On Having The Last Word: How My IRL Nemesis Rescued Me From My Fake Online Enemy
Everyone’s got an enemy and a nemesis. But which has the power to change your life?
Last month Gawker published an expose on a random married rich guy who was soliciting gay sex. The public needed to know, according to Max Read, because “Gawker will always report on married executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives.” But the truth is that Gawker has a thing about ridiculing gay people who are unsure how to navigate the precarity of their identities in high-stakes situations.
It’s not just sexual minorities; the phenomenon is avalanching; ordinary people can’t stop getting blackmailed on the Internet. Two people killed themselves as a result of the recent Ashley Madison hack. However, I never cared in the first place that somewhere out there, shitty cheaters existed. I assume they exist.
Will the threats posed by Internet moralists really transform humankind into a species that is well-behaving and spiritually unblemished?
What stake do bloggers have in ensuring that I’m good? I want to be Good, as I assume everybody does, so perhaps I should submit myself to their wisdom. But I only want to submit myself to those who know better than I do about how life ought to be lived.
*
Recently, while out shopping for my new apartment, I ran into a Jezebel blogger who publicly made fun of me when I took a group of lesbians to a strip club on my 25th birthday. I was crossing; she was on the corner. Sweat was springing from my pores and I was tired, but my personal rulebook has conditioned me to never pass up once in a lifetime opportunities.
“I always wondered if this day would come,” I said, approaching.
“I know who you are,” she replied in a curt tone.
“The bad feminist?” I asked, referencing the self-defense I’d had published on Medium.
“Fuck you,” she said, struggling to keep eye contact. “You’re a terrible person.”
“Oh, you didn’t like my piece?”
“Fuck you. I had to deal with that mess all day.”
I looked at her, the real live person behind the username, and imagined the mess she’d had to deal with on the day I published my rebuttal. A talk with a supervisor, maybe; an afternoon’s barrage of tweets from pesky gay people; perhaps, even, an intolerably uncomfortable moment of reckoning that what she’d done had been shitty.
“…Good!” I replied finally, shaking my head.
She twitched, sputtering no other words besides “fuck you, you’re a terrible person” at least twice more. Yet this woman had hidden behind a corporate computer to type disproportionately scathing responses when I stuck up for myself in the dysfunctional Jezebel comment threads.
I was searching for the perfect comeback, but the same trite yet true thought kept surfacing in my mind: You’re homophobic.
My mind blanked, and the light changed, so instead in a cool voice I said, “And you’re even more ugly in person,” and walked on.
When I arrived home, I saw:
She’d made the freshly dead Virginia journalists into pawns in a Twitter war. I’d understood early that this would be an unfair fight; I’d been an idiot, though, and trusted that it would not be a lawless one.
*
I’m not a blameless victim who’s never wronged another woman in her life. The Internet also led me to my most famous nemesis, someone we’ll call Emily; a hotter version of Lady Gaga I used to make out with at our Liberal Arts College almost a decade ago.
According to Facebook, Emily was heterosexual, a year above me, and she invented absurd characters to share in video comments on the walls of our mutual friends. Her dark hair would be teased, her blue eyes would be electric, and she’d roll on bright lipstick, which was meant to add an unhinged effect to the personalities, but I, eighteen and closeted, found her gorgeous no matter what she did. She’d sit in her cluttered dorm room and deadpan on the grainy screen. My favorite personality was the deranged Southern Belle, who would drawl fantastic TMI: “Y’all would be proud of me — today, in the shower, I did NOT put soap in my vagina!” Then I found her blog, where her writing was even better: stories about magic panties, and being a crazy ex-girlfriend, and uncomfortable but successful jokes about her long term struggle with bulimia.
*
Chuck Klosterman once wrote that everyone’s got a nemesis and an archenemy. “You kind of like your nemesis, despite the fact that you despise him. If your nemesis invited you out for cocktails, you would accept the offer… But you would never have drinks with your archenemy, unless you were attempting to spike his gin with hemlock.”
So, your enemies and nemeses are reflections of who you are — because you chose them. This is the only ideology that has me wondering if I’ve made a mistake by engaging; I am now connected to someone who exploited a tragedy just to shut me up.
My shameless Internet enemy has embarrassed me. My complicated IRL nemesis, though, is becoming of me.
*
At last I met her in real life when a boy took me to a party in a little white house near campus. The moment we stepped in, I saw her, emerging from a clump of wasted upperclassmen.
“This is Emily,” he said, introducing us.
“I know who you are,” she told me, moving him to the side. “You’re hot.”
And in a swift motion grabbed me by the back of the head and kissed me. The boy was left with no choice but to slink away.
*
With Emily I had a low word count and was usually nodding my head in agreement. Saying the wrong thing was my greatest fear; she could never realize I was not as exciting as she was, or that I, too, was emotional, specifically about her.
