JOIN USHer 'battle cry' against internet trolling
Mary Beard, silver-haired and red-shod, was seated in front of a packed house at Lincoln Center, New York, one recent morning, addressing an annual conference called the Women in the World Summit. Mary, a professor at the University of Cambridge and the author of more than 10 books on the classics and classical era, is an authority on ancient Roman culture, but the line that got the biggest response struck a modern (although by no means exclusively modern) note.
Mary was recounting her response to a criticism once lobbed at her in print: not of her scholarship, but of her appearance. A few years ago, in response to one of the television documentaries for which she is well known in England, the (male) critic A A Gill wrote in The Sunday Times, in London, that she was less fit for a history programme than for The Undateables, a British reality show for the lovelorn disabled or disfigured.
Rather than mutely accept such barbs, Mary, with good cheer and a professorial drive to correct error wherever it may cross her path, responded in the pages of The Daily Mail with an essay headlined, Too Ugly for TV? No, I’m Too Brainy for Men Who Fear Clever Women. “When you look at me on the telly and say she should be on The Undateables,” she explained, in retelling, to the crowd, “you are looking at a 59-year-old woman. That is what 59-year-old women who have not had work done look like. Get it?”
Taking the first step
This, said Tina Brown, the founder of the Women in the World conference, amounted to a “battle cry,” a vindication of one of the rights of woman: to look, even in her 50s, like her unvarnished self. The crowd — mostly women, for the record — roared. Whoever else may not have gotten it, they did. As Mary made her way out of the auditorium and out into the morning, attendees stopped her to thank her. “You just brought this great spirit,” one woman said. That spirit is currently applied to a dual purpose. Mary, now 61, is a classicist of decades-long standing and a “troll slayer” of a few years.
She is the author of several books on ancient Rome, including the most recent, SPQR, a doorstopper history that was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
She maintains her professorship at Cambridge and, in April, was awarded the Bodley Medal, the highest honour given by the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University. But when she began making more-regular TV appearances, on popular documentaries on ancient themes and talking-head political programmes, she encountered the response that awaits many women with the temerity to venture into the public arena: “trolling” or online abuse.
As she did with Gill’s review, she responded, battling back her antagonists and becoming something of a folk hero in the process. Now her engagements often combine her two pursuits, as her talk at Women in the World did: tracing the history of misogyny from the ancient world to today. “The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really,” she said. But even in the present, she added, “we have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.”
The Internet can seem like an echo chamber made to amplify that desire, and in the years since Mary began taking on her trolls, instances of online harassment against women have continued. “There’s an awful lot about social media, which people feel very frustrated about,” she said. “It claims to be a democratic online world out there, and yet it isn’t.” Misogyny, in her view, is an accessible rhetoric to vent this spleen: “An available means of being nasty,” she said, “of expressing your discontent.”
Mary is unusually good-humoured about many of her adversaries. In one much-publicised instance, she not only commandeered an apology but has kept in touch with her reformed troll, for whom she now writes letters of reference. She did not, she said, set out to be a hunter of trolls, although she is now often asked to speak on the subject.
Around this time, two women approached Mary mid-interview to introduce themselves. They were gun violence prevention activists: Sandy Phillips of Jessi’s Message, whose daughter was killed in the Aurora, Colorado, theatre shooting in 2012, and Donna Dees-Thomases, the founder of the Million Mom March. “We’ve been excessively trolled with our work,” said Sandy, who had spoken at the conference the night before as part of panel called Mothers Against Gun Violence. “The same thing that gets said to you gets said to us.”