Backdropper shares her experience of being a female journalist

One Sentence Paragraph

Backdropper McKenna Christy shares her experiences dealing with online harassment as a student journalist.

BY MCKENNA CHRISTY | DESIGN BY RACHEL RECTOR

Content warning and disclaimer: This story includes transphobic and misogynistic comments from Facebook, of which certain users will remain anonymous for safety reasons. Journalism is not an easy passion to have. Being a journalist can be all-consuming and exhausting, but sometimes, that is part of the fun.

Throughout the five years I have been involved with journalism, I have learned, explored and pushed myself. I am learning the universals of the profession, such as the experiences most journalists have, through my involvement with publications at Ohio University. But there are certain experiences some journalists don’t face this early in their careers.

I am a young woman with an unrelenting motivation to achieve my goals. This is “intimidating” to some people, such as older men, who were often taught growing up that women should not act passionately by our patriarchal culture. There is more depth to the idea I mentioned and I will touch on its complexity later.

My interactions with men who have ideas of how women should act speak for themselves, however. During my senior year of high school, I was our magazine’s editor-in-chief. We produced an issue dedicated to social justice in 2020. I wrote a letter from the editor detailing the contents of the issue and why, given our country’s problematic origins, it was an important read. A takeaway from my letter is the following quote:

“This issue was written with the goal to feature those who have stories to tell about their experiences facing racism, homophobia, microaggressions and other forms of discrimination. If this issue is uncomfortable to read at times, that’s a reason to continue reading and reflecting.”

A month after we released the social justice issue, my letter was posted on a Facebook group dedicated to “informing people” of happenings in my hometown of Powell, Ohio. A person was angry about what I wrote because some people believe that critical race theory is being taught in public K-12 schools. I ignored it and the comments because I didn’t feel it was beneficial to my growth as a writer and student.

Around the same time, I noticed a new “community” Facebook group emerged. This one was committed to criticizing teachers in my former school district for being “socialist indoctrinators.” I defended a teacher in the comment section of the post and said I felt threatened by the group. My comment was deleted but I took my comment to another post and published it there.

My second comment caught the attention of the creator of the group who posted my letter and in response to my writing said: “All can agree that Christy would have benefited from more instruction in English composition and less indoctrination in social activism. A one sentence paragraph? C’mon, man!”

I was blocked from commenting, so this person must have been intimidated by someone who supposedly can’t write.

Although the group was created anonymously, it became clear who the owner was when someone posted my letter on a comment thread this past February, a year after it was originally posted on Facebook. The person’s account used their last name and had a picture of them. They used the same criticism of my letter saying: “This would not be considered 12th grade level writing in the 1980s …”

The comments about my writing do bother me but the comments that this person makes about others bother me more and prompted me to write this piece. Some of the worst comments I found were transphobic and misogynistic.

“Do teenage girls still deal with anorexia, bulimia or cutting? Or do they all decide they’re trans these days?”

the person on Facebook who used their personal account to do so says.

Another comment of similar nature stuck out to me as well and was in response to a woman fighting back against the person’s harmful comments: “What a classy ciswoman. I’d call you a bitch but that would be an insult to female dogs and male dogs that identify as female.”

These comments reveal the reality of movements on Facebook aimed at dehumanizing women, trans people and other marginalized groups. PhD candidate Pierce Alexander Dignam and professor Deana A. Rohlinger at Florida State University in the Department of Sociology discuss the consequences of unified misogyny and men’s rights ideologies on social media.

Dignam and Rohlinger focus on the “Red Pill” forum, which can be found on Reddit. com and was created by former Republican lawmaker Robert Fisher in 2012, according to the authors. The name is in reference to the movie The Matrix where the protagonist chooses to take a red pill resulting in enlightenment over the blue pill representing slavery.

The forum is an online space purposed “to expose the ‘true nature’ of feminism as oppressive to men and to help men reclaim their ‘rightful place’ in society.” Dignam and Rohlinger place their concentration on the Red Pill forum to show how the platform helped former President Donald Trump win the 2016 election.

The Red Pill has relevance to Facebook and the person who lives in my hometown. On an archived post on Red Pill, user Chazthundergut posted a transphobic comment similar to the ones the person from my community did.

“Women who enter their masculine frame and start acting like men end up miserable and lonely. We all know it, and we clearly see it playing out in society…Men are cutting off their own balls, their own masculinity and acting like they wish they had a vagina,” Chazthundergut says.

The takeaway from the comments made by Chazthundergut and the person on Facebook is what Dignam and Rohlinger explain as the reason men make these comments in the first place.

“The alt-right positions itself as [white] men’s salvation, promising to help men reclaim their natural manhood and usurp women’s social, political, and economic power.

In essence, the alt-right offers men’s rights activists, or individuals who make this pro-male attitude central to their identity politics, a solution to the ‘woman problem’: organized misogyny.” These men are fearful of women succeeding and not because women “are acting like men.” They use transphobia and misogyny to mask their mediocre talents and lives. They don’t want people around them to realize that their male privilege is what gives them power over others rather than their intellect. The comments made about my writing struck an insecure chord of mine but at least my message was powerful enough to strike the chord of a transphobic and misogynistic man for more than a year now. I also want to bring attention to how this person “I will not stop challenging male supremacism through my writing, regardless of has affected me as a journalist. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement with journalists in Germany, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States shows that “online harassment of women what the person from my journalists is a global problem that needs to hometown says about it.” be addressed.” Most of the women journalists interviewed for the study MCKENNA CHRISTY faced harassment from engaging online. “Divisive topics, such as immigration, race, feminism or politics, seemed to elicit greater abuse,” the researchers say. Each time I write a story about the topics above or reproductive justice, one of my favorite topics to explore, I now fear someone may harass me. The researchers discovered that women journalists who have experienced online harassment emotionally prepare themselves for backlash. Although my nerves increase when I publish stories now, it doesn’t make me want to stop. There aren’t many things that make me as passionate as reporting on the world around me and talking to people about their experiences in my communities. I am an intelligent young woman with many passions, and I will not stop challenging male supremacism through my writing, regardless of what the person from my hometown says about it. How is that for a one sentence paragraph?b