She would text me first; I’d giddily trot to her dorm to pick her up, and then together in our frilly dresses we’d run, holding hands, to the parties she wanted to go to. Every night I would feel creepy for hoping we’d end up in her bed.
*
Feeling apologetic for gay desire is a real and not infrequent experience. Most gays can testify to this, which is why many were sad when my silly strip club email was made fun of. When I liked Emily, I cringed at everything I did around her, because every single thing I did happened within the context of my pathetic attraction to her. Deep down, I believed she was straight.
*
After a semester she asked to be girlfriends. I shook my head and walked her to the door, inwardly reminding myself that she had not been serious.
I soon decided I was in love with someone new: an unattainable Lesbian around campus who resembled Angelina Jolie in her Foxfire years, whose short hair was a comfort to me.
I explained to Emily that our friendship had to change because as it turned out, I was gay and she was straight, to which she sighed, “I think we should stop. You’re gay and I’m straight and I was obviously confused.”
Did she - just turn the tables and ditch me? She had! Whatever, I decided. She can have the last word this time.
*
Gradually, then suddenly, the vibe between us soured, as I suppose vibes do when a friendship is strictly experienced in nighttime hours during sad pre-games in damp, too-bright kitchens. I was dealing with new messes; my little sister had been hospitalized for an almost-fatal eating disorder, and my heart ached over this Angelina Jolie girl. Emily sensed that I was exploiting her social connections to end up at the same parties as the other girl I wanted, and meanwhile her openness to making out with anyone she came upon bothered me. It confirmed my secret fear: I was not special to her.
Eventually, I became the one texting Emily first. Whenever she came around, she’d sit in the corner as though she was gracing me with her presence, and then would slip away after twenty. Once I noticed it, I swiftly, wordlessly severed our attachment to prevent myself any further embarrassment. To become the dejected dyke would be my truest nightmare.
Perhaps I was not easily humiliated by the blogger, no matter how hard she tried, because there is no feeling of self-hatred another person could goad in me that has not already existed for me on my own at some point in the past.
*
Judging by her Twitter antics in the aftermath of my response essay, the blogger could school Sun Tzu on the art of war. As soon as she sensed resistance, instead of hearing me out, she set to the construction of a commendably competent smear campaign.
Her cohort and I engaged in a day or two of complicated Twitter battles that I, a bitchy when necessary but ultimately earnest person, was unequipped for.
The last word took the form of a pretty heart wrenching gesture on their part. The blogger’s friend began contacting Hustler Club to question the management, as well as individual dancers, if my party really had been as well-behaved as I’d sworn we had. For whatever reason, the blogger needed to convince an anonymous public that my friends- a collection of social workers, teachers, and nannies– had been out of control dykes at my birthday.
By pushing back, I’d defied the blogger’s self-appointed Internet authority, and it was her business to punish me for it.
*
The school year ended and I settled into a Brooklyn sublet for the summer with hardly a goodbye between Emily and me. I thought I didn’t care at all until my first gay pride, which I’d hyped up to my roommates and all over social media. I invited my depressing bar friends to my apartment, I bought rainbow shit, and I kept chanting, “It’s my first pride!”
On the afternoon before the festivities, my roommate inched into the kitchen to inform me that Emily was making fun of me on Facebook. In a comment to a friend, Emily had snarked that she was swearing off boys and going to find “you know who” at the gay pride parade. “I’m sure she’ll be there,” she wrote.
She was making fun of the uncool urgency with which I’d taken on my new identity- but I shrugged it off. Till that night at a Union Square party when a dangerous combination of substances had me on the phone calling her and leaving an angry voicemail that to this day is still a mystery to me. I have no memory of what I said. Except that I’m pretty sure I made fun of her eating disorder.
*
The next morning, recalling only snippets, the hangover of having collapsed into a new realm of mean was more grimy and terrible than was the hangover of consuming more chemicals than I’d ever before in my life.
Days later, I lost ten friends on Facebook, and word was getting back to me that she was playing the voicemail around. Eventually, when I returned to campus, I was a pariah. Some people already disliked me for my basic social awkwardness, and others by association to a controversial friend I had, so anyone who craved confirmation that I sucked finally had it. But most importantly, for those who didn’t know anything about me, my new reputation told them all they needed.
*
I also suffered severe defensiveness. People hate me, we had both fucked up, why did she have to take it so far? It didn’t help that Emily, who’d graduated, would appear in my Internet life sometimes, sending me weird messages on Tumblr, and “liking” things I’d post just to remind me that she was still around.
“There are consequences to your choices!” my shrink finally exclaimed one day.
If you take measures to hurt somebody, you can’t act surprised when they strike back.
*
It comforted me when people from school talked shit about Emily. “She’s crazy,” I’d hear now and then. Okay, I’d breathe. I may be crazy, but so is she.
