Shrill

by Lindy West

  I’m supposed to feel okay just because I can’t see it?

  Yes. You’re supposed to feel okay just because you can’t see it. There’s no other way, we’re told. We couldn’t possibly change the culture, we’re told.

  There’s no “winning” when it comes to dealing with Internet trolls. Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t engage. It’s what they want.” Is it? Are you sure our silence isn’t what they want? Are you sure they care what we do at all? From where I’m sitting, if I respond, I’m a sucker for taking the bait. If I don’t respond, I’m a punching bag. I’m the idiot daughter of an embarrassed dead guy. On the record. Forever.

  Faced with a lose-lose like that, what do you do? Ignoring “PawWestDonezo” wasn’t going to chasten him, or make me feel better, or bring my dad back.

  So I talked back. I talked back because my mental health—not some troll’s personal satisfaction—is my priority. I talked back because it emboldens other women to talk back online and in real life, and I talked back because women have told me that my responses give them a script for dealing with monsters in their own lives. Most importantly, I talked back because Internet trolls are not, in fact, monsters. They are human beings who’ve lost their way, and they just want other people to flounder too—and I don’t believe that their attempts to dehumanize me can be counteracted by dehumanizing them.

  The week after it happened, I wrote about PawWest Donezo in a Jezebel article about trolling. I wrote sadly, candidly, angrily, with obvious pain.

  A few hours after the post went up, I got an e-mail:

  Hey Lindy,

  I don’t know why or even when I started trolling you. It wasn’t because of your stance on rape jokes. I don’t find them funny either.

  I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self.

  I have emailed you through 2 other gmail accounts just to send you idiotic insults.

  I apologize for that.

  I created the PaulWestDunzo@gmail.com account & Twitter account. (I have deleted both)

  I can’t say sorry enough.

  It was the lowest thing I had ever done. When you included it in your latest Jezebel article it finally hit me. There is a living, breathing human being who is reading this shit. I am attacking someone who never harmed me in any way. And for no reason whatsoever.

  I’m done being a troll.

  Again I apologize.

  I made donation in memory to your dad.

  I wish you the best.

  He attached a receipt for a fifty-dollar donation to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, designated “Memorial Paul West” for “Area of greatest need.”

  This e-mail still unhinges my jaw every time I read it. A troll apologizing—this had never happened to me before, it has never happened to me since, I do not know anyone to which it has happened, nor have I heard of such a thing in the wide world of Internet lore. I have read interviews with scholars who study trolling from an academic perspective, specifically stating that the one thing you never get from a troll is public remorse.

  I didn’t know what to say. I said:

  Is this real? If so, thank you.

  It was really hurtful, but I’m truly sorry for whatever you’ve been going through that made you feel compelled to do those things. I wish you the best. And thank you for the donation—it means a lot. I love my dad very much.

  He wrote to me one more time, our final contact:

  Yes it’s true. Thank you for responding with more kindness than I deserve.

  I’m sorry for your loss and any pain I caused you.

  All the best,

  [REDACTED] (my real name)

  I returned to my regular routine of daily hate mail, scrolling through the same options over and over—Ignore? Block? Report? Engage?—but every time I faced that choice, I thought briefly of my remorseful troll. I wondered if I could learn anything from him, what he’d tell me to do, if he had really changed. And then it struck me—oh my god. I still had his e-mail address. I could just ask him. Even if he turned out to be a jerk, it would make a great story.

  I sent the e-mail. After a few months of torturous waiting, he finally wrote back. “I’d be happy to help you out in any way possible,” he said.

  Within a few days, there I was in a recording studio with a phone—and the troll on the other end. We recorded it for This American Life, a popular public radio show.

  I asked him why he chose me. In his e-mail he wrote that it wasn’t because of the rape joke thing, so what exactly did I do?

  His voice was soft, tentative. He was clearly as nervous as I was. “Well,” he said, “it revolved around one issue that you wrote about a lot which was your being heavy—the struggles that you had regarding being a woman of size, or whatever the term may be.”

  I cut in. I hate euphemisms. What the fuck is a “woman of size,” anyway? Who doesn’t have a size? “You can say fat. That’s what I say.”

  “Fat. Okay, fat.”

  He told me that at the time he was about seventy-five pounds heavier than he wanted to be. He hated his body. He was miserable. And reading about fat people, particularly fat women, accepting and loving themselves as they were, infuriated him for reasons he couldn’t articulate at the time.

  “When you talked about being proud of who you are and where you are and where you’re going,” he continued, “that kind of stoked that anger that I had.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so you found my writing. You found my writing, and you did not like it.”

  “Certain aspects of it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You used a lot of all caps,” he said. I laughed, and it got him to laugh a little too. “You’re just a very—you almost have no fear when you write. You know, it’s like you stand on the desk and you say, ‘I’m Lindy West, and this is what I believe in. Fuck you if you don’t agree with me.’ And even though you don’t say those words exactly, I’m like, who is this bitch who thinks she knows everything?”

