The Death Wishes Are the Tame Ones
The comments have been arriving for years. Since this journal started drawing readers beyond my immediate circle—family, a close friend or two, the ex-girlfriend who still checks in—the feedback has included requests to hang myself, suggestions involving firearms, and detailed wishes for terminal illness. These are, I’ve come to understand, the mild ones. I stopped being disturbed by them long ago. These days I practically get off on them—there’s something almost erotic about being told to die by someone whose entire internet presence consists of leaving comments on other people’s videos.
Still, I’m aware I have it easy. The people who receive the truly comprehensive treatment online—the daily avalanche of threats, body-based insults, and sexualized promises of violence—are women who have the audacity to call themselves feminists in public. The men sending these messages are a recognizable type: sexually frustrated, genuinely terrified of female autonomy in ways that read more like phobia than politics. The hatred is pre-rational, which is part of what makes it so consistent.
Suzie Grime—who has written for this journal, including a sharp piece on the particular hazards of dating rappers—sat down with scientist and presenter Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim for the YouTube series Auf Klo, a show where women talk candidly in a bathroom setting about things that normally get politely avoided. The conversation moves through fashion, menstruation, first times, body image, the specific weight of existing in a shape other people feel entitled to comment on. And then it gets to the internet, and what certain men do with it when they sense their worldview is under threat.
Mai Thi is a sharp presence—she’d go on to become one of Germany’s most visible science communicators, capable of explaining virology to a general audience without losing anyone along the way. Watching her here, discussing the hate she receives with complete clarity and no performance of distress, is watching someone who has made a deliberate decision to keep talking regardless of what comes back.
The hate isn’t going anywhere. Neither are they.