Op-ed: Think Before You Tweet

That little axiom pops up periodically on Twitter, not that everyone pays attention to it. From celebrities to politicians to us mere common folk, everyone has their ranty moments on Twitter. Twitter can best be described as when democracy met anarchy–everyone has a voice, but often, everyone is shouting at once. And, often as not, the democracy of Twitter with its reductive 140 characters reads like a rhetorical Wild West–the not-so-moral equivalent of a verbal hit-and-run.

Hashtag activists (myself among them) can garner a following just for hitting the right note at the right time. I tapped into a lot of female/feminist anger a few months ago when I revived the #sharedgirlhood hashtag, sending out several hundred tweets on issues from female genital mutilation and child brides to being shouted down in grade school and high school classrooms to child sexual abuse. Soon women from all over the world, all ages, all classes, all races, were sharing their experiences of growing up second-class in a world run by male privilege. It was all wonderful bonding until it got hijacked by, well, male privilege and its handmaidens, the women who stand for men before women like we were all back in 1950.

Likewise Asian-American hashtag activist Suey Park tapped into something for Asian Americans with her #NotYourAsianSidekick hashtag last winter, which again was great and a lesson for white people everywhere until it got hijacked by, yes, white people.

Suey upped the ante a few weeks ago with her #CancelColbert hashtag after Stephen Colbert’s account tweeted out some unpleasantly stereotypical commentary on Asians that was supposed to read as his usual satire, but instead read as blatant racism to all but his staunchest (white) defenders.

(Of course not only did Colbert not get cancelled, but he was hired yesterday to fill the coveted slot of the soon-to-be-departing David Letterman, the longest-running late night talk show host in TV history. Adding insult to that injury for Park and others, is that Les Moonves, chairman and chief exec of CBS, is married to an Asian-American, Julie Chen.)

Some hashtags unite, others divide and some, in uniting, seem also to divide, as #sharedgirlhood and #CancelColbert seemed to do. Such is the peril and glory of that democracy-as-anarchy that is Twitter. A medium for socializing as well as politicizing, Twitter is also very public: it’s the place where everybody knows your name. It’s also the place where at least half of the participants are anonymous and with anonymity comes lack of accountability and with lack of accountability. STFU can become the main rallying cry.  

We’ve seen some famous–or infamous–meltdowns. Alec Baldwin cursing at pretty much everyone, then deactivating his account, then putting it up again. Salon and Jezebel writer and "male feminist" Hugo Schwyzer posting 100 tweets in less than an hour apologizing for his bad behavior (which included affairs with students and trying to gas one of his girlfriends to death with fumes from his oven). Actress Amanda Bynes posting endless selfies in various states of deshabille and intoxication before she landed in rehab.

It would be hard to top some of those Twitter dramas, but outside the rarified world of the million-followers tweeters or even the hashtag activists, is the world most women, in particular lesbians and feminists, on Twitter inhabit. That world has become more and more fraught in recent months, with several well-publicized cases of harassment and hundreds more not-so-well-publicized.

One friend says she tries to "keep it cute" on Twitter, maintaining her account for humorous bits for her comedy riffs. When I see her tweets, I always laugh. They usually garner a favorite.

But most people, even comedians, use Twitter not for the rim-shot, but for the one-two punch. Sometimes it’s political, sometimes it’s personal, increasingly it’s both. And increasingly, women are on the receiving end of those not-so-literary punches. Simple disagreement seems beyond the reach of many on Twitter and statistics show that women are the ones receiving the lion’s share of abuse–abuse that often includes threats of violence.

Any woman, especially feminists and lesbians, addressing political issues on Twitter has gotten threats. A few days ago I was having a Twitter discussion with the Health Commissioner of San Francisco, Cecilia Chung, about issues of violence against lesbians. We had been discussing points raised in this article I wrote for SheWired about violence against lesbians being on the rise. 
Our conversation was respectful, but on Twitter, anyone can jump in and derail things at any moment. That happened with this tweet at me in demanding I leave Commisioner Chung alone. The Tweet went on to read, "You are a total CUNT and the reason lesbians DESERVE to get raped!! DIE!!!!"

