“’Doing Feminism Wrong’: The Struggle of Being a Young Feminist on the Internet”

(On February 23, 2015, I moderated a panel at Social Media Week NYC 2015, helping young female professionals and artists understand how helpful social media, and by extension, on-line communities and networks in general, could be to identifying and achieving their career goals. Rafaella Gunz attended my panel, and that panel led to us following each other on Twitter, which led to a conversation, which led to me asking her to write for this blog.

My conversation with Rafaella reminded me that yep, being on-line and connecting with new people can be amazing…and it can also be amazingly enraging. Many people who are angry in the real world, are extra angry on-line. And it’s easy for me to tell other women, “Oh hey, just get on Twitter and start networking, and presto, watch your dreams come true.” Well, it’s easy for me to say that, but what happens when you go on-line, with the very best of intentions, and you’re consistently challenged and attacked for your ideas, your content and, fundamentally, your gender. If you feel the Internet isn’t a safe place, and far too many people are made to feel that, why the hell would you want to put your heart and soul out there? March is Women’s History Month, and while some blogs are posting photos of Oprah and Beyonce, with a sprinkling of feel-good hashtags like #strongwomen, over here at the Yentabunker, we like to practice what we preach. We like to be honest.  As a feminist, Women’s History Month seemed like a great time to pass the mic to the younger generation, and hear what one of them has to say. Read it, and let us know what you think! C.)

“I’m 22 years old and I’m still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl. I’ve been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin. It has been very tortuous. College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. Within those years, I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because… I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.”

These are the words spoken by Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old who, on May 23, 2014, went on a shooting spree targeting mostly women. He said this in a video he posted to YouTube just before the killings.

I was born in 1993, and thus was one of the first of this generation to grow up on the Internet. As someone who wasn’t considered popular in school, I loved going online and talking to other kids from around the world. I remember going on the AOL Kids Only chat rooms, and as I got a bit older, Habbo Hotel and MySpace. It was fun for me to make new friends outside of the people I knew from school.
In school, my best subject was always English. And with a British mother, I guess I shouldn’t expect anything less. When I was 12, I saw the film The Devil Wears Prada, and it inspired me to one day become a journalist and write for a fashion magazine. While I’m majoring in journalism now that I’m in college, recently, my focus has shifted from fashion to something else a lot more controversial – feminism.

Upon hearing about Rodger’s shooting, I was horrified. How could someone want to kill all women because no one had sex with him yet? Why would that thought even pop into one’s head? It was this event, coupled with the Gender Studies courses I began taking at school, that marked my feminist awakening.

Soon after this event, I attended my first feminist rally in Union Square, which was in response to the shooting and driven by the #YesAllWomen hashtag that soon began to trend on Twitter. It was during all of this that the guy I was seeing at the time told me I was “too headstrong for his taste” and broke up with me over text message. It was also during this time that I discovered  feminist YouTubers such as Laci Green, and, sticking to what I know (communicating online), took to the comment section to vent my frustration at the inequalities women face, which were just starting to become apparent to me. This is where I very quickly learned a new lesson: women, especially those who express feminist opinions, aren’t welcome on the Internet.

Anti-Feminist Screenshots

Just for the record, I never look to start fights online. I get these types of responses no matter how respectful and polite I am in expressing my opinions. If I leave a comment, even as a response to a fellow feminist’s video, I get tons of these hateful replies. Many of these people use pseudonyms and don’t have any identifying information on their page about them. On the other hand, I have had a YouTube account since 2007 and there are numerous videos of me. I like to go by Raffi on YouTube, as opposed to my full name, but that still has not stopped one of these responders, a man from Saudi Arabia, from finding my Facebook page and attempting to add me three times. So while I’m not afraid to express my beliefs un-anonymously, I have some concerns about my personal safety, especially in light of the GamerGate controversy and the recent trend of doxing

This harassment goes beyond people just angrily replying to my comments on videos. Some of them have actually taken time to come to my channel and spam my personal videos – all of which are unrelated to feminism – with bigoted remarks. And, of course, anonymously.

Take, for example, this guy who disguised himself as George W. Bush and posted comments like this to about 10 of my videos, which I had to then delete one by one:

I’ve even gotten backlash from other self-proclaimed feminists, who don’t even know me, telling me that I’m “doing feminism wrong”:

And I received no reply to that. But I just have to ask: how is randomly attacking another woman online beneficial to the feminist cause?

All of this has gotten me to the point of disabling responses to the comments I leave, as I’m tired of having endless back-and-forths with people who aren’t actually interested in learning, but instead, just want to argue and bring me down. Believe me, I have engaged with people leaving these types of comments and it’s gotten me nowhere. As someone who’s struggled with being bullied growing up, I’m still learning to put my mental health and well-being over what other people think of me. But even when I choose not to engage with these people, I still can’t escape backlash. Here’s a comment I got on my channel attacking me for closing a comment thread:

There’s literally no way out. Definitely a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of situation. But if there’s one thing I do know it’s that I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to let these anonymous trolls silence me. That’s what they want to do, and that’s exactly why we need feminism. Though reading these comments can be disheartening, at the end of the day they just further prove my point and let me know that what I’m fighting for is right, and that I should trust my own thoughts and beliefs instead of allowing these hateful people to change my perception.
On a more positive note, the Internet has allowed me to reach out to other feminists from around the world and engage in meaningful discussion. This has also given me some comfort by letting me know I’m not alone in receiving harassment from anti-feminists. In fact, one of my favorite feminist writers, Lindy West (Lindy West: What Happened When I Confronted my Cruelest Troll),has written numerous articles about the harassment she faces online. And as for the guys doing this harassing, in the words of author Chuck Palahniuk, “Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.”

Rafaella Gunz is a student at The New School, majoring in Journalism and minoring in Gender Studies. She has a passion for social justice, specifically women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ rights. She currently writes for student-run publication The Antithesis (http://theantithesistns.co.vu/). You can reach her at r.gunz@aol.com.