As a person vaguely in the media who possesses a body and clothes, I’m no stranger to the hatred and vitriol that comes from all directions when online. I’m talking about trolls – not little plastic figurines that sit atop your pencil, but hairy, smelly men who live under their mum and dad’s house and reply things like, “that dress makes you look pregnant” to the tweets of the Loose Women.
Of course I’m being facetious; internet trolls can take many forms. From middle-aged women who didn’t like an answer I gave about the civil service on House of Games to football fans who call me a woke snowflake for publicly liking women’s football (joke’s on them, I do rude gestures at eight-year-olds who support the opposing team regardless of gender), the internet is a shield behind which we can all hide from the consequences of our hateful words.
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I was recently exposed to my largest deluge of online malevolence when I was given my own segment every Saturday morning on popular rolling sports news channel Sky Sports News late last year. I would start the show by doing an anarchic comic monologue that rounded up the previous week in football, in which I could tell it like it is, as long as it is grossly centrist and in keeping with the sponsors’ values.
Some disgruntled viewers took to the internet, initially in their tens and then their hundreds, critiquing my appearance and the clothes I chose to wear. A 6ft 1in lesbian who wears a wide-leg trouser and a functional shirt clearly wasn’t something they were used to on their glamorous sports channel and boy did they let me know.
One morning I was really excited to wear a new shirt and jacket I’d purchased the previous day. I received a Twitter notification and found that someone had taken a picture and video of me, posted it with an insulting caption and now hundreds of people were replying with their hot takes on my sartorial choices. One stranger wrote: “Who would wake up in the morning and choose to wear that?”
I was pretty upset and turned to some of my colleagues at the channel. It was former Rangers striker Kris Boyd who gave me the kindest advice. The gist of Kris’s words was that all people who work in the media are subject to abuse at some point in their careers but it seems to affect women more, particularly women who aren’t white, thin, able-bodied or straight.