My First Piece Of Hate Mail
“I just read the opinion of a judgmental droopy eyed hack, so I hope you’ll take the time to read my opinion.”
These are weird words to see in your inbox from a complete stranger. But I’d avoided looking long enough. I needed to face what I’d done.
It’d been a full day since I published a piece about a bad OKCupid date that went stupidly viral. Long story short: I ended up accidentally meeting the Magic the Gathering world champion, whose company I did not enjoy, and relayed the experience to one of my editors. He urged me to write about it. I was an intern who wanted to please, so I did what he asked without really taking time to think about what might happen. A few days after I left for a new job, he published the piece.
It probably shouldn’t have gone up. It hadn’t been edited much. And I’d rushed to write it in my free time, when I wasn’t scouting for story ideas or tagging posts. I didn’t feel any particular allegiance to my opinion. Just that I’d met a guy who had dedicated the majority of his life to something really niche, and seemed pretty arrogant about it. At the time I was also in a particularly bad early-20s fog. I felt generally pessimistic about relationships and people and the way my family raised me. My feelings were far from my actions, and I was numb and drunk too often.
But whatever was going on with me personally didn’t change the fact that I wrote a negative review of a date with a man who was a god among nerds. And that meant I, a sacrificial female, must pay. I was suddenly the person at which an entire community of Internet dwellers could direct their hate. Their hate for the girl who laughed at them in middle school, the crush who rejected them in their teenage years, the sorority girl who called them ugly or fat or dweeby. I’d never been that kind of person in the past. But your real-life track record doesn’t matter much when you’re deemed the Internet’s dartboard for the week.
So when I’d caught word that what I’d wrote was causing a shit storm, I avoided my inbox for the rest of the day — relishing in the fact that I happened to be moving and didn’t have an Internet connection. The next day, I slipped away to a café and finally engaged, starting with my Facebook “Other” folder, in hopes it’d be tamer than the goat.se links and “rapid cunt fire” I’d seen and swiftly deleted in my email’s inbox.
The first real piece of hate mail I read was from a guy named Cody, and it went like this:
I hope you read this, stock up on batteries and hagen daz, its the only love you’ll get.
magic is fucking lame, but you are a judgmental tard, and your backpedaling is unbecoming of someone with an education.
Maybe if he was overweight and verbally abusive, or perhaps if he had fit into your warped high school fantasy he would of had better prospects, hey, guess what you’re not Carrie Bradshaw, but your face does resemble a foot so I can see why you got confused.
It read like pure stream-of-consciousness. The sentences were run-ons, punctuation was missing, words were misspelled, there was a weird amount of alliteration. He thought I looked like Carrie Bradshaw/a foot. He wasn’t even defending Magic the Gathering (which was “fucking lame”). But he clearly hated me, the woman who had the gall to reject a man in public. I was disgusted, and yet I couldn’t stop reading.
Its not just dweebs, nerds, and whatever other labels you want to churn out, but its good to see the liberal institutions still pushing out square pegs.
…truth be told, you’re a shameful representation of womankind, your reptile brained vanity based procession of priorities is proof positive of that. What about love and all that shinny shit you females wax poetic about?
just get over it, you want someone with a cock and money whom your gaggle of friends wont make fun of you for and whom you don’t have to explain.
Log the fuck out of life, permanently, and if you can’t bring yourself to, keep your uneducated judgmental, trite thoughts to yourself.
I bet your neighbors think you have a really big blender, what with the constant humming and vibrations, if only they knew sad sordid truth; to deal with your loneliness you might try hooking that shit up to a car battery.”
He hoped I’d be alone forever. He had taken a moment to fantasize that I inhabited a sexless existence. He encouraged me to kill myself via some sort of creative vibrator-based electrocution.
I recognized that style of writing as something I might’ve scribbled in my journal after a bad day in high school — a spew of anger, poorly reasoned without apology. And yet, for how horrible this person had demonstrated themselves to be, I couldn’t help but absorb his words like a dutiful sponge. Even if he had lumped me into an idea of a female that I was very much not.
