Trump supporters. That’s the bulk of all of the nasty comments that I get. And they’re all sexual in nature. It’s not just "you’re stupid." It has to bring up my breasts or something sexual in the comment.

I had to leave my apartment because Fox News accidentally published my address on their website and accidentally published my cell phone number, so I got tons and tons of calls saying they were going to come kill me. They called my family telling them how many hours I had to live before they killed me and they explained to my brother how they were going to murder me - exactly how I would die. I no longer live in that place anymore.

I was really shocked, going through my mentions right after I left Breitbart. It was the most vile, disgusting things I’ve ever been told in my life. I was in a dark place at the beginning. And I remember I spoke to Megyn Kelly who, of course, has gone through this, and she gave me the best advice. She said, "Get off Twitter," which is what I did because I think if I had gone on Twitter and kept reading it and reading it, I would’ve fallen into an even darker place. Now we’re almost at the end of the election and I think I’ve become so desensitized to it. Last night, I looked at my Twitter mentions - I try not to because they’re pretty bad. And someone said something like, “You’re a cunt,” and demanded that I show them my tits. That was literally the tweet that I got. And I just felt nothing. I was like, “Oh, mute,” that’s it.

[Donald Trump] has brought out a really ugly side of the Republican Party. He’s rude, and they think it’s funny, and they take it a step further. There aren’t enough men in the Republican Party who are standing up to Donald Trump and saying, "This is not how we speak to women." When all of that stuff happened with Trump and that audiotape, they said this was disgusting, but that was it. But this has been happening for months and months now, and you don’t see leaders in the Republican movement who have really stood up to Donald Trump except maybe Ben Sasse and a few others. But I think there needs to be more people who step up and set an example and say, “This is not how we talk.” Instead they just are bowing to Donald Trump. That’s the failure of the Republican Party.

Election Day is Nov. 8. If you haven’t registered to vote yet, you can do so here.

Follow Prachi on Twitter.

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