This was published 6 years ago
Clementine Ford: This is the personal price I pay for speaking out online
By Clementine Ford
A lot has been written about the consequences of doing activism online, particularly if you work in the feminist space. Too often, these testimonies or complaints are dismissed as the rantings of oversensitive baby-women. We provoke it, we're told. Some of us are even accused of courting it, laying traps to ensnare the splendid chaps who wouldn't normally dream of dropping by to talk about the various ways you should be beaten or violated but who just couldn't resist telling you this one time how your face looks like a bridge fell on it.
Most of us have become good at laughing about these intrusions. We screenshot them and caption them with withering commentary to invite everyone else to mock ruthlessly as well.
But there is a cost to the relentless onslaught of this violence, and it leaves one weary and skittish.
It's not so much in the uninvited, unflattering commentary about appearance or sexual desirability. As foul and hateful as the language of this is, it's mostly just boring to hear over and over how disgusting a stranger finds you.
Clementine Ford.Credit: Simon Schluter
No, the cost is in the slow and steady encroachment of your physical and mental space. It's in the knowledge that there are people who try to track down your home address while updating their progress in private online groups filled with other people trying to do the same thing.
It's in the realisation that these same people track the details of your work events, emerging as soon as those details are announced to heap abuse on the people who have engaged you to appear for them.
It's in seeing the obsessive blog posts they write about you (on the website that seems increasingly devoted to monitoring only you) expand to include first your partner's name and then your child's.
It's in understanding that the vigilance you thought you enacted before to protect both of these people has to increase tenfold – because they didn't ask to be implicated in the unfortunate consequences of your chosen profession, and any fears you've ever had about your safety pale in comparison to the ones you have about your baby.
Clementine Ford with her baby son.
It's in the cost of knowing that the rules are different for you and always will be; that you must be composed at all times and never scrap in the muck laid down by your opponents because your moral purity is measured differently to theirs.
You can be told 20 days in row that you should be raped and sodomised and beaten and strung up and thrown out and taught a lesson, but if on the 21st day you turn around and make a joke about firing men into the sun using a cannon, you are a scold who hates men and is teaching her son that he's a rapist.
He is the cost too. Since announcing my second book, Boys Will Be Boys (an exploration of toxic masculinity and the bonds of harmful brotherhood), I have been told I should have my son taken away from me. That I am a child abuser who will teach him to hate himself.
And since uncovering a sardonic joke written in a friend and fellow feminist's copy of my book – a note that wryly asked her if she had "killed any men today" and if not, why not – a note that was a direct hat tip to the relentless accusation made to feminists that we hate men and want them all to die and that our efforts to better the world for everybody are actually just code for wanting to commit widespread manocide; a message that was quite clearly withering satire – the same people who tell me all the ways they'd like to hurt me, or who say nothing as other men tell me those same things too, have been using it as an opportunity to double down on their assertion that it's me who poses the real threat to social order.
That I am a terrorist who should be reported to ASIO. That DOCS needs to be made aware of my child and track his welfare. And, as someone saw fit to tell me on my Facebook page, that I am the reason my son will kill himself one day.
The cost is in the lies. There have been so many lies told about me that started from one tenuously made allegation and snowballed out to include blatant falsehoods, it's difficult to know where to start.
When MRA trolls started harassing the booksellers at Avid Reader in Brisbane for simply sharing my book announcement post, it quickly became clear that half of them weren't even sure what they were protesting. Was it that Avid Reader promoted me in general? Was it that they stocked my old book? Some people seemed to think it was because they stock my new book, a book one man described as "delusional nonsense" despite the fact it hasn't even been written yet.
Recently, I saw a comment from a man declaring he is trying to rally a group to protest outside the Brisbane Powerhouse where he says I'll be launching my new book in a few weeks. I'm actually there to speak at a babywearing conference, but facts, once again, are irrelevant.
Because of the things one pathetic man (an anonymous coward) in particular has written about me over the past few years, I am regularly accused of utter falsehoods. That I bullied a disabled man. That I bullied schoolboys. That I told schoolboys they would grow up to be rapists. That I had a reporter fired because I didn't like the questions he was asking me. That I had a man fired before Christmas and made his family homeless. These things can all be printed and shared and pointed to as "evidence" despite the fact there's not an ounce of truth to any of them.
This is the cost. It's in the hyper vigilance one starts to practise, assessing all public appearances for potentially dangerous people.
It's in knowing where the exits are. It's in grimacing each time you open your email, and wondering what new and inventive subject lines you'll see today.
It's in watching yourself become a more paranoid and fearful person, because you have been sent so much abuse and hate and violence and threats for years that there's literally no other way to be.
This is the cost. But I'm not done paying it yet.