by Sam Byers
‘Scared, I assume,’ she said, taking another sip of wine.
‘Very scared. With good reason. So I was knocking on doors, getting what I could, and I got to this real scene of a flat. Stuff smeared on the windows. Dark. And when I knocked on the door, this guy called out, saying he was stuck and couldn’t get up. He wouldn’t let me call anyone, so I ended up breaking his window to help him.’
Robert had stopped attending to whatever he was cooking and was now standing with his back to it while it popped and spat behind him. He was looking not at Jess but slightly past and above her.
‘It was this old guy,’ he said flatly. ‘Stuck on his sofa. Couldn’t get up. Said someone had been round and moved his stick. Flat was …’ He shook his head. ‘Filthy. Stank.’
‘Jesus. What did you do?’
He shrugged. ‘What could I do? Made him a cup of tea. Chatted.’
‘Hey,’ she said, gesturing to the empty dining chair beside her with her foot, ‘come and sit down.’ When he did so, she slid off her shoes and rested her legs across his lap. ‘So what are you going to do?’
At this, he seemed to snap out of his momentary drift elsewhere. ‘Oh, write about it,’ he said firmly. ‘For sure. It’s perfect.’
‘People need to know,’ said Jess.
‘Right.’
He’d begun bouncing his knees slightly, making it difficult for her to rest her legs on them. He took a swig of his wine, his eyes narrowing slightly.
‘That’ll give her something to think about,’ he said, almost, but not quite, to himself.
‘Who?’
‘Oh …’ He waved the moment away, his knees still again. ‘No-one. That woman.’
‘The commenter?’
‘Yeah. Julia whatever.’
‘Why would it—’
He shook his head, got up, and returned to the cooker.
‘I just think if the piece was emotive enough, she’d have a lot of difficulty doing her usual cynical deconstruction in the comments section, that’s all. And even if she did, I don’t think she’d find it was met with the usual level of appreciation.’
‘But that’s not a reason to—’
‘Of course it’s not the reason. I’m just saying that it would be a nice little bonus, that’s all.’
He’d put his wine down on the worktop and turned to face her. This was something that happened to them now. The opportunity for an argument would present itself. They would look at each other, weigh up the extent to which they wanted to yield to temptation. Then, usually, they would simply move on, skirting around the booby-trapped moment.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Human-interest stories tend to put off the trolls.’
He nodded.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘We should eat.’
*
While they ate, they talked about the day’s events on the web, asking each other if they’d seen this or that post, tracked this or that social media shitstorm, or caught a glimpse of whatever eye-rolling thinkpiece headline was currently whipping up derision across right-thinking networks. This being dinner, they selected things about which they could agree. Some digital– analogue distinctions, Jess thought, still applied. Online, the aim was to court controversy. At home, you cherry-picked for accord. Points of reference were not difficult to locate. They had, like everyone they knew, seen broadly the same things, and entertained broadly the same thoughts about the things they’d seen. She’d begun to feel that the unspoken aim of these evening conversations was reassurance. It was their way of telling each other they were still in the same place, still reachable via familiar coordinates. They had to tell each other this, she thought, because the place they’d reached was in fact not familiar at all. Territory had shifted beneath them. Their maps had failed to update.
Whatever this was – this non-space of domestic harmony and digital dissent – had begun, as everything now seemed to begin, with an article. Some years back, when her academic career had been more nascent, Jess had published a piece of research on masculine identity within online gaming culture. Roughly a month later, a counter-article appeared, written by an increasingly notorious ‘thinker’ called Stefan Ziegler, who at the time was building a name for himself as a populist quasi-intellectual adept at dressing up anachronistic opinions in the trendy garbs of big data and repackaging his assumptions as ‘unintuitive’ thinking. By the time he wrote this particular article, he’d already published numerous thinly veiled troll-pieces masquerading as mathematical insights on, among other things, the bell curve, the statistical improbability of rape as a real-life occurrence, and why game theory could be used to make the case against foreign aid to the developing world. He was, basically, a bigot with sums, and in the self-satisfied geek-bro circles in which he performed his ideas, sums were the going currency.
In this particular piece, Ziegler had put forward the argument that the hyper-masculinised and essentially misogynistic culture of online gaming, far from being a distasteful throwback to a pre-enlightened age, was a perfect example of the way in which super-charged male competition gave rise to a highly productive strain of male co-operation. That this very specific strain of masculine bonding flourished in an environment where male aggression towards women went largely un-policed, Ziegler contended, was strong evidence in favour of the idea that certain workplaces, far from striving towards the kind of messy equality that was, at the time, so much in vogue, should in fact strive towards less equality in the name of greater productivity. As was his style, Ziegler had bombarded his readers and editors with data. In doing so, he had not only appropriated Jess’s research without crediting it, he had also used it to draw conclusions offensively at odds with her own.
