The Perils of Reporting While Female
Trolls, death threats, and constant harassment — the risky business of being a woman journalist in the social media era
“Feminist cunts should die.”
This was the subject of an email I received a year and a half ago. Wary but curious, I opened the message and confirmed that the feminist cunt in question was me.
I didn’t delete the message. Instead, I printed it out and brought it to my local police station, where they added it to a growing file that had started some months earlier, after I published an article in Politico correlating toxic masculinity and mass shootings. In response to the article, a man I had never met sent me a picture of a mutilated woman accompanied by an incoherent message.
The graphic nature of the image unsettled me in a way his words alone would not have, and persuaded me to file my first police report. Some fellow female journalists encouraged me to do this, in case the threat — and others like it I’d been receiving — escalated to something more serious.
At the time, I was no stranger to cyberbullying. When I wrote about climate change, the gender wage gap, and racial health inequities for the Street, the comments sections of my articles were often filled with hundreds of posts…