  I asked him if he felt that way because I’m a woman.

  He didn’t even hesitate. “Oh, definitely. Definitely. Women are being more forthright in their writing. There isn’t a sense of timidity to when they speak or when they write. They’re saying it loud. And I think that—and I think, for me, as well, it’s threatening at first.”

  “Right.” It was a relief to hear him admit it. So many men cling to the lie that misogyny is a feminist fiction, and rarely do I get such explicit validation that my work is accomplishing exactly what I’m aiming for. “You must know that I—that’s why I do that, because people don’t expect to hear from women like that. And I want other women to see me do that and I want women’s voices to get louder.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I understand.” I really felt like he did. “Here’s the thing,” he went on. “I work with women all day, and I don’t have an issue with anyone. I could’ve told you back then if someone had said to me, ‘Oh, you’re a misogynist. You hate women.’ And I could say, ‘Nuh-uh, I love my mom. I love my sisters. I’ve loved my—the girlfriends that I’ve had in my life.’ But you can’t claim to be okay with women and then go online and insult them—seek them out to harm them emotionally.”

  In my experience, if you call a troll a misogynist, he’ll almost invariably say, “Oh, I don’t hate women. I just hate what you’re saying and what that other woman is saying and that woman and that one for totally unrelated reasons.” So it was satisfying at least to hear him admit that, yeah, he hated women.

  We talked for two and a half grueling hours. They flew by, but every second hurt. He was shockingly self-aware. He said he didn’t troll anymore, that he’d really changed. He told me that period of time when he was trolling me for being loud and fat was a low point for him. He hated his body. His girlfriend dumped him. He spent every day in front of a computer at an unfulfilling job. A passionless life, he called it. For some reason, he found
it “easy” to take that out on women online.

  I asked why. What made women easy targets? In retrospect, I wish I’d been even more plain: Why was it so satisfying to hurt us? Why didn’t he automatically see us as human beings? For all his self-reflection, that’s the one thing he never managed to articulate—how anger at one woman translated into hatred of women in general. Why, when men hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.

  He did explain how he changed. He started taking care of his health, he found a new girlfriend, and he went back to school to become a teacher. He told me—in all seriousness—that, as a volunteer at a school, he just gets so many hugs now. “Seeing how their feelings get hurt by their peers,” he said, “on purpose or not, it derails them for the rest of the day. They’ll have their head on their desk and refuse to talk. As I’m watching this happen, I can’t help but think about the feelings that I hurt.” He was so sorry, he said.

  Finally, I brought up my dad.

  “How did you even find out that my dad died? How did you—” I trailed off as my voice broke. He saved me the trouble of finishing the question. “I went to my computer. I Googled you—found out you had a father who had passed. I found out that he had—you had siblings. I forget if it was three total.”

  “I have two siblings.”

  “So—”

  “Did you read his obituary?”

  “I believe I did,” he said. “I knew he was a musician.”

  “Yeah, I wrote that.” My voice started to crack; the rapport I’d felt started to harden. “I wrote his obituary.”

  He hesitated at the edge in my voice. “I created a fake Gmail account using your father’s name, created a fake Twitter account using his name. The biography was something to the effect of, my name is—I’m sorry, I forget the name—the first name.”

  “His name was Paul West.”

  “I wrote, ‘My name is Paul West. I’ve got three kids. Two of them are great, and one of them is—’” He hesitated again. “‘An idiot.’”

  “Yeah, you said ‘embarrassed father of an idiot.’”

  “Okay.”

  “‘Other two kids are fine, though.’”

  He exhaled. “Ohhh, that’s much more worse.”

  “And you got a picture of him,” I said.

  “I did get a picture of him.”

  “Do you remember anything about him?” I was crying at this point. “Did you get a sense of him as a human being?”

  “I read the obit. And I knew he was a dad that loved his kids.”

  “How did that make you feel?” I wasn’t going to be cruel, but I wasn’t going to let him off easy either.

  “Not good,” he said. “I mean, I felt horrible almost immediately afterwards. You tweeted something along the lines of, ‘Good job today, society,’ or something along those lines. It just wouldn’t—for the first time, it wouldn’t leave my mind. Usually, I would put out all of this Internet hate, and oftentimes I would just forget about it. This one would not leave me. It would not leave me. I started thinking about you because I know you had read it. And I’m thinking how would she feel. And the next day I wrote you.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, “I mean, have you lost anyone? Can you imagine? Can you imagine?”

  “I can. I can. I don’t know what else to say except that I’m sorry.”

  He sounded defeated. I believed him. I didn’t mean to forgive him, but I did.

  “Well, you know,” I said, “I get abuse all day every day. It’s part of my job. And this was the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me. I mean, it was really fresh. He had just died. But you’re also the only troll who’s ever apologized. Not just to me, I’ve never heard of this happening before. I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s ever gotten an apology. And I just—I mean, thank you.”