Commissioner Chung apologized to me, but she didn’t send the tweet, although her name was included in it.

As is often the case, one vile tweet led to more. A man had been demanding that I contact Roseanne Barr, with whom I have frequent feminist and political chats on Twitter, because he "loves her." When I said I couldn’t do that, he resorted to calling me a cunt as well, and started tweeting, changing my screen name to the pornified, "VAGBOX," teaming up with the other tweeter to call me a "dyke," "failed writer" and suggest that indeed, rape and death were the best things that could happen to me.

This kind of random threatening harassment is regrettably common on Twitter and women are the lightning rods, especially women writers, particularly lesbians. There isn’t a day that goes by when someone is not sending me a vicious attack on Twitter. Every woman writer I know experiences the same thing and many have written about it.

Last summer, Caroline Criado-Perez, a British feminist and journalist who had helped organize the movement to get a woman on a UK banknote, was harassed mercilessly on Twitter after that movement was successful, receiving threats like the above threat to me repeatedly. Criado-Perez said in interviews that the harassment was so intense it made it impossible for her to function.

The high-profile nature of Criado-Perez’s case drew brief attention to the treatment of women journalists on Twitter and in January two people, John Nimmo and Isabella Sorley, were given brief prison sentences for their Twitter threats to Criado-Perez. The two had multiple accounts from which they tweeted "die you worthless piece of crap" and "I will find you" among others.

A year ago African-American journalist, lawyer and anti-rape activist Zerlina Maxwell, who has worked with President Obama, appeared on the Sean Hannity show on FOX to talk about rape activism.

Maxwell, herself a rape survivor, said, "I think the entire conversation is wrong. I don’t want anybody to be telling women anything. I don’t want men to be telling me what to wear, how to act, not to drink. And in my case, don’t tell me if I had only had gun, I wouldn’t have been raped because it’s still putting it on me to prevent the rape. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there with prevention."

The Twittersphere immediately lit up with rape threats to Maxwell.

Consistently Twitter has looked the other way when women are attacked. Suey Park said she received similar threats to those Maxwell, Criado-Perez and I have received, yet the response to these attacks has been minimal at best. Twitter offers a report button now, added after the Criado-Perez incident, but it requires the victim to fill out a form for each event. I have filled out this form more than 100 times since the beginning of the year. And only for the most egregious threats, not the simple daily ones of "you bitch" or "you cunt."

The prompt for violent threats to women on Twitter is invariably politics–leftist, feminist, lesbian. But it is something more: the threats are silencing. As Criado-Perez noted, it exhausts you and wears you down. If you use Twitter as a forum for political debate as many women of color, lesbians and feminists do, the "trolls" will find you. And when they do, it’s difficult to walk away. The point is to silence you, and as Maxwell said to me one day on Twitter, "You can’t block the world."

A trans woman friend of mine runs a site on Twitter devoted to gender issues. She’s a strong voice and a strongly feminist one. And she is regularly attacked from all sides by people telling her to shut up, using the same kind of language used by the people who were jailed in Criado-Perez’s case. I recently argued with a straight white guy I saw attacking her. He was basically telling her she wasn’t doing trans right. I suggested he might want to talk to some other straight white guys if he was concerned about trans women of color, since they were the perpetrators of violence against trans women. He said that wasn’t his job.

But policing a trans woman was?

Which directs to the other way women are silenced on social media. It’s not all rape and death threats–it’s the everyday sexism. The egregiousness and its cumulative impact on women is what caused Laura Bates to start her site, Everyday Sexism, as both reporting on sexism in the workplace, school, streets and on social media and a forum for women to shout back about their personal experiences with misogynist behavior. As the columnist Laura Penny wrote, "Most mornings, when I go to check my email, Twitter and Facebook accounts, I have to sift through threats of violence, public speculations about my sexual preference and the odor and capacity of my genitals, and attempts to write off challenging ideas with the declaration that, since I and my friends are so very unattractive, anything we have to say must be irrelevant."

