What the Anonymous Men Write

Every day, without fail, Lena Meyer-Landrut—the German singer who won Eurovision in 2010 at nineteen and has been famous ever since—receives direct messages on Instagram that land like small punches. You cunt. Ugly and worthless. You’re a disgrace. Arrogant little bitch. Whore. Fuck you. Dumb slut. Years of it. A steady drip of anonymous men with nothing better to do than send hate into the phone of a person they have never met and never will.

Her response was to write the words down on pieces of paper and photograph herself holding them. Facing the camera. Not shrinking, not performing distress, not explaining. The selfie as something between a mugshot and a middle finger—here are your words, I’m still here, make of that what you will.

I keep thinking about what it actually costs to do that. Not the photograph itself, which takes thirty seconds. The accumulation that makes it necessary: years of reading those messages, absorbing them even when you try not to, carrying them whether you want to or not. You can build walls against that kind of thing, but the words still land somewhere. What Lena is doing isn’t proof the words don’t hurt. It might be proof that they do—and that she decided to refuse them anyway. That’s a different thing from invulnerability. It’s harder than that.