I’m so sorry you had this experience. I was literally just talking with a friend today about fear of backlash from projects of mine. I once wrote something not even about feminism that apparently inspired some weird guy to seek out my personal Facebook profile and try to call me through Facebook (!) when I ignored his come-to-Jesus messages. What the f*ck is wrong with people.

On a similar wavelength, I had the experience some months ago of having to debate whether I should respond to a few misogynistic troll comments, and the men in question were not even commenting on any essay of my own; they were commenting on my comments to a whole other woman’s article. Apparently, what she’d written ruffled them, and what I’d written to her upset them too. Thus, my traffic hit one of the biggest spikes ever — because a neo-Nazi website skewered the original author’s story. That was a situation where I decided not to feed the trolls. I chose to use my energy on other things.

In any event, enough of my sharing more stories about this. Just wanted to offer some solidarity. I admire you for speaking up, and I would admire you just as much for ignoring them. It isn’t fair that women feel pressured to sacrifice some of their creative time for the mere purpose of defending themselves against sexist troll-holes.

In a sense, coaxing women into these kinds of senseless conversations is a method of exercising some degree of “control” over us. We’re damned if we do engage, damned if we don’t. In the former case, we lose some of our own very valuable time and energy on these men’s absurdity. In the latter, there’s the fact that countless buffoons will feel vindicated or judge us for remaining silent: they’ll think we were legitimately defeated, or that our silence is proof that we’re arrogant, and so on.

This is why there’s no right response for a woman… but there’s no wrong one either. ;)

Wishing you a successful writing career delightfully devoid of harassers and trolls, Gillian!