The “Women Are Having Fun And Must Be Stopped” Police are everywhere.

Daily digital misogyny and how to combat it

Not that I spent much time on the app formerly known as Twitter anymore, but one of the most frustrating points about social media is the way every platform affects the other platforms in some way. Discourse on X will find its way to Instagram, Reddit, Tiktok and vice versa. And since engagement gets verified blue checkmarks paid on Elon Musk’s platform, they have discovered the easiest way to get said engagement is misogyny.

Misogyny is one of the world’s oldest evils and is so normalised, it’s basically baked into society.  

A running bitter joke amongst my friends is if you want to triple your income, the easiest way to do it is get on the internet and bash women – from Andrew Tate to Jordan Peterson, whole careers have been made by sheer hatred towards women and everything women value. And this is precisely what these engagement farming blue checks have discovered. Post a video of women dancing, having a good time and say “This is why men hate modern women”, sit back and watch the misogynists gather to curse or shout at these women. Or post a video of a group of single mothers starting commune so they can raise their children together with the caption “Women are destroying society” and watch as thousands of people comment in the affirmative. A tiktok video of a teenage girl dancing in her bedroom has a comment section full of adult men calling her all kinds of abusive names for the crime of….dancing in her bedroom. And God forbid if women read books by women, because nothing goes viral faster than someone making fun of women authors and women’s literature.

Of course, in a digital world run by algorithms, these posts with their huge engagement are pushed onto all our feeds, which then end up being posted across various platforms for “clout”. The end result? There is absolutely nothing women can do without being attacked. The amount of times I see an innocent picture of a group of women having lunch together being descended on by misogynists who now think they have the right to comment on their looks, appearance and what they are eating has increased exponentially.

And if we are still under the mistaken impression that social media has no effect on real life, I recommend looking into how teenage boys are deeply influenced by the content they consume and how they are treating the women around them including their teachers as a result of that.

In a time when women’s rights are under attack, the notion that women existing and enjoying our lives is now being demonised shows a deep festering wound at the heart of society. If left untreated, the daily misogyny that women face and have to live with will only get worse. However, this can be a teachable moment – the antidote to misogyny has always been to starve it of the oxygen it relies so strongly on, attention and the complicity of society. The best response to seeing engagement bait where women are being hated is to deprive it of attention and engagement. I often think of Iliad in these situations. When Eris, the goddess of strife created the golden apple of discord and tossed it into a bored Olympus inscribed with the words, “For the Fairest”, she did it with the specific purpose of starting a riot between the Gods. She could only succeed because they did exactly what she expected. If we deprive those engagement farming accounts of the oxygen they crave to pay their bills by refusing to rise to their bait or reporting them, we can actually reverse at least some of the damage being done to this world.

Make people feel embarrassed of being associated with misogynists. Make misogyny unprofitable for anyone to pursue. The way we win is by depriving it of the attention it so desperately needs.