Women are abused online every day. One turned her nightmare into a book.

USA Today

24-02-2025

Women are abused online every day. One turned her nightmare into a book.
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Alia Dastagir was sitting at home, rocking her baby in a velvet chair when she read the message: "I am sorry to those who have confused you to be a person, because you are not a person.'
Dastagir had published a story as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse in 2022, and became the target of an online mob. Her Facebook and email had been flooded with vulgar, inflammatory responses. When we spoke on the phone earlier this month, the memory alone made her nauseous.
In her debut book out Tuesday, "To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person" (Penguin Random House) the award-winning journalist and former USA TODAY reporter weaves her experience of online violence with the stories of 13 other women, including a comedian who disrupts her harassment with feminist humor and an OBGYN who channels her anger into social media debates. She examines how a better understanding of the internet is vital in mitigating violence against women, and argues that online misogyny is interwoven with white supremacy and systems designed to silence women. Dastagir analyzed her interviews with psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, technologists and philosophers to unveil the societal structures that nourish online misogyny, and how women can cope and make meaning from violence.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Question: When you entered journalism, did anyone warn you that you were opening yourself up to being susceptible to online violence?
Answer: No, there was no preparation. I remember the first couple of times that I got a really profane and sort of disgusting and really malicious message (from a reader), and I just remember feeling so shocked, and then later on, feeling so silly that I was shocked. I remember sitting there so long and just being like, what is happening? It's a little humiliating to describe now because it's not shocking anymore, but I think it goes to show that these experiences are so affecting and can feel so physical and confusing, especially when it first starts happening to you. The genesis of the book for me (was) that when you start talking about it, people are very matter of fact. They're just like, 'Ugh, the internet,' or, 'This is what it's like for women on the internet.' So then you get the message that not only were you not prepared for it, but there's nothing that you can do about it, there's nothing you should do about it, and you just kind of got to roll with it. For the first few years, that was kind of what I did. I was just like, 'OK, I have to suppress this.' I have to do the thing that so many people suggest that you have to do to survive in these spaces, which is to make yourself so emotionally tough and unaffected that you can continue to do this work.
But then 2019 rolled around, and honestly, I think having kids cracked something open. I just remember having a moment where I was like, 'I don't accept this. I don't think anybody should accept this.'
Were you fearful at all while writing and publishing this book that you would open the door for more abuse?
I am so scared all the time, and it's hard to kind of admit that, but I feel like I want to admit that because some women can't, because it's risky to name that kind of vulnerability. When I wrote those sections of the book, particularly the section in the last chapter where I really go into detail about what happened (to me), it was hard for me to write it. It was hard for me to read it and reread it.
I don't want to overstate it, but even as I'm talking to you right now, I feel nauseous. It was such a difficult experience, psychologically and physically, that talking about it, remembering it, writing it, absolutely brings up all of those feelings for me, and I'm terrified. People ask me about the book and how I'm feeling. Am I proud, or am I excited? It's really hard to explain that the dominant feeling is anxiety, and that I feel an obligation to push through that anxiety because I feel like the message of the book is so important.
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You write in your book that when confronted with online violence, stopping that psychological and physical impact isn't as simple as just looking away from your screen. Can you turn away from this online violence as a form of self-protection, or do you feel there's a moral imperative to face it?
It's impossible to make any kind of categorical statements or rules about what anybody should be doing in any of these spaces, because we all have different risk profiles, and there's so much variability in what we experience and how we react to that. This didn't make it into the book, but I remember interviewing a woman who said that when her children were young, she felt that there were things that she could not engage with online, things she couldn't say because that just felt too risky to her as a young mother. But now her children are grown, they're out of the house. And she said to me, 'I feel that my risk profile has changed in such a way that I probably can be, and will be more, more vocal on certain things.'
Something you really dove into in the book was misogynoir, a specific combination of misogyny and racism that Black women face. How did intersectionality become so central to your reporting for this book?
When I first started (to pursue this project in 2019), I had a really myopic idea about what was happening. For me, a lot of what I was experiencing was just gender-based violence and harassment. My assumption was that a lot of it was just the 'manosphere.' Like, it was just guys from that space getting really agitated by some of my coverage of feminism and gender. And so, I had this idea about what forces were at play, and it was so narrow and so narcissistic because it was just based on my own experience. So once I opened the project up to interviewing other women who had had very diverse experiences, I realized that what was not getting enough attention, and what I hadn't given enough attention to, is the fact that this isn't just about misogyny. This is about white supremacy, and all of the systems that intertwine with that. And I think that it's important to recognize that women, particularly women of color and Black women, were calling out abuses on these platforms for years. But Black women's experiences of pain are rarely deemed worthy of attention. So, it was really important when I began to write this book to say so early on, like, we can't have a conversation about anything related to online abuse unless we understand that this is about white supremacy, not just misogyny.
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Right now, many women don't feel safe for a myriad of reasons. Partly due to the platforms we are engaging with, but also, femicide rates are rising internationally, American women are faced with growing restrictions on reproductive rights. How are these things a factor in online abuse?
It's all connected, right? We talk about it as if it is an online problem. It's a cultural problem. Like, this is a problem of the culture. It's a political problem, it's an economic problem, it's a human rights problem. It shows up online, it shows up offline. One of the reasons that I felt like it was really important to write a chapter where I followed a woman who was experiencing relentless misogyny in the workplace and online – (a welder and now plumber named Brooke Nicholas) – her story really underscores the inescapability of this. Like there isn't a place that feels safe online or offline for women and marginalized folks, people of color and queer and trans folks.
This book was rooted in your own experiences, but the story is strung together with other women's stories. In speaking to these other women, were you able to see yourself in everyone's stories?
There's so many different ways that we experience violence and respond to violence. But I think that what was so evident to me, no matter who I interviewed and even reflecting on my own experiences, was that nobody was 'ignoring it.' Everybody was dealing differently. Everybody was making meaning in different ways. It was sort of the most fundamental animating question of the whole project, which I guess was my initial idea. Like, 'Why can't I ignore it?' But I think that the reporting sort of bears out that ignoring is just not the right word. I think sometimes people say the word ignore and they mean 'don't react,' or sometimes people say the word ignore and they mean 'don't feel.' And I don't think that most people aren't feeling. Once the language comes through or the threat comes through, we can make a decision. And we can make a decision to suppress whatever the feeling is or to compartmentalize it, to make a joke about it or externalize it or to report it, but we're still always doing something with it. And so when I reflect on my own experiences and I think back to all of these interviews, there is a ton of variability in how we experience violence, how we make meaning out of violence, and how we react to violence. But nobody was ignoring violence.