Required Vacation Reading: Sara Schaefer on Sexist Internet Trolls

• Sara Schaefer

We’re big fans of comedian Sara Schaefer here at the Mercury. As Courtney Ferguson once wrote of the stand-up, she’s “friend material.” And so she is! Telling it like it is with winning lady-swagger. Which is exactly what she did recently, in a piece at the Huffington Post titled, “Oops, I Made a Feminist Joke on the Internet.” Here’s Schaefer, talking about all the garbage comments lobbed at her after she dared to suggest that it might be challenging sometimes to be a woman in comedy:

As if every other week we don’t see a new article about the down-trend of female roles and jobs in my industry; as if we don’t keep finding out we’re getting paid less than our male counterparts; as if women’s bodies and humanity aren’t under constant attack in every cranny of society. These men are acting like I posted a video of myself beheading a man and screaming out “KILL THE MEN! THE REVOLUTION IS UPON US!” When in reality, I barely said anything of note, and it definitely wasn’t a shocking revelation to anyone who does this for a living.

Bottom line: it turns out that these men telling me to “man up” are just so incredibly fragile and sad. They can’t handle a joke. They can’t even understand a joke…

These dudes’ self-assuredness is hilarious to me. They show up guns blazing to a battle I’ve already been in for my entire life. They foolishly think I don’t have the receipts for my claims; and will declare victory just because I choose not to spell it out for them. Of course, I know that it’s a fruitless endeavor, because they are not, as they assert, interested in “debate,” or open to learning anything new.

Schaefer is speaking to a much broader (lol) problem that any woman who writes publicly on the internet is likely to encounter sooner or later—if I wanted to set the MRA rape-apology machine a’rollin’, I could just say something vaguely critical about Game of Thrones right now, and receive an onslaught of hateful words from the Actually Men of the internet. And yet, we beat on, boats against the current, etc. because, as Schaefer herself puts it, it’s a battle we’ve already been in for our entire lives.

You should read the whole thing.