Creepy men slide into women's DMs all the time, but they can be shut down
“You can confidently put ‘knows how to handle online sexual harassment’ on your CV,” a friend tweeted at me. “This is a master class in how to handle a painfully common situation,” wrote another. Both were reactions to screenshots I had posted from a conversation with a prominent male journalist.
The conversation started about reporter jobs and the media market at large and ended with him telling me “You have so much cum on your face.” After a few minutes of contemplation, I responded with “This isn’t acceptable or appropriate.” A short while later, I posted the messages (with his information cropped out) on Twitter to add to the never-ending scrapbook called “Things Women Deal With And How Much It Sucks.”
I expected he would explain it, somehow, in a way I could believe. He told me they were “meant for someone else” but when I pressed him to explain the 40-minute lapse where he could have noticed the mistake and corrected, he simply replied, “You’re 100% right.” When I posted the conversation on Twitter, I pointed out how common it is for men to toe the line, cross the boundary, and then finally backpedal into “it was a joke” or “it wasn’t meant for you” when the response they get isn’t what they wanted.
He asked me what he could do, and I told him: tell your wife and delete your account. The former because she probably doesn’t know, and the latter because a platform like Twitter to a man who randomly messages young women in his field late at night is typically an enabler of bad behavior. He said he couldn’t do either because he’d get in trouble at work and his wife would be devastated, a thought he hadn’t considered prior. So I contacted his editors with a full transcript of the conversation, noting that this behavior is what keeps women and marginalized voices out of entire industries. They ultimately decided to suspend him, pending investigation.
Alongside this private conversation, I was posting portions of it to Twitter because I felt they highlighted the type of garbage-baby behavior women deal with in every aspect of our lives. The responses I expected centered on reacting to the grossness of his message. What I didn’t anticipate, however, was that the real conversation would focus on what I had said: “This isn’t appropriate or acceptable.”
It’s simple, tidy, and demonstrably true. So why is it so new and refreshing to see? For the past few days, I’ve been receiving messages from women expressing regret that, when faced with similar situations, they didn’t shut it down. Author Jennifer Ashley Wright asked her Twitter followers if they’d ever experienced a similar conversation. In response to her own tweet, she notes that this has “obviously” happened to her before and she usually laughed it off, lamenting, “I wish I’d been better at saying ‘that’s not appropriate.’” Women have nothing to regret for responding to bad behavior by doing what they feel will best keep them safe. The trouble is what we learn to do to keep us safe is at odds with
what will most destabilize a status quo that allows men’s bad behavior to proliferate.
Women are socialized, for our personal, professional and physical safety, to be amenable to the whims of men and build up as many walls as you can to prevent encouraging it, lest someone presume you are “asking for it”. Wear a fake engagement ring to the laundromat. Park close to the grocery store entrance. Never let your drink out of your sight. Your boss makes a sexist comment? Laugh it off. A classmate sees you just posted to your Instagram story and immediately texts you a dick pic? Pretend you fell asleep and never saw it. A man on the street starts following you on your way home? Clutch your keys between your knuckles and discreetly pick up the pace, your other hand on your phone with 9-1-1 ready for you to hit the call button.
We’re not told to turn around and figure out if the man following us has made us his prey or if he’s just walking down the street. We’re not trained to work up the nerve to tell our boss his comment was sexist, or our classmate that he’s disgusting. We’re taught to de-escalate by cutting off pieces of ourselves to feed the wolves. When a woman tosses the knife aside and demands accountability without budging an inch, it’s shocking. So shocking, in fact, that alt-right trolls mass-reported my Twitter account to force Twitter’s algorithms to automatically suspend me.
Conspiracies bloomed that I had manufactured the exchange, or I was blackmailing the man (for what? Because I love the predictable deluge of harassment that followed?), or that some flirting had transpired and I simply deleted the messages. None of this aligns with the truth, but it seems it’s more convenient than believing a woman would react beyond the expected norms of self-minimalization to actually stand up for herself.
Shutting down sexual harassment shouldn’t make you shake in fear or feel like your stomach just fell 10 stories. We don’t just need to be empowered, but released from the burden of protecting men’s comfort at the expense of ourselves. Reducing yourself to avoid upsetting men isn’t, and will never be, appropriate or acceptable.
Talia Jane is a Brooklyn-based writer and food service worker covering poverty and millennials