The worst trolls are mean girls of the sisterhood
Ever noticed how often the word “example” gets used by trolls? Scroll through a page or two of online bitchery and up comes that word time and time again … pretty much always by women against women. “What kind of example are you setting your children?”… “What kind of example are you setting women?”
Because as mothers, as women, we are meant to be nothing less than exemplary. Totems of perfection. We have a responsibility, don’t we? To set the right tone. To be the right shape: neither too fat, nor too thin, too dimply, nor too toned, too fake nor too real. And if you’re in the public eye and you fall short on any or all of these accounts, well, you can just sit back and let the abuse rain down.
Davina Mccall found this out when she had the temerity to upload a picture of herself in a bikini at 50 on Instagram last month – only to be berated by roughly 4,000 people; I’m guessing 99.9 per cent were proud members of the sisterhood.
Speaking out on Sunday about the backlash to her celebratory “still got it at 50” photo, the TV presenter expressed her sadness that the sight of a gym-honed figure in a bikini could prompt such vitriol. It was “interesting”, said the one-time fitness instructor, how a population that is “becoming more sedentary” is open to thin-shaming but frowns on fatshaming, and hurtful on a personal level that hard work and discipline should have made her “a bad role model” in so many people’s eyes. Setting aside the obvious points that those who can’t do, preach; that if any of the sofa-bound sloths sniping away about exemplary behaviour could tear themselves away from their iphones and their KFC bucket meals long enough to do the odd sit-up, they might not feel quite so exercised (don’t worry ladies – different kind) about another woman’s abdominal muscles, they may not be seething balls of resentment; and that, as a former drug addict who lost her sister to lung cancer in 2012 and whose 17-year marriage has only recently ended, working out might not be the worst possible coping mechanism for Mccall, I’m dismayed to see how personally the presenter seems to have taken those online moral arbitrators.
Perhaps she, like almost every public female figure before her, was under the impression that social media was her friend. And as someone who finally joined it (in a very small way) last year, it’s easy to see why. After all, for Mccall, it will have primarily been a work tool: contributing to the longevity of her TV career and helping to shift the £1.3million-worth of
exercise DVDS she has sold over the past decade. While Twitter will have given her the opportunity to engage with discourse, Instagram might have brought back the warm, cliquey feeling of “belonging” we had as schoolgirls who enjoyed agonising over what to wear and knew exactly what our friends had for dinner. Crucially, Instagram will have provided the unique form of physical validation women seek from other women. But, at its best and where women are concerned, social media can only ever be the worst kind of frenemy.
It’s no coincidence that celebrities brought the word into our lexicon: as the type of “friend” whose words or actions always bring you down, the type you ought to cut off but don’t, frenemies are either vaguely noxious or downright toxic. And, hey, you’ve had some good times, but really their only purpose is to keep putting you “back in your box” until you demand better for yourself. The likes of Amy Schumer, JK Rowling, Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian have tried to do this by mounting various troll “takedowns” over the years. But have they ever won that battle? No. Because for women, social media is the Mean Girls locker room, only it’s vast, and they don’t wait for you to leave before berating your thighs.
Rather than make her point by quitting, Mccall may try to elevate the tone and found some sort of “Instamovement” like Jameela Jamil. The British actress was so appalled by the way women tried to estimate one another’s’ weight on Instagram that she started the account @i_weigh, where women can post all their accomplishments and achievements beneath pictures.
But, again, although the “followers” are racked up and the numbers look great alongside all those emoticonned-up messages of female support, one has to question the honesty of that support in a world with such a seething underbelly of nonsisterhood – a world where 50 per cent of misogynistic language is employed by women. However vast it is, you only need one or two to poison the well.