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A young poet, enough of a rising star to be profiled in the
New York Times Magazine, posts a poem called "The Rape Joke." It begins, "The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend." It is about as intense and intimate as an online post can get. In the magazine article, the poet's mother reads the poem, but it is the comment thread that makes the mother cry. "Do you see what these people were saying about you?" her mother asked. "Mom, it's O.K.," the writer, Patricia Lockwood, said. "It's just the Internet."
Internet cruelty is nothing new. It might only surprise children and the uninitiated, who dip into the public sphere for the first time and are shocked by what comes back at them. But Lockwood's response reveals a generational shift. Her mother calls the commentators "people." Lockwood identifies them as "the Internet," a strange hybrid of human and computer, innately vicious but also ubiquitous, phenomena to be ignored.
Others have a more difficult time ignoring it. After reaching out to her father's mourning fans, Robin Williams' daughter
Zelda became a target of sadistic trolls - piling trauma upon trauma. She closed her Instagram account and shut down her Twitter feed. A budding journalist who had just had one of her first stories posted on her university newspaper's website was so stunned by the comments that she decided to find another line of work. A young writer in New York City who was photographed trying to make ends meet by hauling his typewriter to the High Line and busking stories was savaged online. (He ended up writing an article about his ordeal called
"I Am an Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything.") Journalist Amanda Hess, who
wrote one of the most talked-about stories of this year on women and the Internet, relates getting this comment to one of her pieces: "Amanda, I'll f*cking rape you. How does that feel?"
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