Part of this, I later realized, is just a young woman’s initiation into the real world: hearing a constant flow of criticism/approval of your body, face, or intelligence. Hearing it, and taking note, and internalizing it, the same way you remember any time a boy you like says another girl is pretty. It’s a dumb reflex, but one that I admittedly used as a way to gauge my value. Doing this nibbled at my confidence for years and years, almost systematically. Each year of my life, it seemed my head hung just a smidgen heavier from the shit I’d been told a woman was supposed to be like, but that I wasn’t.
So, it was a bad idea for me to read the rest of the messages, but the day we got Internet, I did it anyway. I remember toting home a large bottle of Grüner Veltliner, plopping down on the couch next to my roommate, and gulping a new glass for every two or three emails. The bottle of wine disappeared long before I’d cleared my inboxes.
Each night, for a few weeks, I went through them like a pouch of Oreos, feeling a strange mix of satisfaction and disgust each time I swallowed one whole. There were hundreds more messages on Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. New ones flowed in faster than I could delete the old. That month, I lived almost exclusively in the insane, unbridled heads of my hate mailers.
When I’d reached peak sexist comment — probably somewhere around the third death threat — I stopped listening. I reverted back to my auto-delete strategy and tried to go on living my life.
But something strange happened: I started to secretly believe everything they, the voices in my inbox, had said. I would look into the mirror, and see the lazy eye, crooked face and imperfect teeth that one piece of hate mail had so carefully detailed. I’d find a flimsy sentence I’d written, and deem myself unworthy of journalism, just like so many of my anonymous enemies had. It was akin to that episode of “Seinfeld”, where Elaine breaks up with a guy, he says her head is big and then suddenly birds are flying into it and cab drivers are telling her to stop blocking their rearview mirrors. My reality changed, and it became clear from the hate mail that it was all because a ton of crazy strangers thought I wasn’t attractive enough to outwardly reject a man.
Getting through my funk happened in phases, all of which included lots of wine. At first I laughed outwardly with my friends about my predicament, thinking that if I wore my unwanted badge as Nerd Hater proudly, I would at least get the best of my tormentors. But slowly that devolved into a fear that my career was over. I’d be the Right Said Fred of bloggers — the one hit wonder that was known for something she’d clearly half-assed from the beginning.
That fear devolved to doubt, and for a while I was too terrified to write. Even when I had easy assignments, I’d freeze at the sight of a blank page. Part of this was because I knew my harassers were watching me. For as long as two years after I published that piece, they’d often find me on Twitter or in the comments section of something new I’d written, however trivial, and say I was a garbage female who sucked at journalism and deserved a lifetime of loneliness.
They would’ve driven me out of my profession, if it weren’t for a core group of supportive friends, my stubbornness, and the fact that I loved what I did too much to let it go. The fear faded, I stopped caring about the comments, and I built my confidence back.
Though the scope of my experience was a particularly unique one, women writers across the Internet are vulnerable to this kind of verbal sewage every day. Any lady who chooses to air her unpopular opinions online is harassed far more liberally than her male peers. Period. I’m often sad for future generations who might end up facing the Internet alone one night, reading a mean comment at their laptop, and not quite realizing that it numbs them or hurts them if they’re not ready for it.
And sometimes I still think about Cody, my first hate-mailer. Ever so often I stalk his profile, expecting to see a guy posing with a Confederate flag and a pitbull, aiming a rifle into the sky. But mostly it’s just photos of him and his young son and daughter. I’m still boggled by the thought that a father of two children randomly shot off an anonymous hate letter to a girl he’d never met, but the Internet has proved to be an ideal incubator for such dual identities. I think about his daughter, and — once she becomes Internet conscious — whether she’ll get the same treatment from some other anonymous dad .
And then I think: This is why you don’t read the hate mail.
