CYBER HATE
Lizzie Marvelly takes on the trolls
Ireceive nasty comments online on an almost-daily basis. At times, my notifications will become flooded with bile faster than I can block and ban the perpetrators. There is a folder on my laptop called “Haters”.
If you imagine a Portaloo at the end of the last day of a music festival plagued by rain, a shortage of any food other than extra-spicy curry, and an outbreak of dysentery, it’s a fairly equitable representation of the general look and feel of the thing.
I’m not quite sure why I felt the urge to create it, and I’m quite certain it’s not healthy to maintain it, but it’s become something of a pastime. Like collecting stamps. It’s a good thing I don’t do speed-dating.
You can just imagine the hobbies round. “Hi, my name is Lizzie and I collect the explosive digital diarrhoea of internet trolls.”
Inside my little Pandora’s box of gore and grime are examples of almost every sub-category of online abuse imaginable, from the mundane to the rare. I’ve collected more misogyny than I know what to do with, a decent amount of condescension, nearly every possible variation of “stick to singing” and a fair bit of racism.
Every once in a while, however, I’ll unearth a comment so rotten the stench of it takes my breath away. Admittedly that happens less frequently these days — more because I’ve acquired an iron stomach after repeated exposure than anything else.
Nowadays I tend to award points for originality. In a weird way, the odd utterly rancid pile of steaming cyber shit makes for a nice change to the usual, “shut up, you man-hating feminazi”. The ones that surprise me even get their own sub-folder within the “Haters” folder. It’s called “Truly Vile”.
I’m going to take you inside that awful place. Think of it as taking the plunge through the plastic toilet seat into the unholy mess below. I apologise in advance.
Before we start, however, I’m just going to put one giant, allencompassing [sic] here, so we can get the strange correlation between being an arsehole on the internet and having an abysmal grasp of basic spelling and grammar out of the way.
I also need to point out (for legal reasons) that it is possible that the account names used below were used by someone other than their owners to make the comments included in this chapter. I know if I were behind one of these posts, I’d certainly say that I’d been “hacked”.
First up, we have racism. All of the worst comments I receive on social media generally revolve around some form of discussion — for want of a better term — about my Ma¯ori heritage and fair skin. For example, this charming little Facebook conversation:
Len Walls: “Bloody honky! Maybe we should roast her on the spit and give her a good old native welcome . . . Bet she tastes like a Koni Koni with that pinky flesh! Mmmm bacon!”
Mark Rallison: “My dog wouldn’t even want to eat that.”
Len again: ”I dunno, a bit of garlic, some onions, add a little Asian with some soy sauce … 8 hours in the hangi and shed turn out alright in the end! Lol. We could make a real native delicacy out of her!”
Welcome to the bowels of internet hell, where we will find a few repeat offenders. Mark, for example, was kind enough to bless me with another stroke of genius, in a separate thread, again about Ma¯ori people:
“We should’ve just made these people slaves back in the 1800s. Would’ve been better off for them.”
Then came Wayne, Trevor and Murray.
Wayne Walker: “Typical trash from a pseudo moari. What a disgusting person. What about her predominant white blood. Does her single entitled brain cell not honour her white blood.”
Trevor Bryan: “i’d of added tupperware european maori to that list. as in she has as much of the tar brush as a plastic chinese tiki sold at the airport”
Murray McKenzie: “LM, 5% maori, 100% Tangata F’wit.”
If it’s not racism, it’s almost certainly going to be rape, murder, the kind of misogyny that proves many of my points in one fell swoop, or a swipe at my father, because God knows a woman with an opinion must have daddy issues. Take, for example:
Lloyd Gretton: “Perfect set up yourself to be raped Your biography says you love wine and dating Lead besotted men on and then scream rape” (This one is actually pretty funny. My biography says I love date scones. I can only surmise that Lloyd needs new reading glasses. And a shred of human decency. He later told me to “stick [my] ngati where it belongs”. Because, of course.)
James Jenkins: “Lizzie wishes she had tits worth an oggle . . . #enviousandbitter”
Mark Dash: “Lizzy marvelly’s face is enough of a contraceptive not sure what she is complaining about.”
NZ Men Fed up with the NZ Family Court: “Lizzie Marvelly is a singer who failed in her career and couldn’t attract the public attention. Now, she is a feminist trying to get more attention from the public and be more acknowledged. She is an anti-male because her dad didn’t give her enough attention during her childhood and now she thinks that all men are like her father.” Honestly, you can just imagine the kind of conversations that take place on that rather revealingly named Facebook page.)
Geoff Booth: “OhHell no DumbLiberalSnowflakes like Lizzy wont wake up tothis till the Caliphate is half waythru removin her head.” Bevnolz: “Go catch Ebola Lizzie.” Lawrence Prasad: “Seems like you have a tallpoppyitis affliction. Bungy jumping without the cord is known to help!”
Premsocial: “You’re the reason why I hit woman You stupid two hole.”
And of course, no discussion of online abuse would be complete without mention of this chapter’s namesake: Whatyoutalkinabout Willis: “Someone please shoot this stupid bitch. NZ f ****** hates her.”
I could go on, but you get the general idea. Online abuse is a regular occurrence for me, whether I like it or not. It simply comes with the territory of being a young woman with a public presence on the internet, so I’ve learnt to deal with it.
I’m not for a second saying that trolling behaviour is okay. Some of the comments that have been hurled my way have affected me deeply but it’s the volume and frequency of the online abuse hurled my way that has caused me the most anguish.
While it’s relatively easy to dismiss the odd awful comment, repeated waves of nastiness are harder to ignore. I’m not ashamed to admit that there have been times when particularly malicious threads of comments have made me cry.
Vulnerability is not something we’re conditioned to admit to, but when it comes to the effects of online abuse, it’s important for me to be honest. I’ve found that being at the receiving end of a particularly vicious and prolonged online attack can even trigger my fight or flight response.
While I logically know that online comments carry no immediate physical danger, my brain still insists on flooding my body with adrenalin, sending my heart rate through the roof and preparing my body for evasive action as if a fairytale troll had come to life, leapt through the screen, club held high above its head, and threatened to clobber me to death.
When I’m attacked online, there is little I can do to control how I feel about it. I can mitigate the impact, but I can’t stop myself from feeling the initial hurt. Reactions to online abuse have nothing to do with strength or weakness, they are often due to brain chemistry.
Thankfully, over time, any anger and hurt I’ve felt has become dulled almost to the point of numbness, but in the early days I sometimes wondered how on earth I was going to handle the next week’s wave of vitriol.
When women online refuse to give in to their detractors and continue to share their opinions despite fierce and sometimes violent opposition, angry, threatened people hiding behind a screen become even more incensed.
To these people, women are supposed to know their place.
When we step out of line persistently and refuse to be cowed, we need to be taught a lesson. In our culture, women have consistently been represented as pliable creatures who will eventually give in. In my interactions online, and in the media, I’ve deliberately chosen to attempt to subvert this narrative wherever possible.
And in doing so, I’ve affixed a target to my back.
● Disclaimer: It is possible that the accounts mentioned above could have been hacked, or created by someone else.