Women Revolutionaries Stand Up to Online Trolling

Ashley Judd has been standing up for women for a while now but recently Judd took on the harassers (otherwise known as puny tyrants cloaked in anonymity because they have no other option, really – too cowardly to come after women in real life but full of so much hate they can’t contain it) in a powerful essay, “Forget Your Team: Your Online Violence Toward Girls and Women Is What Can Kiss My Ass.”

I routinely cope with tweets that sexualize, objectify, insult, degrade and even physically threaten me. I have already — recently, in fact — looked into what is legally actionable in light of such abuse, and have supplied Twitter with scores of reports about the horrifying content on its platform. But this particular tsunami of gender-based violence and misogyny flooding my Twitter feed was overwhelming.

Tweets rolled in, calling me a cunt, a whore or a bitch, or telling me to suck a two-inch dick. Some even threatened rape, or “anal anal anal.”

And:

Instead, I must, as a woman who was once a girl, as someone who uses the Internet, as a citizen of the world, address personally, spiritually, publicly and even legally, the ripe dangers that invariably accompany being a woman and having an opinion about sports or, frankly, anything else.

What happened to me is the devastating social norm experienced by millions of girls and women on the Internet. Online harassers use the slightest excuse (or no excuse at all) to dismember our personhood. My tweet was simply the convenient delivery system for a rage toward women that lurks perpetually. I know this experience is universal, though I’ll describe specifically what happened to me.

I read in vivid language the various ways, humiliating and violent, in which my genitals, vaginal and anal, should be violated, shamed, exploited and dominated. Either the writer was going to do these things to me, or they were what I deserved. My intellect was insulted: I was called stupid, an idiot. My age, appearance and body were attacked. Even my family was thrown into the mix: Someone wrote that my “grandmother is creepy.”

Women and Hollywood also draws our attention to Shannon Sun Higginson’s new doc, “GTFO: Get The F#$% Out,” which premiered at SXSW about the war going on right now between little boys and women who criticize the gaming industry.

Women need to stand together on this and not mince around words like feminism, what it means and what it stands for. I have no patience for women who don’t get the bigger picture. Unfortunately there are too many of them and their dissent is part of what diminishes the collective power of women who are victimized everywhere in the world every hour of every day. AwardsDaily stands firmly behind Judd and is ready to take on the trolls any time, anywhere.