This past weekend some friends came over for a late Sunday lunch. It was a cold, windy early March day, with a blizzard in the forecast. We ate lamb meatballs with mint and lemon, rice studded with toasted almonds and dried fruit, and a salad with California avocados and hothouse cucumbers—in other words, winter food that longs for spring. We drank a fizzy dry Lambrusco and then sat around the table and talked, peeling tangerines and pouring from a big red pot of cinnamon tea, while the baby did laps around the table and whacked us with the whisk broom and dustpan that are his new favorite toys.
We were two college professors, one local politician, and me, and we talked about education and politics and policy, about strategy and community. I’ve been thinking a lot about power lately, about who has it and how they got it, about what they want to do with it. In this past year, I gave birth and turned thirty. I started a new job that gives me access to rooms where money gets distributed and policy is influenced. I saw my country taken over by a wave of wildly unqualified demagogues, and for the first time in my life I looked at people who have more power than me and thought, I could do that. For the first time in my life it feels important that I take over, because if I don’t something terrible will happen.
So I asked the question that is never far below the surface when I think about power and ambition:
How much power can I have before the rape threats begin?
I am constantly aware of being the kind of woman—a leftist, outspoken unapologetic feminist—who readily inspires violence in men, and my only hope for avoiding it is not to attract attention. This is part of why I am loath to write for a wide audience, why I have told only a tiny handful of people about this website in the first place, why I have until lately rarely said to myself, I could do that.
A 2016 study found that almost half of Australian women face harassment online (over two-thirds for women under thirty). But it’s not just an online problem: 80% of female members of parliament globally have reported psychological or sexual harassment or violence. And, of course, the United States is currently being governed by a man who bragged openly, on tape, about committing sexual assault.
Caitlin Moran wrote about this back in 2013, when a woman who campaigned for Jane Austen to be on British bank notes—of all the colossally unthreatening things!—and was deluged with horrific threats of violence for days.
By the time a woman has finished defending herself for her abusers, and actually gets around to doing what she came on Twitter to do – to talk, to communicate – she’s already exhausted. And, also, a little more angry, paranoid, defensive and, frankly, rattled than the non-abused people her Tweets appear next to. There’s nothing quite like being repeatedly told you’re violatable and worthless to send you to bed anxious and unhappy.
I suppose this is the point where I should say, but they can’t keep me down! I’m going to claw out as much power as I can anyway, violence and harassment be damned!
But frankly, I’m not sure I’m up to it. So, somebody, tell me: How much power can I have before the rape threats begin?