internet troll
By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 9 years ago

“It’s frightening that he’s so normal.”

Here at Feministing, we think a lot about trolls. We live with them every day. There’s the light stuff: the insults to our intelligence, our appearance, our integrity. Then there’s the more heavy duty stuff. Rape threats, death threats, threats to our family and friends and colleagues. Doxxing. It’s our normal.

Lindy WestIt’s something almost all of us have in common at Feministing and at publications like us — though some of us get it worse than others — and we all have different strategies for dealing with it. Few of us have tackled it the way Lindy West did, though. Lindy, who you might know from her writing at Jezebel and GQ, was trolled by someone who set up a Twitter account in the name of her dead father. She wrote about how awful that made her feel, and to her surprise, he wrote to her again – but this time, to apologize.

Then, she called him and interviewed him about what had gone through his mind when he decided to do what he did. And recorded it all. “It felt like if I could just get the specifics,” she says, “gather them up and hold them in my hands — then maybe I could start to understand all the people who were still trolling me.”

They talked for two hours, and by the end, she’d forgiven him for the terrible things he’d done – the meanest thing anyone has ever done to her. She understood what his life looked like at the time that he was trolling (he’s since stopped, he says) and she felt sorry for him. Still, she says, it’s disturbing to know that there was nothing wrong with him per se. “It’s frightening that he’s so normal,” she says. He’s not your idea of a monster, and unlike a fairy tale troll, he certainly doesn’t live alone under a bridge. He has women coworkers, and a girlfriend, and women friends. “They have no idea that he used to go online and traumatize women for fun.”

You should listen to Lindy’s “This American Life” episode. It’s heartbreaking, and comes with a big old trigger warning. But it’s a glimpse into what so many of us, at Feministing and far beyond, deal with every day — and into the minds of the people who deal it to us.

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Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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