I have sympathy for Maria. You would too if you saw my inbox
BRENDA POWER
NOT a sentence I ever thought I’d write, but I have a lot of sympathy for Maria Bailey. She’s not necessarily a person who inspires sympathy, and her continued refusal to accept that there was anything wrong in swearing an affidavit that contained a flat-out untruth – that she couldn’t run for three months, when in fact she’d completed a race just weeks after she fell off that swing – mitigates against any rehabilitation in the public eye.
But unless you’ve been on the receiving end of the Twitter mob’s vicious, spiteful, profoundly misogynistic and almost invariably anonymous wrath, you cannot even begin to imagine what she has suffered over the past two years. As it happens, I can.
As a female opinion columnist, for a start, I come in for a lot more personalised, sexist and vulgar abuse than my male colleagues would experience.
Abusive
A few years ago, The Guardian did an audit of the comments posted under its columns, and found that women contributors received far more abusive responses than men. I doubt that came as news to any woman working in the media or politics in this country – the temerity of mere females to pop their heads above the parapet seems to inflame the losers, cowards, begrudgers and, I suspect, frustrated incels (involuntary celibates with a grudge against womankind) who make up the bulk of the online hate mobs.
You’d be amazed at the things that send these characters into a frothing, vengeful, incoherent rage. A few years ago, on the Cutting Edge show, I’d expressed the perfectly reasonable opinion – just an opinion, folks – that people who cover themselves in multiple tattoos are effectively self-harming.
I’ve no problem with one or two tattoos, but when you get to 40 tats you’ve got a problem.
From the volume and venom of the responses, which numbered over 1,000 on Facebook alone, you’d imagine I’d called for the ceremonial culling of all tattooed citizens, and offered to carry it out myself.
One particularly foul-mouthed tirade came from a young man whose profile revealed he worked for the National Lottery. I was galled to think my occasional gambles were paying his wages, and considered forwarding a screenshot of his abuse to his employers. But I didn’t – for such people, I reckon, their character is their destiny.
I tend not to heed the likes of Twitter, which I believe attracts a certain calibre of damaged, dysfunctional, quivering cowards to join in the mob abuse of their chosen targets so as to deflect attention from their own secret prejudices; to paraphrase
Winston Churchill, such people feed the crocodile in the hope that it eats them last.
But a few weeks ago, I couldn’t ignore the torrent of malice that came my way after a brief, harmless comment on the mother and baby homes report.
I pointed out that Phil Lynott’s grandparents managed to raise a black child in Crumlin in the 1960s without the sky falling in; my point was that families had more choice in condemning young women to these institutions than the country was prepared to accept.
The mob rounded on me in force. As is their wont, they deliberately misinterpreted the comment and told me what I’d actually meant: that the young women victims of these places had chosen to give up their babies. I was subjected to a hail of abuse, mostly, it seemed, from men who were either too stupid or too consumed by their righteousness to see that they were repeating the very behaviour their own grandparents had almost certainly visited on the girls despatched to those homes with shame and finger-pointing: administering mob judgement to a woman who had violated their moral code.
Nothing in my life was out of bounds to this slavering, hate-fuelled rabble: my appearance, my divorce, the ups and downs of my career were all thrown at me by Twitter users as they egged each other on to greater insults. Apologise, they shrieked. Repent, in other words, you shameless woman. Wear the sackcloth and ashes. Get thee to a nunnery.
Persecution
They contacted my editors and urged them to fire me.
The gratifications some of these men clearly got from their persecution of me was almost palpably sexual: they were getting off on their circle-jerk orgy of indignation.
So, yes, I can imagine what Maria Bailey has gone through, just about. She made a mistake, and compounded it with a tineared, ill-advised interview. She probably deserved to be deselected, or deleted as she put it, as a candidate for Fine Gael, a party that had pledged to fight unjust claims.
She did not deserve to be abused, mocked, insulted and harassed to near breaking point. Absolutely nobody does, particularly not those women who have the guts to put their names to their opinions or take a stand in politics or journalism.