by Lindy West
Personal storytelling is an engine of humanization, which is in turn an engine of empathy. This is a long game, but if we can change enough minds, voter suppression will lose its power, gerrymandering will be pointless, the electoral college can’t stop us. If we unleash our stories, destroy the stigma, and manage to create a broad base of unequivocal cultural support for abortion—the foundation of which is already there—then by the time the more ghastly consequences of abortion bans begin to creep up on politicians, we will have the communication tools to act as an enraged critical mass.
Our stories are ours just as our country is ours just as our bodies are ours.
Leave Hell to the Devils
Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I play video games. And I mean console games, where you’re an elf with a fine halberd that you looted from a corpse and you run around stabbing ghouls and picking up, like, eighty-seven of one type of leaf so you can brew a potion that makes you immune to bees, and finishing it takes 120 hours. I play the kind of game where you amass so many longswords that you have to keep fast-traveling back to the bawdy tavern where you keep your trunk so you can free up enough inventory weight that you don’t crush your horse, Poop Dumper (I play the kind of games where you get to name your horse).
I’ve always played video games, on and off—eight-bit Nintendo as a child, PC adventure games with my dad, Final Fantasy in the college dorm, city building on my laptop in my first apartment, Double Dash on the GameCube with my midtwenties roommates, Dragon Age: Inquisition in the early morning before the kids wake up, Zelda: Breath of the Wild when I’m on the road. As I get older, as life gets more complex and the future of the planet grows more uncertain, I find that I increasingly value this escape to a closed, fixable universe. I can’t solve the world’s problems or even my own tomorrow, but I can help a village seize its croplands back from a restless dead bride.
That said, it has never occurred to me to call myself a “gamer,” mainly because I’m not especially good at video games (I play on easy mode—I am scared of monsters!) and I sometimes go months or years without playing them. But also because there’s heavy gatekeeping around the term and baggage attached to those who do pick it up. Whether or not girls play video games—and more specifically whether we are qualified to have opinions about them—has become a major culture war fixation over the past decade, uniting aggrieved male gamers against a common enemy that just so happens to look exactly like their moms, mean teachers, all the girls who have ever rejected them, and Hillary Clinton.
The thought of explaining Gamergate to you right now makes my brain want to leave my body and fly into the sun, but I think I can make it through the Cliff ’s Notes: In 2014, one man was mad at one woman, his ex, who happened to be an indie video game developer. He knew that lots of men and boys around the world were also mad at lots of other women and girls for reasons that maybe they couldn’t fully articulate—but which essentially boiled down to the very mild, hard-won shifts away from traditional gender roles that activists had fought for over the past fifty years (aka since America Was Great—this comes back later, unfortunately). The angry man wrote a blog post telling the other men and boys that his ex was the worst kind of New Woman—that she had sex, but not with him anymore, and that she had the gall to make video games, a boy’s dream! He suggested that any success his ex enjoyed was due not to her talent but to “political correctness” and “fourth-wave feminism,” which allowed her to beguile horny, venal male gamers and video games journalists using her sex body. The lesson was quickly drawn by other angry men: other bad women were doing this, too—a whole wave of them!—while also forcing the games journalists to say that game studios should take all the sexy tits out of the video games. Therefore, ruthlessly stalking and harassing women in video games was a truly noble crusade, the only way to save future editions of the Grand Theft Auto franchise from having slightly fewer sex workers you could beat to death. Plus, harassing women online was fun. And so they did.
From there, it was easy for other groups of aggrieved men, those with bigger political agendas, to perk up and come calling. Oh, you feel oppressed by women? Have you heard about the men’s rights movement? Oh, you think that calls for diversity in games constitute censorship? You might enjoy this Ben Shapiro fellow or perhaps even this overt white nationalism. Oh, you want a return to traditional values, a time when women knew their place? You might enjoy this presidential candidate named Donald J. Trump.
Mike Cernovich was just a garden-variety men’s rights advocate/pickup artist hawking cold-shower virility mumbo jumbo to lonely boys when he made a YouTube video about me, offering—in my recollection—$10,000 to go live with him in Las Vegas for three months so he could prove that he could make any fatty thin through, I assume, gorilla powder and verbal abuse. (The video has since been taken down, a profound loss for anyone who loves making fun of Mike Cernovich, a gain for everyone else.) The goal of the video was to signal to his proto-incel followers that he had lots of money and was a Very Good Troll Boy, and perhaps that worked, but to any remotely well-adjusted adult watching, it was impossible not to read the sputtering, stammering, countertenor tragedy of a man—falling over his words, breathless with excitement at his own joke, and desperate for validation from extremely online virgins—as anything but what he was: a lonely dork begging to pay a woman to be his friend. Needless to say, I declined the offer.
