Years later, when I moved on to a staff writer position at Jezebel (and trolls like sex-alien guy had become a ubiquitous potpourri), Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton unrolled a new platform called Kinja, with the express mission of “investing in commenters.” On Kinja, any commenter could start their own blog, hosted by Gawker, which could then be mined for re-posting on the main sites. Your commenter handle became the URL of your blog—so, for example, mine was lindywest.kinja.com. This was an alarming precedent from an editorial standpoint: Our employer was intentionally blurring the lines between our work as professional, experienced, vetted, paid journalists and the anonymous ramblings of the unpaid commentariat, which seemed to exist, most days, simply to antagonize us. It did not go over particularly well at the all-hands meeting. In Kinja, as the trolls quickly learned, comments are moderated by the writers, so to keep our work readable we had to dismiss and ban each one by hand. At Jezebel, that meant fielding a constant stream of gifs depicting graphic violence and rape. It was emotionally gruesome. But it was “part of the job.”
The problem with handing anonymous commenters the tools of their own legitimization soon became even clearer for me. One user registered the handle LindyWestLicksMyAsshole” and began merrily commenting all over Gawker. Under Kinja, that meant there was now a permanent blog, hosted by my employer, side by side with my work, called lindywestlicksmyasshole.kinja.com. Can you imagine? At your job? That’s like if your name was Dave Jorgensen and you worked at Walgreens, and one day you got to work and right in between the fiber supplements and the seasonal candy there was a new aisle called Dave Jorgensen Is a Sex Predator. And when you complained to your manager she was like, “Oh, you’re so sensitive. It’s a store! We can’t change what goes in a store—we’d go out of business! We all have stuff we don’t like, Dave. I don’t like Salt and Vinegar Pringles, but you don’t see me whining about aisle 2.”
I e-mailed my boss and insisted the page be taken down. She told me she’d see what she could do, but not to get my hopes up. Sure enough, Gawker higher-ups claimed it didn’t violate the harassment policy. It isn’t explicitly gendered or racist or homophobic. Anyway, that’s just how the Internet is! If we start deleting comments because people’s feelings are hurt, it’ll stifle the lively comment culture that keeps the site profitable. What if LindyWestLicksMy Asshole has some really tasty anonymous tip about a congressman who did something weird with his penis? Don’t you care about free speech and penis news?
It is gendered, though. Of course it’s gendered. It’s sexualizing me for the purpose of making me uncomfortable, of reminding my audience and colleagues and detractors that I’m a sex thing first and a human being second. That my ideas are secondary to my body. Sure, if you strip away cultural context entirely, you could construe “Lindy WestLicksMyAsshole” as having nothing to do with gender, but that’s willful dishonesty.* I didn’t have a choice, however, so I put LindyWestLicksMyAsshole out of my mind and tried to stay out of the comments as much as possible.
It’s just the Internet. There’s nothing we can do.
When I was right in that sweet spot—late Stranger/early Jezebel—when the trolls were at full volume about my Michelin Man thorax and Dalek thighs, but my only line of defense was the fetal position, I was effectively incapacitated. I had no coping mechanisms. I felt helpless and isolated. I stayed in bed as much as possible, and kept the TV on 24/7; I couldn’t fall asleep in silence. I don’t know if trolls say to themselves, explicitly, “I don’t like what this lady wrote—I’m going to make sure she never leaves her apartment!” but that’s what it does to the unprepared.
I know those early maelstroms pushed some of my friends away. To someone who’s never experienced it, large-scale online hate is unrelatable, and complaints about it can read like narcissism. “Ugh, what do I do with all this attention?” The times I did manage to get out and socialize, it was hard not to be a broken record, to recount tweets I’d gotten that day like a regurgitating toilet. Eventually, people got bored. Who wants to sit around in person and talk about the Internet?
Gradually, though (it took years), I got better. I learned how to weather the mob without falling out of my skin, becoming my own tedious shadow.
PLAN A: Don’t click on anything. Don’t read anything. Don’t look at any words below any article, or any forum to which the public has any access, or any e-mail with a vaguely suspicious subject line like “feedback on ur work” or “a questions about womyn” or “feminism=female supremacy?” EVER. Because why on earth would you do that? I can understand if the Internet had just been invented Tuesday, and you sincerely thought, “Oh, perhaps sniffmychode89 has some constructive perspective on the politics of female body hair.” However, I, Lindy West, have now been using this virtual garbage dispenser for literally twenty years, and maybe one comment in fifty contains anything other than condescending, contrarian, and/or abusive trash. I have no excuse. When I click, it is because I am a fool.
It’s as if there were an international chain of delis that—no matter what franchise you went to and what you ordered and how clearly you articulated “PAHH-STRAWWW-MEEE”—forty-nine out of fifty times they just served you a doo-doo sandwich. A big, fat, steaming scoop of doo-doo on a sesame seed bun (special sauce: doo-doo). Then you went ahead and ate the sandwich. And you didn’t just eat the sandwich one time, or fifty times, or even one hundred, but you went back and ate there—with hope in your heart, paying for the privilege—every single day of your life. Thousands and thousands of days in a row. Plus, pretty much everyone you ever met had been to that deli too, and they all ate mouthfuls of straight stank doo-doo over and over again, and they told you about it. They warned you! Yet you still went back and ate the sandwich.
Because maybe this time it’d be different! Maybe—just maybe—this time you’d get the most delicious and fulfilling sandwich the world had e’er known, and the sandwich guy would finally recognize the trenchant, incisive brilliance of your sandwich-ordering skills, and doo-doo would be abolished, and Joss Whedon would pop out of the meat freezer and hand you a trophy that said “BEST GUY” on it and option your sandwich story for the plot of the next Avengers movie, Captain Whatever: The Sandwich Soldier. (Full disclosure: I do not know what an Avenger is.)
That’s not what happens, though. That’s never what happens. Instead, I keep slogging through forty-nine iterations of “kill yourself, pig lady” per day in my Twitter mentions, because one time in 2013 Holly Robinson Peete replied to my joke about Carnation instant breakfast.* Cool cost/benefit analysis, brain.
Still, I TRY not to click. I try.
PLAN B: When the temptation is too strong, when Plan A falls in the commode, I turn to the second line of defense—the mock and block. I take screen grabs of the worst ones—the ones that wish for my death, the ones that invoke my family, the ones with a telling whiff of pathos—and then re-post them with a caption like “way to go, Einstein” or “goo goo ga ga baby man” or sometimes just a picture of some diaper rash cream. (As Dorothy Parker or someone like that probably once said, “Goo goo ga ga baby man is the soul of wit.”) My friends and I will toss the troll around for a while like a pod of orcas with a baby seal, and once I’ve wrung enough validation out of it, I block the troll and let it die alone. Maybe it’s cruel. I know that trolls are fundamentally sad people; I know that I’ve already defeated them in every substantive arena—by being smart, by being happy, by being successful, by being listened to, by being loved. Whatever. Maybe if Mr. “Kill Yourself You Fat Piece of Shit” didn’t want to get mocked, shredded, and discarded, he should be more careful about how he talks to whales.
PLAN C: Wine.
Overall, my three-pronged defense holds up… pretty well. I am… okay. I cope, day to day, and honestly, there is something seductive about being the kind of person who can just take it. Challenging myself to absorb more and more hate is a masochistic form of vanity—the vestigial allure of a rugged individualism that I don’t even believe in.
No one wants to need defenses that strong. It always hurts, somewhere.