Deeply hip to Ziegler and his ilk’s rhetorical strategy of drawing people into an argument and then accusing them of becoming ‘emotional’, Jess met data with data, publishing a paper in a sympathetic academic outlet clarifying her own work and deconstructing Ziegler’s misinterpretation of her findings. Ziegler, in turn, ignored all of Jess’s points, stripped out two or three mildly contentious passages from her article, and posted them, shorn of context and padded with foaming interjection, onto his blog, where they were fallen upon by all the raging gamer man-children and men’s rights activists who’d read in Ziegler’s earlier piece a long-awaited anti-feminist rallying cry. Within twenty-four hours, Jess was subjected to over five hundred tweets threatening her with everything from professional disgrace to rape and death. Someone got hold of her personal email address and posted it on a forum. Her home address and mobile number leaked. Photographs of anonymised men standing on her street or even outside her house were splashed across the web. A wreath was delivered to her door.
In some ways, Jess was prepared for this. She’d always suspected, given her work and gender, that at some point a bunch of feral men were going to go to town on her reputation. She’d seen numerous colleagues go through similar things. What she was less prepared for, however, was Robert, and the way his response to what was happening fell so far short of what she expected and demanded his response should be. For all his rhetorical bluster in his columns, Robert was, like most men who press the language of conflict into the service of intellectual debate, pretty averse to actual confrontation. Given the fairly incontrovertible evidence of what Jess was experiencing, downplaying what was happening was difficult. Instead, he opted for the next most convenient course of action: querying the reasons for its occurrence.
‘He could have stolen anyone’s work,’ was one of his most oftrepeated pronouncements. ‘I’m not saying it was OK he ripped off your research but I don’t think he ripped off your research because you’re a woman. He ripped off your research because it was the research he needed for his piece.’
‘Everyone gets hate on the internet,’ was another favoured rhetorical position. ‘I mean, literally everyone I know who writes online gets some kind of abuse. It’s not necessarily gendered.’
Here, Jess would generally poin
t out that she was fairly certain none of Robert’s male friends had received emails to their personal address and texts to their supposedly private mobile phone number describing in graphic detail all the things the anonymous sender intended to do to their genitalia. Nor, she assumed, did many of the insults received by these possibly made-up friends refer specifically to their gender as if it were their gender itself that was repellent. In an effort to drive home to Robert exactly what she was being asked to deal with, Jess had taken out her phone in the kitchen and begun reading messages aloud at random.
I’ve got a crowbar I’m gonna bring round your house and shove up your fucking cunt you fenimist bitch.
Good luck getting raped you ugly fat whore.
Enjoy your last hours alive, cunt.
At this point, to his credit, Robert had visibly paled, then become apologetic, and then, finally, angry on her behalf. So angry, in fact, that he had written about it, in one of his first, and, as it turned out, defining posts for The Command Line. Almost as quickly as she had found herself attacked, Jess became the subject of swelling online support. A charity set up to help women experiencing online harassment became aware of the situation and offered to help. They scrubbed Jess’s accounts, rebuilt an untraceable life for her, and even, in a move Jess particularly enjoyed, de-anonymised many of her attackers, allowing Jess to send personalised greetings cards to their home addresses, letting them know exactly with whom they were fucking, and what they could expect to happen if the fucking continued. The worker assigned to Jess by the charity was Deepa, who volunteered for them whenever she wasn’t at work on her research. When things had died down, Deepa had pointed out the position at the institute and suggested Jess go for it, a move that, conveniently in terms of both physical safety and ongoing solvency, meant leaving London. Little by little, things settled. Jess and Robert settled with them. His career picked up; hers progressed. They were solvent, safe, successful, and, superficially, happy.
But in her quieter, undistracted moments, an anger that had nested and bred began to show itself. At work, or out with friends, or chatting with Robert, she felt largely herself. But at night, as she tried to sleep, or driving the country roads with little in the way of traffic to sustain her attention, Jess would be struck by a rage that reared up from within and then, finding no reasonable outlet, thrashed around inside her, kicking up torn scraps of discarded memory and trampled feelings. Bits of online messages would flash up in front of her eyes. Threats would once again seem imminent. She would picture Ziegler’s face, recall passages from his article that still, even with all this time having passed, made her skin hum with fury. She even started seeking out her own fuel, sitting up late into the night, long after Robert was asleep, poring over Ziegler’s latest article, or tracking yet another eruption of misogynist harassment online, cranking herself into a pointless, insomniac fury.
Robert began to struggle. His support remained, but his understanding faltered. As far as he was concerned, the event was over. They had handled it, come out on top. It was a time, he seemed to think, in which they ought to be congratulating themselves. Sometimes, he would climb up to the attic where she worked, dressed for bed and upset by her absence, and peer over her shoulder at her online reading. He’d try to soothe her, distract her, charm her away. Let it go, he’d say. It’s over, let it go. And she’d smile and allow herself, on the surface at least, to be calmed. She agreed with Robert, felt reassured by his concern. It was over; she did need to let it go.
It struck her that perhaps what she needed to do in order to let it go was express it, release it somehow, in a way that wouldn’t simply set the whole cycle off again. And so, late at night, in a desperate bid for sleep unpunctuated by the rattle and buzz of whatever was trapped inside her, she created a blank Twitter account from which she called Stefan Ziegler a cunt.
She had wanted, quite simply, to know how it felt. As soon as she did it, she knew: it felt complicated. The moment she hit the button to send the tweet, an event was created around which her thoughts and feelings began to orbit. There was an initial thrill; a few sweaty, adrenalised moments, but at the same time, various sub-strata of sensations began to press upwards from beneath her enthusiasm: a sense of shame, a suspicion that she had, in some small way, reduced herself or, worse, been reduced by a situation she should have resisted or evaded.
Just as she was considering deleting the tweet, though, Ziegler acted. The difficulty for Jess was that he did not act in any of the ways she had anticipated (a cutting response, a call to his followers to attack, the redeployment of Jess’s abuse as further evidence of Ziegler as world-weary victim, etc.). Instead, he simply, without a word, blocked her, thereby rendering Jess’s new anonymous Twitter account effectively useless. Online violence, she now saw, was a more sophisticated endeavour than she had initially envisaged.
Over the next day or two, the sense that she had been both attacked by and refused entry to a system that callously wielded aggression with no concession to consequence scratched away like a burrowing animal in her brain. It was as if both anonymity and visibility had been denied her. When she attacked Ziegler intellectually, in public, she was threatened. When she hectored him anonymously, nothing happened. As herself, she was too visible to safely function. As an anonymous heckler, she wasn’t notable enough to make an impact. Where, she thought, did that leave her? What options were available? If Jess became certain of anything in the days that followed, it was that simply giving up and getting on with some less controversial research was not an option. After that kind of retreat, she thought, her life would be intolerable. She would be intolerable to herself.
The Ziegler experience was harrowing, but informative. She came to think of it as the inverse revelation to that of Dorothy in Oz. Jess had not pulled back the curtain to find a wizened old man operating the controls of a monster; she had swept aside the old man and exposed the vastness of the beast behind him. There would always be Zieglers: self-interested, self-protective men masking their ambition and prejudice behind so-called analysis. It was what supported Ziegler that appalled her: an apparatus of misogyny in which opinion was the greenhouse for aggression, discussion the doorway to harassment.
So the problem became less one of revenge, and more one of statistical proof. A tessellating system of hostility had revealed itself to her; now she needed to unmask it to others. To do this, she needed to drag it from its natural habitat – the world of opinion and rhetoric and flippant, combative dismissal – and into the very space it falsely professed to inhabit: the world of research; the world of cold, hard, verifiable reality.
It would be no good, she thought, doing this as herself. Her name as a researcher was now, thanks to Ziegler, inextricably linked to the worst elements of that which she wanted to research. The only option, it seemed, was to become someone else entirely. Or, to be more specific, not one person, but many: an infiltration team.
She began working on fake CVs – falsified publication histories that would take weeks to unravel. She pitched widely, operating as both men and women. Her fields of interest were broad, carefully calibrated to draw on her talents without overlapping with her actual work. Personalities began to emerge, and with them, opinions. Paradoxes in her own thought became enmities between the minds she had imagined.
As complicated as the maintenance of these separate strands of activity quickly became, Jess’s multiple bylines and viewpoints were merely the user interface of what she was piecing together. Behind the personae, behind the ideas and opinions she was imagining, Jess crafted a system of analysis that tracked the repercussions of her rhetorical interventions across the web. Every tweet, every sentence in every thinkpiece, every comment below the line, every shared link, could now, because Jess was in control of so many more variables than the average online user, be tracked and mapped as they made their way along the pathways of thought and response that shaped the web. It was the online equivalent of a barium meal. She fed ideas into the internet’s hung
ry maw, then traced their progress through to its bowels.
Robert, meanwhile, was thriving. His piece on internet misogyny for The Command Line had accrued a readership far beyond his usual reach. As a result, he now spoke about inequality with a new-found confidence. He’d written a piece on how men could contribute to challenging misogynist discourse. He built a following on Twitter, and became known for his socially minded interventions and carefully targeted trolling of bigoted celebrities. Soon after they’d moved to Edmundsbury, he’d heard about the plans for the Larch-wood, and had claimed the cause as his own.
And of course, Jess loved to see him thrive. Who, she would often ask herself, when she began to doubt the extent to which she welcomed his success, did not love to see their partner thrive? And who could possibly complain about his credentials? He had, after all, supported her in the most public way possible, and now wrote with what appeared to be genuine passion about issues she admired him for taking on.
But the more adulation Robert attracted, the more she was reminded that in many ways his success had its roots in her harassment. The more she watched Robert confidently making feminist assertions at parties, in print, even at home, in the kitchen, where he increasingly felt comfortable debating with her the finer points of third-wave feminist praxis, the more she found herself reminded of exactly what it had taken to trigger his much-congratulated awakening: her having to read those threats and degrading insults to him, out loud, in their home, visibly distressed, effectively rubbing his face in something he should have recognised from a comfortable distance.
She knew all the ways her discomfort would sound if she described it, and all the ways Robert would respond. It was jealousy, he would think, bitterness. She wasn’t happy with how her career had turned out and so was lashing out at his. She was still angry with Ziegler, with the men who had attacked her, and now was shifting that anger onto him, even though he had, quite demonstrably, been there for her when she needed him. He could even provide citations for his support. How many people could do that?