Twitter trolls commonly call women ugly and/or fat, ending with, to their mind, the most terrible insult of all "no one wants to fuck you!" Lesbians are bombarded with these insults, as well as the standard, "I can make you straight, bitch." One man recently sent me a tweet with nothing but the word "penis" repeated throughout the entire tweet. Another sent me a tweet with nothing but "cunt" repeated throughout.

As I said: exhausting.

For writers like myself, the abuse has to be borne, yet there’s no question it has created an atmosphere that is toxic. Penny gets to the heart of the problem: the misogyny is meant to derail the topic at hand, which is that women be allowed have a voice at all. For centuries women have been silenced by men and by a society that has dismissed their words, feelings, experiences and ideas out of hand. Twitter and other social media is just the newest and most expeditious means for doing that.

But why should we be silenced? And does silencing us help make the world more equitable? Last month a gay male writer I know whom I thought respected me and my work said flat out that violence against lesbians wasn’t a big deal. When I challenged him, sending him the SheWired article, he told me if that made him misogynist and lesbophobic, "so be it."

"Ownership" of movements–feminism, LGBT, anti-racism–is keenly felt on Twitter. But in the case of the LGBT community it threatens any kind of solidarity between and among those various groups. Dan Savage tells us, "It gets better" and that the bullying stops once you’re an adult, but for women, that simply is not true. The venue just shifts from high school hallways to the halls of social media. Even women writing about their cancer experiences on Twitter, like Lisa Bonchek Adams or lesbian writer Stella Duffy, have received stunning critiques of their honest discussions of what it is to battle breast cancer. Other women writing about their experiences of FGM (female genital mutilation) have also been rebuked online while still others organizing over violence against women–rape, domestic violence and even murder–are constantly asked, but what about men?
Women speaking at all continues to be an issue for many. And not every woman can battle against the silencing techniques. If a woman of Criado-Perez stature can be reduced to not being able to function from the onslaught, what happens to the young lesbian, neophyte feminist or newly transitioned trans woman testing the social justice waters of Twitter?

As social media broadens to incorporate nearly every interaction in daily life, women will be exposed more and more to harassment and threats. There should be a campaign against it, but there isn’t–just individual women speaking out about their experiences and the problem.

This behavior online damages those on the receiving end of each exchange. Individual attacks are bad, but when they come in a torrent–as happened to me when the #sharedgirlhood hashtag was hijacked or as happened to Suey Park over #CancelColbert–it can be overwhelming.

This shouldn’t happen, of course. Respectful interaction should be how we interact with strangers online–just as we would in real life. And the harassing and violent threats from members of our own community–like the ones I described above–those damage any intersectionality that might exist between and among lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and trans.

We can practice respect–I never use vulgar language and never attack people online–and we can practice self-care. Defense is necessary: report abusive tweets, even if you think it’s a one-time thing. The person who abused you has almost certainly abused others. A pattern of abuse gets someone suspended. Document abuse–that’s how Criado-Perez got her trolls arrested and charged. Copy transcripts or capture screenshots of harassing content when it happens to you, before you block the abuser. Or retweet it so everyone can see who is doing what to you.

In the end Twitter remains that giant democracy with anarchistic tendencies. It can be the most wonderful place to meet and exchange ideas and it can be a place that incites fear. The one true dictate to follow is one we learned as kids, however: treat other people the way you want to be treated. It doesn’t always work, but it does make it clear who the troll is when those vile tweets come in. We can’t always avoid the toxic, but we can refuse to accept that we deserve it.

Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a contributing editor for Curve magazine, Curve digital and Lambda Literary Review. She is the author and editor of nearly 30 books including the award-winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability. Her collection, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for Cultural/Historical Fiction. Her Y/A novel, Cutting will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX