What unites vile, grubby trolls? They all hate women

The greatest nastiness online comes from angry, isolated and deeply conservative far right men who hate anything new or changing. In particular, they hate women, writes Claire Harvey.

It is not a coincidence that in one week we are all confronted by both the horror of Christchurch and the sheer depressing normality of a young woman being pilloried for her body.

These are two faces of the same phenomenon: the growth of a large, ­interconnected network of people without empathy or girlfriends: angry, ­isolated men in elasticated pants who play a lot of computer games.

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Not all of them have the urge to kill people, as Brenton Tarrant did to such devastating effect in Christchurch.

Most of them are just happy to stay home and urinate in their undies in order to maintain concentration during 50-hour gaming binges.

But what unites them, on reddit and 8chan and all the other troll-holes where they gather, is the propensity to spew forth nastiness in the agreeable safe-space of their shared loneliness.

It’s a high and mighty place to spew your repulsiveness from, isn’t it? Picture: iStock

Does this sound a bit personal? It is.

I gave up posting on social media a while ago when my feed was just saturated with hatred and anger. I was spending my weekends dreading the mounting notifications on Twitter and trying to ­resist the urge to read about how stupid and ugly I am.

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And I think this group of people gravitates to the right. Don’t get me wrong — there are left-wing morons, haters and bile-spewers on Twitter, too.

But in my experience (perhaps ­because I am politically moderate), the greatest nastiness comes from the deep conservative far right who hate anything new or anything that might be changing.

In particular, they hate women.

It’s sad, isn’t it, that Tayla Harris, who is only 21, has rocketed to national fame because of her experience as a victim, not her status as a heroine. A beautiful photograph of the young AFLW player’s bal­letic follow-through from a kick was being feted on Facebook earlier this week when the comments stream turned nasty.

“Here’s a pic of me at work… think about this before your derogatory comments, animals,” AFL star Tayla Harris, 21, wrote. Picture: Michael Willson/AFL Media

Essentially, the gag for the trackie brigade was that the photograph showed Harris in tiny shorts (her work uniform) with her legs wide apart. Cue vagina references. Allusions to sex and rape. Suggestions of violence. Outright statements that she shouldn’t be allowed to call herself an athlete.

This from people who’d struggle to run around the block unless they were following an ice cream truck.

It’s nothing new, of course.

Sportswomen, being in possession of vaginas, are naturally an object of titillation/vilification for men who struggle to find non-inflatable women interested in having sex with them.

From surfer Stephanie Gilmore to ­basketballer Liz Cambage, you’d struggle to find a female athlete who hasn’t had her vagina assessed for her by some 36-year-old virgin living in his parents’ ­granny flat. I suspect most of them have never seen a real vagina.

The Carlton Blues footballer, Harris, approach the trolls head on and called them out. Picture: AAP/James Ross

My instinct when confronted by trolls is to block them. I think I have more blockees than followers, in fact.

But I think I prefer Tayla’s approach: call them out. “If these people are saying things like this to someone they don’t know on a public platform, what are they saying behind closed doors, and what are they doing?” she said.

At the very least, the social media ­platforms should delete or suspend them.

If they can detect a nipple within 20 seconds of it being posted by a breastfeeding mum, then surely they can find a trackie-dacked loser with his hand in his pants and take away his platform.

Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

@chmharvey