When the journalist Leta Hong Fincher wrote about forced marriages in Xinjiang, she was bombarded with online abuse for weeks. Games designer Brianna Wu was driven from her home during an online campaign against sexism in her industry. The account of playwright and activist Van Badham was hacked and fake sexualised images of her were distributed to hundreds of thousands of people.
Nina Jankowicz’s trenchant short book How to Be a Woman Online is packed with similar examples of misogyny blooming on the internet, drawn not just from her personal experience but from her academic research. “To be a woman online,” she demonstrates, “is an inherently dangerous act.”
It would be easy to stop there. Instead, Jankowicz supplies a whole toolkit of ideas for protection. Get cyber secure. Invest in a password manager. Use governance. Employ ‘blocktivism’. Find the mute key. Establish a network of women allies. Amplify them. Be intersectional. Mentor. Be Mentored. Above all, get back out there. The internet is a public forum to which women ought to have equal access. It’s the job of any thinking woman to keep claiming it.
Nina Jankowicz is a committed, North American, second-wave feminist. She quotes Madeline Albright. Her examples are women “with a public presence online”, blue-tick Tweeters, up-and-out-there bloggers, leaners-in. Her enemies, by and large, are men: ‘reply guys’, @ProfessorEsq, @LazyLogan, @TrojanHorace. Her arguments centre on possession of the public sphere: authority, property, occupying space. Correspondingly, the inner sphere is of less interest: psychology is for solving individual pain. Getting out there, Jankowicz acknowledges, will hurt. Own it. Tell your family. Get a therapist.
It’s all admirable stuff: solidly researched, informative, grounded, gritty, practical; as is Jankowicz and the women she knows and champions. But staring at the Twitter feed in front of me, and my long unused account, I find it hard to apply her advice. My feed is of a particular sort: literary, lefty, education-heavy, and disproportionally written by people who also write the news. It’s not that there’s a shortage of misogyny or bullying on show: on the contrary, other than the odd picture of a sunlit cat, it is a cavalcade of images of women and dissections of power plays. But rather than the outer sphere, it seems mostly concerned with perceptions, identity, feelings and psychology. To put it another way, Twitter seems lately to be a psychodrama, much of it about itself.
Take, for example, the story of Sarah Moulds, a woman who kicked a horse on video in late 2021. A deluge of tweets rapidly ensured she lost her job and reputation and would be prosecuted by the RSPCA. There was unquestionably, too, a gendered element to her demonisation: a male hunter with a whip would have been treated to different metaphors. But Moulds’s persecutors weren’t male trolls or reply guys. Many of them were privileged, educated, middle-aged, and female: Jankowitz’s victims rather than persecutors.
They hated, though, with all the vigour of Van Badham’s pursuers. The condemnation went on for days after it became clear that Moulds had young children and had gone into hiding; that she had been punished up to and beyond our usual limits and must be in danger of her life. It went on with particular, almost religious righteousness. One user with “hates bullies” on their bio vowed to “keep hunting for her like she did foxes”. They would not be remonstrated with. “You’d think you’d be safe, wouldn’t you,” tweeted a member of the caring professions, “criticising someone for hitting and kicking an animal but app not”. ‘Safe’ in that sentence has evolved well past Jankowicz’s cyber security tips. Its means something uniquely Twitter.