Washington – Jessica Valenti is one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation. As a columnist for The Guardian, her face regularly appears on the site’s front page.
She has written five books, one of which was adapted into a documentary, since founding the blog Feministing.com.
She gives speeches all over the country. And she tells me that, because of the non-stop harassment that feminist writers face online, if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous.
“I don’t know that I would do it under my real name,” she says she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It’s “not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications” of round-the-clock abuse.
This is a strange, contradictory moment for feminism. On one hand, there’s never been so much demand for feminist voices. Pop stars such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift proudly don the feminist mantle, cheered on by online fans.
After years when it was scorned by the mainstream press, the movement is an editorial obsession: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please occupy, and sometimes top, bestseller lists.
“Stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit centre in a media industry beset by insecurity,” Jonathan Chait recently wrote in New York magazine – a proposition that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
On the other hand, while digital media has amplified feminist voices, it has also extracted a steep psychic price. Women, urged to tell their stories, are being ferociously punished when they do.
Some, particularly women who have the audacity to criticise sexism in the video-game world, have been driven from their homes or forced to cancel public appearances. Fake ads soliciting rough sex have been placed in their names.
And, of course, the Twitter harassment never stops. “Being insulted and threatened online is part of my job,” Lindy West, formerly of Jezebel, recently said on This American Life.
Jamia Wilson, executive director of the feminist advocacy group Women, Action and the Media, says: “It really can affect the way that people feel about themselves.”
Feminists of the past faced angry critics, letters to the editor and even protests. But the incessant, violent, sneering, sexualised hatred their successors absorb is harder to escape. For women of colour, racial abuse comes along with the sexism. “I have received racialised rape threats that I don’t think I would necessarily receive if I were white,” Wilson says.
She finds herself talking about the online abuse in therapy, she says. “There is trauma, especially related to the death and rape threats,” she says. Eventually, such sustained abuse ends up changing people – both how they live and how they work.
In her epochal book Backlash, Susan Faludi described the anti-feminist cultural messages of the 1980s as a “relentless whittling-down process” that “served to stir women’s private anxieties and break their political wills”.
Today’s online backlash may be even more draining. It saps morale and leads to burnout. “You can’t get called a c*** day in, day out for 10 years, and not have that make a really serious impact on your psyche,” says Valenti, who thinks about quitting “all the time”.
Just how long can this generation of feminists endure?
Uppity women, of course, have long been targets of rage and contempt. In 1969, when Marilyn Webb spoke about feminism at an antiwar demonstration in Washington, many of the men who were listening erupted, screaming at her.
Feminists of the second wave regularly contended with real-world hostility from left-wing men that would be inconceivable today.
Nona Willis Aronowitz, features editor at Talking Points Memo, is the daughter of the revered late feminist writer Ellen Willis, who wrote for publications including the Village Voice and the New Yorker. “Forget random online commentators – people who were working at her same publications were total sexists,” Aronowitz says.
Male staffers regularly referred to their female colleagues as the “Stalinist feminists”, Willis wrote.
So stories today about internet abuse inevitably elicit clichés about heat and kitchens.
Reading “nasty virtual tweets” is far better than being “an undocumented immigrant trying to feed your family in America, or somebody who is wrongfully incarcerated, or any of the issues I used to work on”, acknowledges Sally Kohn, a Daily Beast columnist who was previously the only left-wing lesbian feminist contributor at Fox News, making her an especial target for trolls.
Yet try as women might to brush them off, the online pile-ons can leave them reeling, says Aronowitz.
Some are not. In 2013, the pro-choice activist Jaclyn Munson wrote about going undercover at an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centre. Soon a stalker was sending her death threats. A year ago, exhausted and depleted, she largely gave up writing online and deleted her Twitter account.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, “the mainstream culture of the media was more anti-feminist. That was when you had all that ‘feminism is dead, all women just want to get married’ kind of stuff’,” says Nation columnist Katha Pollitt.
“But the men’s rights people, Gamergate, that’s new. There is this cadre of incredibly enraged men who have found each other.”
Perhaps, Pollitt says, it’s “a sign of our success” that the anti-feminist backlash is mostly digital.
Jill Filipovic, a senior political writer covering feminist issues at Cosmopolitan, says she recently tried to persuade a friend to run for office. “There are several reasons why I wouldn’t want to do it, but one of them is that I follow you on Twitter, and I see what people say to you. I could never deal with that,” the friend told her.
Filipovic, the former editor of the blog Feministe, says that, although her skin has thickened over the years, the daily need to brace against the online onslaught has changed her. “I doubt myself a lot more. You read enough times that you’re a terrible person and an idiot, and it’s very hard not to start believing that.”
The creator of Feministe, Lauren Bruce, no longer has an online presence. “I had to completely cut that part off in order to live the rest of my life. In order to work, have a nice family and feel like I was emotionally whole, I could not have one foot planted in a toxic stew.”
Women who want to brave the toxic stew face a dilemma. Online, is the easiest way for them to get their message out. The most prominent feminist figures of recent years have all opened their lives to public scrutiny. First-person essays by women are huge drivers of internet traffic. “I have tried to mentor a couple of young female writers,” Valenti says.
“They were trying so hard to get their first pieces published, and then they write something about their vagina, and all of the sudden the doors open up.”
Self-revelation brings an inevitable barrage of sadism. Consider the young women’s site xoJane, which specialises in first- person narratives. Getting published there can be a big break, but writers rarely last long on the site.
“We bring someone here, we develop them, they are able to make their name and their brand online, and the first chance they get they go somewhere safer, like print,” says Emily McCombs, the site’s executive editor. “Part of that is definitely not being able to handle the harassment.”
McCombs herself has decided that her next job won’t be online, which is to say, it will be away from the action. “As a result of choosing to be a writer online I have to read direct messages from trolls on my social media telling me how fat and ugly I am every day,” she says.
The Washington Post
* Goldberg is a contributing writer at the Nation and the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World.