Stupid C*nt Writing Stupid Things

Seven myths about being a feminist writer on the internet

“Stupid cunt writing stupid things.” This was one of the first tweets I remember receiving after publishing my first op-ed, in the New York Times, in 2013. I had signed up for Twitter shortly beforehand, and had very few followers. I still remember a four-and-a-half hour bus ride from Ithaca to New York City where the reactions came so thick and fast—many of them critical, some of them laudatory, a few of them abusive or threatening—that all I did was refresh my phone, bewildered, just trying to get my head around what was happening.

That was for a piece calling out white male cops as a scourge for Black and brown folks (which, ahem, I very much stand behind). It wasn’t even close to the volume or the intensity of reactions I received two years later, after the wildly popular anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers called me a conspiracy theorist for claiming misogyny was still a thing in the run-up to the 2016 election. (I also stand by this claim.) On that occasion, I was getting over a hundred notifications every minute, and the tweets were almost entirely scathing—a veritable pile-on.

Because of experiences like these, and others, I’m often asked how to approach the fraught issue of writing as a feminist and anti-racist and fat activist on the internet. What I’ll try to do in what follows is debunk seven key myths about doing what I do, for those contemplating doing similarly, while acknowledging that experiences like the ones I opened with are real and mildly terrifying.