  “I’m glad that you have some solace.” He seemed surprised, and relieved, that I hadn’t been more cruel. But I was just tired. I didn’t have much anger left. We exchanged a few pleasantries, I thanked him, he thanked me, and we hung up.

  It felt really easy, comfortable even, to talk to my troll. I liked him, and I didn’t know what to do with that.

  It’s frightening to discover that he’s so normal. He has female coworkers who enjoy his company. He has a real, human girlfriend who loves him. They have no idea that he used to go online and traumatize women for fun. How can both of those people share the same brain?

  Trolls live among us. I’ve gotten anonymous comments from people saying they met me at a movie theater and I was a bitch. Or they served me at a restaurant and my boobs aren’t as big as they look in pictures. Or they sat next to me at a bar five years ago and here is a list of every single bite of food I consumed. People say it doesn’t matter what happens on the Internet, that it’s not real life. But thanks to Internet trolls, I’m perpetually reminded that the boundary between the civilized world and our worst selves is just an illusion.

  Trolls still waste my time and tax my mental health on a daily basis, but honestly, I don’t wish them any pain. Their pain is what got us here in the first place.

  If what he said is true, that he just needed to find some meaning in his life, then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all of the people who are still at it. I can’t give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers, but I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.

  Humans can be reached. I have proof.

  This story isn’t prescriptive. It doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to forgive people who abuse them, or even that I plan on being cordial and compassionate to every teenage boy who pipes up to call me a blue whale.* But, for me, it’s changed the timbre of my online interactions—with, for instance, the guy who responded to my radio story by calling my dad a “faggot.” That guy does not have a good life. Since this conversation with my troll aired on This American Life, I’ve had to report six more Twitter accounts using my father’s name and face, one that scolded me for writing about my abortion. “Why did you kill my grandchild?” it asked. It got easier every time.

  It’s hard to feel hurt or frightened when you’re flooded with pity. It’s hard to be cold or cruel when you remember it’s hard to be a person.

  Abortion Is Normal, It’s Okay to Be Fat, and Women Don’t Have to Be Nice to You

  Just two weeks after my This American Life segment aired, copies of a leaked memo by Twitter’s then-CEO Dick Costolo began flooding into my inbox from breathless friends. An employee had posted my piece on an internal forum, where it got the attention of Twitter higher-ups, Costolo himself ultimately responding with this blistering communiqué: “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO,” he wrote. “It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front.”

  Then: “We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them. Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.”

  “We’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo went on. “We’re going to fix it.”

  I was floored. Like, literally on the floor, rolling around. Bloggers, activists, and academics had been throwing ourselves against Twitter’s opaque interface for years—begging for help, compiling sheaves of data on online abuse, writing heartfelt personal essays and dry clinical analyses—and suddenly, in one stroke, we had their ear. There was a human being behind the bird, and he actually gave a shit.

  The jury’s still out on the long-term efficacy of Twitter’s “fixes.” It’s notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to retroactively change a community once bad behavior has taken root—once users know how to exploit a system, it’s hard to evict them without rebuilding the system itself from scratch. Still, to know that Twitter is aware and they’re trying—to have the CEO publicly throw his hat in with the feminazis rather than the trolls—is a victory, and a sign that our cultu
re is slowly heaving its bulk in the right direction.

  Decisive victories are rare in the culture wars, and the fact that I can count three in my relatively short career—three tangible cultural shifts to which I was lucky enough to contribute—is what keeps me in this job. There’s Costolo and the trolls, of course. Then, rape jokes. Comedians are more cautious now, whether they like it or not, while only the most credulous fool or contrarian liar would argue that comedy has no misogyny problem. “Hello, I Am Fat” chipped away at the notion that you can “help” fat people by mocking and shaming us. We talk about fatness differently now than we did five years ago—fat people are no longer safe targets—and I hope I did my part.

  All of those changes are small, but they tell us something big: Our world isn’t fixed, the way those currently in charge would have you believe. It’s malleable.

  When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with a video-game developer named Roberta Williams. She made point-and-click adventure games—King’s Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory—a largely extinct genre in which exploration, curiosity, and problem solving took precedence over combat and reflexes. As a corny king or a dopey spaceman, you wandered through brilliant, interactive landscapes, picking up random shit in the hope that it might help you rescue a pissed-off gnome from a swarm of bees, or break a talking collie out of dog prison so he’ll reward you with the magic kerchief you need to blindfold the King of the Dead.

  I wanted to be Roberta Williams; I wanted to build worlds.

  In ninth grade, I enrolled in a beginners’ programming class at a community college near my house. I was the youngest one there, the only girl, and the only one with no previous knowledge of coding (which wasn’t a prerequisite); the teacher ignored me and chattered away with the boys in jargon I couldn’t follow. I sat through two classes in a humiliated, frustrated fog and never went back. I drifted away from video games; they didn’t want me. I forgot about Roberta and grew up.