In 2014, Cernovich popped up on my radar again, this time having smelled an opportunity to shepherd and radicalize the Gamergate horde, rebranding himself as a passionate crusader for ethics in video games journalism in order to lead teenage boys to white supremacy and fascism. And it worked! In 2016, he was a driving force behind the troll-built conspiracy theory Pizzagate, which posited that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were running a child sex ring out of a DC pizza parlor, culminating in the gullible Trumpist idiot Edgar Maddison Welch almost murdering a bunch of people with an assault rifle while they were just trying to chow some ’za. As you probably know, Donald Trump was then elected president (or, as my husband and I call it, “The Incident”), and in 2017, Cernovich was photographed at the White House giving the alt-right “okay” hand sign, which, two years later, the New Zealand mosque shooter, who was radicalized online much like so many Gamergate boys, would flash at his first hearing for murdering fifty peaceful Muslim worshippers.
To put it into internet parlance:
Life!
Comes!
At!
You!
Fast!
By early 2017, I had tweeted thousands of times, maybe tens of thousands. Riffed my beautiful life away. Saw a typoed joke go viral and died inside. Giddily screen grabbed a follow from a hero. Stuck around long enough to see all heroes turn out to be pieces of shit. Was trolled in previously unimaginable ways that soon became all too manageable. And then I quit.
I deactivated my account shortly after President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!” on January 2, 2017. I wrote in The Guardian that day:
I deactivated my Twitter account today. It was more of a spontaneous impulse than a New Year resolution, although it does feel like a juice cleanse, a moulting, a polar-bear plunge, a clean slate (except the opposite—like throwing your slate into a volcano and running). One moment I was brains-deep in the usual way, half-heartedly arguing with strangers about whether or not it’s “OK” to suggest to Steve Martin that calling Carrie Fisher a “beautiful creature” who “turned out” to be “witty and bright as well” veered just a hair beyond Fisher’s stated boundaries regarding objectification (if you have opinions on this, don’t tweet me—oh, wait, you can’t); and the next moment the US president-elect was using the selfsame platform to taunt North Korea about the size and tumescence of its nuclear program. And I realised: eh, I’m done. I could be swimming right now. Or flossing. Or digging a big, pointless pit.
Anything else.
The North Korea tweet struck me as an unsettling portent of how Trump’s presidency was likely to unfold: rash, petty, ostentatiously uninformed, with no regard for public safety or the mechanics of governance. The internet makes neighbors of us all, and my conscience demanded that I put some virtual real estate between myself and the befuddled, racist mobster who was seemingly determined to dismantle and loot the republic. If seeding nuclear war wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, Twitter wasn’t a service I wanted to endorse.
Exactly one year later, on January 2, 2018, President Trump tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
How exquisite it would have been to be wrong.
People tend to misconstrue my relationship with internet trolls. They say that trolls hounded me off Twitter (no, it was literally the president, see above) or that I “stalked” and “doxxed” the troll I interviewed for a story that aired on This American Life (no, he emailed me) or that I’m obsessed with trolls because they hurt my feelings (no, it’s because they were foot soldiers in the fall of American democracy, a slide into fascism that black, trans, and feminist activists detected a decade before any of the white male leftists currently making millions off their self-congratulatory skewering of the alt-right were even paying attention).
It’s too late to do anything about that last thing, because none of you fucking listened the first thousand times we mentioned it, and now a Twitter troll is president of the United fucking States, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is complicit in what appear to be multiple percolating genocides as well as the imminent collapse of the planet itself (which, sorry, Nazis, includes white genocide, too!). But, hey, don’t feed the trolls. Ignore them and they’ll go away! You’ll only encourage them by acknowledging their corrosive impact on human interaction and taking steps to discredit and deplatform them!
I keep vowing to never write about internet trolls again, but unfortunately my country’s hard dick for ignoring the screams of the marginalized has made internet trolls not just culturally relevant or politically relevant but historically relevant. So here I am—one more troll chapter.
For example, this morning, the president of the United States, angry about actor Alec Baldwin’s unflattering portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live last night, tweeted, “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” And that’s just today, a random day, a Sunday, the day I decided to sit down and write this chapter I shouldn’t have to write. But it could have been any day. Today, though, Donald J. Trump, who is the president (?), also tweeted a call for some sort of criminal (??) investigation into Lorne Michaels’s long-running NBC comedy variety show, notorious for such chilling Marxist propaganda as “Dick in a Box,” “Oops, I Crapped My Pants,” and “Mr. Peepers,” a recurring sketch in which Chris Kattan plays a sexual monkey who snatches apples (the means of production) from Will Ferrell (Tsar Nicholas II) and gobbles them violently in the faces of various repulsed celebrities (the bourgeoisie). What budding comrade could resist such seductive satirical sweetmeats?
SNL’s assault on democracy this week came in the form of a cold open in which Mr. Baldwin lampooned a recent White House press conference on the newly declared state of emergency, dealing grave insult to Mr. Trump by, essentially, quoting him accurately about his idiot wall. “I want wall!” Baldwin-as-Trump bleats again and again, “Wall keep safe!” It’s a cogent and efficient summary of the last two years of Trumpist policy: weaponized xenophobic nonsense battered relentlessly against our skulls until everyone is dead (jk, we wish) and then Trump goes golfing. Somewhere, a glacier calves.
I am writing this chapter, against my will, because people still love to scoff at the significance of Twitter and its culture of abuse. It’s “just” social media. Tweets are “just” tweets. I pale at the need to explain this, but “just” tweets such as “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!,” when tweeted by the president, actually matter quite a bit, because Trump’s endgame, communications-wise, is to silo his supporters to the point that he is literally their only trusted source of news, opinion, and truth—and Twitter is the platform on which he talks to them. It matters.
The Republican Party long ago ceased any limp gestures toward holding Trump accountable for anything, and Fox News (minus Shep) never even went through the motions. The Democrat-controlled House has been cock-blocking Trump in some satisfying ways, but it’s only one branch of our big, sick government. Trump has been stacking the lower courts with servile bootlickers, and with Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, he has effectively hamstrung progress for decades even if he himself is impeached tomorrow.
The media are our last independent check on Trump’s authority—and, especially, his lies—lies he disseminates using Twitter, the same platform he uses to try to destroy the press. In the past week, the president tweeted a promise of a new North Korea: “North Korea will become a different kind of Rocket - an Economic one!”; he has assured his followers that “the Wall is being built and will be a great achievement and contributor toward life and safety within our Country!”; and he let everyone know that; “No president ever worked harder than me (cleaning up the mess I inherited)!”
It’s a strategy I recognize: telling people the lies they’re hungry for, constructing an alternate reality, refusing to back down in the face of facts, spamming the discursive field until people just accept that it must have some legitimacy in the “debate”—Trumpism is the internet troll playbook.
Is it any wonder, after years of being told “Don’t feed the trolls,” American society has no idea whatsoever how to deal with Trumpism? The necessary response is social ostracism. The necessary response is to set firm institutional boundaries. The necessary response is not to reopen closed debates. The necessary response is to block and report, and by report I mean say the truth, over and over, until it sticks.
Instead—on Twitter and in Trump’s America—most people just sit, bewildered, on the high road and try to get on with their lives. It doesn’t work. I promise.
When you work in media, Twitter becomes part of your job. It’s where you orient yourself in “the discourse”—figure out what’s going on, what people are saying about it, and, more important, what no one has said yet. In a lucky coup for Twitter’s marketing team, prevailing wisdom among media types has long held that quitting the platform could be a career killer. The illusion that Twitter visibility and professional relevance are indisputably inextricable always felt too risky to puncture.
Who could afford to call that bluff and be wrong? So we stayed, while Twitter’s endemic racist, sexist, and transphobic harassment problems grew increasingly more sophisticated and organized.
Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocalypse. So I left. I wrote jokes there for free. I posted political commentary for free. I answered questions for free. I taught Feminism 101 for free. Off Twitter, these are all things by which I make my living—in fact, they make up the totality of my income. But on Twitter, I did them pro bono, and in return, I was micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mined my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoyed unfettered, direct access to my brain so they could inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.
I talked back, and I was “feeding the trolls.” I said nothing, and the harassment escalated. I reported threats, and I was a “censor.” I used mass blocking tools to curb abuse, and I was abused further for blocking “unfairly.” I had to conclude, after half a decade of workshopping, that it may simply be impossible to make this platform usable for anyone but trolls, robots, and dictators.
Those of us who complained about online abuse were consistent
ly told—by colleagues, armchair experts, and random internet strangers—that we were the problem. We were too soft. We, who literally inured ourselves to rape threats and death threats so that we could participate in public life, were called weak by people who felt persecuted by the existence of female Ghostbusters. Meanwhile, Twitter’s leadership offered us the ability to embed GIFs.
Those of us who pointed out that online harassment was politically motivated—compounded by race, gender, and sexual orientation—as I did in 2013, for example, were accused of being “professional victims” trying to leverage our paranoid delusions to censor the internet. That defamation has never been retracted or atoned for even after the revelations that an army of Russian Twitter bots functions as the Trump administration’s propaganda wing and the alt-right, essentially a coalition of antifeminist, white supremacist online harassment campaigns, recruits angry young men to Trumpism by framing the abuse of social justice activists as a team sport. Meanwhile, Twitter’s leadership offered us 280 characters.
The social contract of the internet seems to insist that there’s nobility in weathering degradation. You can call me oversensitive, but the truth is, I got far better than any human being should have to at absorbing astonishing cruelty and feeling nothing. Undersensitivity was just another piece of workplace safety gear.
In 2012, out of morbid curiosity, I clicked on the home page of a stranger who had been saying aggressive, repulsive things to me on Twitter and found my way to his personal YouTube channel. I was relatively new to blogging on a national platform and struggling to get my bearings in the thick of my first large-scale hate mob—hundreds of people flooding my social media feeds with cruel, frightening messages—in retaliation for what, exactly, I can’t even remember. I’d written something that some men didn’t like, and they felt the need, en masse, to shut me up. As a fat feminist, it happens to me all the time.
