All The Insults You Meet As a Woman On The Internet
CW: This post contains mentions of death/rape threats, some graphic language, descriptions of online abuse, screen caps of verbal abuse, transphobic and hateful comments. If you need a mental palate cleanser after just thinking about that, here’s a pic of Rand cooking.
So, last week, or maybe two weeks ago, or three months (does it matter? Does anyone remember? Are we still keeping track? HOW IS IT STILL MARCH? IT HAS BEEN MARCH FOR A YEAR.) I did something that caught people’s attention on Twitter, and it amused some folks and rankled others, the way anything that catches people’s attention does.
And since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d talk about it.
A little while ago, Lauren Boebert, a Representative from Colorado (she was the one who was livetweeting the location of several sheltering Democratic officials, including Speaker Pelosi, during the armed siege of the Capitol, and also vowed to take a loaded glock onto the Senate floor) posed in front of her bookshelf, onto which she’d precariously shoved a bunch of firearms.
I decided to do the same with sanitary pads.
Generally if I tweet anything vaguely critical of the free-for-all smorgasboard that is American’s gun control laws, or anything that acknowledges the horrifying truth that menstruation happens for some humans, my mentions become a shitstorm for a few days. But this, dear friends, managed to hit the sweet spot in the Venn diagram where those two concepts overlap, and so I was hit with a monsoon of crap.
(Nice things were said, too. The problem with a monsoon of crap is that you tend to lose sight of all those nice things.)
At some point, even Boebert herself saw the tweet and felt the need to weigh in, with some weird transphobic comment that still remains baffling to me.
But what’s amazing is just how unoriginal all the insults were. They were the same thing I’ve always gotten. Every single time. Again and again and again. And they’re virtually identical to all the comments my friends get, again and again and again. It’s like Groundhog Day, but I’m surrounded by white supremacist misogynistic transphobes who are just deeply unloved. So, I figure, I’m just going to cover all the insults I get online here, so we don’t need to go through this again next time.
Narrator: she would absolutely be going through this again next time.
- “You are mentally ill and need help!”
Yes, please lock me up in a home for the unstable, for I have a wandering uterus which is giving me fits, and have developed a nasty habit of literacy, as well as an acute infection of feminism on the brain. The only cure is a mixture of laudanum, writing up legislation to repeal the 19th amendment, and planning my future dream life when I become Mrs. Matt Gaetz.
– - “You look like a dude/ You secretly ARE a dude.” Please, if I was a dude, people would be listening to me right now.
– - “Your husband is a girl.” Someone literally said this because Rand likes to cook.
Anyway, this is sexy as hell and calling someone a girl isn’t the insult you think it is.
– - “You are super ugly.”
Oh, no, the guys on Twitter who are frightened by menstruation and find grammar as baffling as they do the clitoris doesn’t want to fuck me, whatever will I do.
– - “Your husband doesn’t actually love you”/”How the fuck are you married, you’re disgusting” etc, etc.
Yup. It’s all a sham. And my husband is a girl. And I am a boy. We’re very unhappy. It’s been two decades of hell. I’m too gross to be loved.
We only stay together for the children, which is how I refer to our shared Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts.
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– - “Just take the L!”
Ah, take the L. I assume that this also what they say to women after they’ve failed to given them an O. HEYOOOOOOOO!!!!
– - “You are gross/disgusting/need to bathe more.”
Fear not, gentle souls: when I am on my menses I will retreat to a dark cave in the forest until I am done, and should the dark day arise that I ever need to defecate, I will flee into the hinterlands, never to return to polite society. (Also, of all these folks who are very eager to tell me how gross I am, none of them are using their real photos. Because I’m sure they’re super comfortable with how they look.)
– - “Some other insulting comment about my glasses/nose ring!”
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Oh. Oh, JayeMarie. What was that about glasses?
– - “You are old! You are menopausal! YOU ARE 80!”
Sit down, my little kittens. Let me tell you a story. Sometime at the closing of the 1970s, in the sunset of Disco, my parents did lie together and begat a child of that long-ago epoch. Now, decades later, I watch my bones wither to dust and my memories fade. “The first time I saw Back to The Future,” I whisper, tears rolling down skin as thin and creased as crepe paper, “it really was 1985.”Anyway, I will continue to strive to be as comfortable with my withering looks as you, grown woman who uses cartoon avatar and guy whose profile pic is a blurry group shot.
– - “You don’t know you’re talking about!” It’s literally a photo of me in front of tampons, Dave. I’m not sure that there’s that much to scrutinize here.
– - The Death/Rape Threat. Of course, no discussion of online abuse would be complete without these guys, who truly are at the bottom of the shit barrel. They take a few forms, most of them single-celled. Some try to hide behind hypotheticals, like “How are you going to protect yourself when a rapist comes busting through your door?” and comments that assess our value according to how rapeable we are – i.e., “You are too ugly to rape, anyway!”.This dude felt the need to decapitate me because he got upset at the sight of menstrual pads. Imagine having this many books about programming on your shelf and still being this fucking bad at Photoshop.
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Or being this mad because I. Posed. With. Maxi. Pads. He’s is about to give himself a rage stroke because he had to look at overnight super absorbents with wings.
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- The absolutely baffling.
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Me:
– - Bonus: The unintentional self-burn.
The poor dipshits are so unfamiliar with basic human anatomy that they don’t understand why someone would need pads of different absorbencies. They think that the different sized pads ARE FOR DIFFERENT SIZED VAGINAS.
What’s funny is I actually PREDICTED this would happen:
Because the insults s are always the fucking same. Because hate is inherently unimaginative. It’s the opposite of creativity. If you hate, you haven’t put any thought into anything.
To anyone who feels the urge to repeat any of these messages to me, I would *strongly* encourage you to try to come up with something new. You might even find yourself thinking. And that might lead somewhere good. Because as things stand, y’all are getting a little predictable.
Until next time …