So is that what the last word is, then? An appeal to any witnesses that you are the Good one? It’s nothing but a last-ditch effort at saving face in front of the Twitter jury?
*
My roommate was unfazed by my run-in with the blogger.
“She must’ve had you mixed up with someone else she’s written about,” she explained. “It doesn’t make sense that she’d come at you like that over the stupid strip club thing.”
“No-she told me she knew who I was! We talked about my essay!”
“Oh-then she’s crazy,” my friend replied without missing a beat.
But I’m on the fence about using “crazy” as an insult and an excuse. Manipulative women are unique victims of the patriarchy. We’ve been taught that we are not strong enough to engage in direct intellectual combat the way men do and therefore must resort to games.
I’m not sure whether I pity or resent so-called “crazy” women. I’m not sure why feminism is run by straight white women who feel that their egos, their indie aesthetics, and their twee Twitter snark are really mobilizing us.
As for me, between the revelation that my decisions had consequences and deciding that “crazy” is not a valid pass, I chose to change.
The next time I heard someone call Emily crazy, I reluctantly declared some truth. “But she’s a brilliant writer. We don’t like each other, but it doesn’t change how good she is.”
*
Trying to be a better woman comes with principles; hear your instincts as a method of choosing your battles. Be honest. Be self-questioning. Apologize when you’re wrong. Respect those around you by striving for precision, sharp as a knife, in any argument. Remain unyielding until those instincts command you to stop. The self-love I’ve cultivated over the years is a result of commitment to these rules.
*
Apparently Emily did this too. I know she did, because we have reunited, and for that I owe the blogger my gratitude. Medium has a function called “recommending,” which is essentially “liking.” When I published my self-defense, I saw Emily’s name on the list of those who had recommended it. I think…she means this well, I realized. And was immediately scared to face the Good. I found her on Facebook anyway and thanked her.
“I was so impressed by that piece and proud of you,” she wrote back.
Courageous humbleness on both our parts led to messages charged with relief which led to coffee overlooking the East River which led to a renewed friendship of sharing writing and emotionally supporting each other.
*
Whenever I was honest, I knew I hated myself for what I said to Emily. But when I’m honest with myself about my run-in with the blogger, I don’t care much about what I said. As we now know, people can be “ugly” on the inside too. Watching a powerful person’s moral fabric combust right before you-concluding in a series of slanderous Internet posts that disrespect the dead-is more terrible than you expect it’d be until it happens to you, which is why I’m writing at all, for the second and last time, about Jezebel.
My effort to tell the truth may be futile — I will never have a readership of ten million, because I deferred a writing career in favor of an altruistic career path. And all my friends are wringing their hands that I am penning a last word essay because now we know the blogger might try to obliterate my hard won happiness, my career, the boundaries of my privacy, if she needed terribly enough to vindicate her ego. In a liberal community, advocating for myself should not result in my personal ruin, but that’s the direction this era of the Internet is going, and for that reason, I now have a lawyer.
*
The blogger said that she hoped I’d “learn” from this experience.
I didn’t learn a thing from her. But I did gain.
I realized how afraid we all should be of the direction that popular blogging is going — the relentless striving for utmost shock value, the sheer stupidity.
I remembered my community. I’d been floating away from activism. Seeing that Gawker’s disdain for imperfect gay people and their prioritizing of self-justification over journalistic ethics has led them to both undermine my self-defense, and, much worse, to assault a closeted man into what we can only assume is devastation — has left me feeling protective of my people and back in touch with the issues.
I discovered just how wary we ought to be of straight white feminism. My side of the story deserved “dialogue” and instead I experienced a miniscule sampling of “silencing.” While I once (mostly) understood silencing as a concept, I realize now that I had not fully conceptualized it until I had the tiniest true taste of it. I must admit it — to know that many others experience this particular feeling ubiquitously and perpetually, has been my most profound takeaway.
*
Oh — and two more fun consequences: The funny uptick in the blogger’s coverage of lesbian issues after she was accused of being homophobic. And that I’ve made myself into more trouble than clickbait was worth. If my noise means that moving forward, the blogger will feel wary of ridiculing a random nobody –if only for dread that the nobody might turn out to be another headache like me — then, good!
*
Emily and I exchange apologetic looks when we broach the subject of our past.
“We cancelled each other out,” we decided early on. “We were both terrible.”
Where we used to be terrible, we are now tough and growing better every day because we’ve owned our wrongdoings. Our compassionate treatment of each other now seems to heal most of it.
The other day I was sad, in part because of the nasty run-in, and suddenly I received a text from Emily asking how I was doing. “I just had a feeling I should text you,” she said, even though she was about to leave for a vacation with her boyfriend.
I asked her if I could send her some writing that I was about to start working on (this essay), and these were her last words before she got on the plane:
With a life like this — three-dimensional, honest, and abound with sisterhood- it won’t be at all hard to be Good.
