MAN! I feel like a woman
To my fifteen-year anniversary with internet misogyny
I used to log on to AIM on my family’s basement desktop to see what boys really thought of me.
I’d stack phone books on the chair because I was too small to see the screen, and wait for the pings that told me my worth. If the pings didn’t come, I messaged SmarterChild and asked if they thought I was pretty. I was 10 years old and careful, so careful, because I heard the internet was forever. Who knew how long forever really was? We were the first explorers in a vast new terrain, one of infinite possibility, one where, we learned, boys told the truth.
I held my breath when I scrolled, looking for my name on the rankings in their profiles. She has chubby arms, -3, a boy typed, so I covered my limbs with big sweatshirts at school. Someone wrote that he saw my training bra strap in gym that morning— how gross, how embarrassing, did I want to make out? In Math the next day he avoided my eyes, and I wondered what was real and what wasn’t, what the rules were in this strange game we played. Could I Google them?
When I was 15, there were new messages on new social medias, the ones with all the power. One of these websites began as a ‘Hot or Not’ game where boys could rank girls’ photos, and then it became the biggest social network in the world. Slut, the boys typed now. Keep…