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'Not everyone realises just how well the trolls are fed suggested targets.' Photograph: Getty Images Photograph: Getty Images
'Not everyone realises just how well the trolls are fed suggested targets.' Photograph: Getty Images Photograph: Getty Images

When they call us 'frightbats', they make us fair game

This article is more than 9 years old
Van Badham

Anyone who tells you that trolling is a purely online phenomenon is not living with it. The women on the recent 'frightbats' list have weathered real-world incidents for years

I discovered that a male blogger from a rival news organisation had turned me into a bat at a most inopportune time.

I was in rehearsals for a theatre production in Hobart, yet had agreed to speak in a public policy debate for Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre that same day. I was making a somewhat frantic trans-Bass flight when I learned I was one of the 10 Australian media women nominated as a “frightbat” in this most recent example of news-blogger name-calling. It's an event that repetition has made tiresome. The post went up, hours of trolling followed.

I may be no bat, but I am a tough broad. I came of age in Wollongong, where you can learn through direct observation that police separately bag the parts of a dismembered body after an axe-murder, as I did one sunny morning, on the way past the house of the very dead ex-mayor, Frank Arkell. Your perspective on human cruelty somewhat deepens after moments like that.

It’s thus tempting to conclude that the point of these exercises is not to damage me with insults, but to dog whistle to those on social media who’ll volunteer to waste my time.

Everyone on the internet knows not to feed the trolls. What not everyone may realise is just how well the trolls are fed suggested targets by the “frightbat” blogger and his ilk, and how a silent masthead can lend legitimacy to that persecution.

Anyone who tells you that trolling is an online phenomenon is not living with it; the public "flaming" of women in the media emboldens those who pursue the offered targets for harassment and abuse. The experience of being cyberstalked, poison-penned, monitored, physically followed, threatened, vexatiously litigated and even subject to bomb threats is a matter of record amongst the women on the “frightbat” list; some have weathered this nonsense for years.

Everyone who gets into commentary does so with vigorous eagerness for debate. Our role here is to provoke a conversation. Perhaps that's the reason why the “frightbat” post struck such a nerve with the broader commentariat – and, more significantly, its readership. The “frightbat” episode exposed the refusal of a corner of the Australian media to substantively engage with 10 commentators – an entire cohort of writers, expert across a broad range of subjects – on any level but gender.

Attacking one writer with schoolyard insults is pathetic, but arguably personal. To attack 10 women with the ancient stereotypes of “shrieking”, “hysterical” woman-hating betrays to me an obviously gendered problem – not merely of the blogger, or his audience.

Why is the hatred of these 10 women so vicious? Whether the dogwhistling is deliberate or not, what possibly motivates a news-blogger to publicly denigrate his female colleagues? What inspires anonymous trolls to invest their time in harassment and abuse?

I suggest that it springs from a resentment that women have irreversibly encroached upon what not that long ago was an exclusively male domain: public discourse. Where once female – let alone feminist – voices were marginal to civic debate, in online media, they’re mainstream.

A decade ago, it would’ve been fanciful to imagine a tabloid commentator could name so many feminists, let alone rely on the cranks amongst his readership to recognise them in a silly poll. What’s happened is that the old print hierarchies of men appointing other men to dominate the public discussion of politics, business and – gasp! – even sport are yielding to the new digital reality.

In particular, digital publications live or die on the shareability of articles. Women outnumber men as the active users of social media sites Twitter and Facebook. Ironically, patriarchal stereotypes that still shape gender roles have pre-equipped women with skills as sharers, spenders and communicators, now allowing them to dominate the online world of not only public discussion, but domestic commerce.

As more women are recruited by media organisations to speak to a diverse audience, explicitly feminist commentators – and publications – have gained market traction because while women are not an homogenous bloc of undifferentiated behaviours, opinions or lifestyles, there is one experience we do all share and all feminists can speak to: the experience of sexism.

What was actually surprising about the “frightbat” poll was the number of feminist commentators who didn’t appear. There are dozens more influential Australian media feminists who meet the political criteria of "frightbat", and there’s certainly a far broader ethnic and cultural diversity in this community than suggested by the 10 on the list.

Where was Eva Cox, Wendy Harmer, Karen Pickering, Stella Young or Amy Gray? Where the hell was Celeste Liddle, Nareen Young, Nakkiah Lui or Kelly Briggs? One name suggests ten more; the sheer size of this community is perhaps the reason why the “frightbat” poll rebounded on its creator so quickly, with the named “frightbats” campaigning for votes, memes created, hashtags trending within a matter of hours.

And this, I suggest, is the thing that the old boys posting insults find most frightening: that the audience of online feminist commentators is not only bigger, but far more socially influential than the most ardent anonymous cranks. The male-dominated realm they remember is gone and not returning. No wonder they’re furiously clogging my timeline. No wonder they're batting scared.

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