I listened to a great podcast today from This American Life all about internet trolls. In it, Lindy West, a plus sized American feminist, writer and activist, talks about her experience of coming face to face with her worst troll after he had realised the error of his ways. In brief, it turns out that this dude had been going through some serious personal shiz, he was overweight himself and depressed about it, his girlfriend had dumped his sorry ass, he hated women, had lost his job and so, when he saw Lindy, a proud, unapologetic, larger lady, accepting and loving herself, well it was too much for his little man-ego to handle and he flipped the fudge out. He began, as most people do, with google. He researched her family and personal life and decided the best way to get to her was to create a twitter account imitating her recently deceased father and begin attacking her from there. For Lindy, who receives countless hateful messages a day, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She spoke out about how this very personal act had deeply affected her, and believe it or not, her troll heard her and experienced, for the first time, shame and remorse for his actions. Almost as quickly as he had began, he wrote to her and apologised for all his wrong-doing and ceased the trolling. He even donated $50 to the hospital where her father had died.

Now, we don’t all get the chance to meet our trolls, and truth be told, I have pretty fucking thick skin. (Did I mention this blog post will have swearing? THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS SWEARING). After all I’m a big butch man hating feminist lesbian bitch, I can take it. What people don’t know is that I am also a researcher, and of course I couldn’t do just nothing with this developing stream of data coming my way, so I began to experiment.

I started to share my blog which is purposefully anonymous on social media to see what would happen depending on how, where and to whom I shared it. I have found the results predictable in that it received wide-spread trolling, yet interesting in how these responses changed depending on the platform, and heartwarming in what happened behind the scenes. So here we go!



“The writer wrote on a specific topic that they felt strongly about, but it wasn’t what you wanted it to be, so it’s ‘lazy writing’. Hmm!”



The most interesting thing about the trolling comments I’ve received are how these men have chosen to attack me depending on where I shared the blog, how anonymous they were at the time and how anonymous I was.

I posted this blog first in a facebook group called Melbourne Barista Union (MBU), a group, as you would expect, comprised of baristas in Melbourne. I did this several months ago after my first couple of entries and the vitriol it created in its short lifespan of a few hours was immense. I had barely blinked before the thread was deleted by the group admin. I did not reply to any comments after my original post and whilst the blog received one positive comment by a brave soul, the rest of the thread was complete and utter trolling abuse. However, interestingly enough, the comments on this social platform were mostly all directed at my ability as a barista. I am still digging for screenshots so until then this is what I can recall from memory:

“You must be such a shit barista if you have to write this to make yourself feel better”

“Does this blog make you feel less insecure about your skills?”

“It’s not men’s fault if they are more highly skilled at these jobs and are hired because of it”

It appears that they wanted to cut me down where it hurt, which in this context, was my skills as a barista. Whilst the torrent was raging overhead, man bun after man bun feverishly slinging insults and high fiving each other on the originality of insults which to me seemed remarkably similar -(though one of them did go to the effort of writing an entire lengthy facebook post on his own personal facebook about how shit me and my blog were, thanks for the traffic bro) - something heartwarming and incredible was simultaneously happening. Whilst man after man spoke out against me and my blog, all save one, the women were also communicating, but not in words, in tags. Between every insult made by a man there was a girl tagging one or two of her friends and behind the scenes, on my tumblr dashboard my followers began to quickly grow.

In this incredible article about the gender division in specialty coffee released today, Lisa Knisely, Portland writer with a PhD in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies, describes how work that is undertaken in a public space is valued more than domestic or “caring” work which is usually carried out in private. Public work is associated with masculinity whilst caring/private work is associated with femininity. Knisely goes on to say a bunch of brilliant and insightful things (I’m trying to keep this short, read the article) but basically, the point being made is, “women can inhabit public space, but with the expectation that we’ll accommodate others and police ourselves”.

So to put it frankly, yes I was allowed to be a part of the MBU facebook group, the same way that women can now play professional sports, or vote, or join their college soccer team, or sit in the boardroom of a large corporation. We have fought hard to gain the privilege of being present - we can listen to men treat women like sexual objects in our workplaces, or to our brothers making rape jokes with their mates, or to a customer making a racist slur against our newest employee. We have been let into these spheres ladies! But don’t you dare ruffle any feathers by speaking out against something that you perhaps believe is not ok, especially if it is sexism against women, the least recognised oppression to date. Don’t even fantasise about changing the order of things because if you do YOU WILL BE CUT DOWN! This is a man’s world ladies, as is the coffee world ever since it moved from the private sphere back into the public one and went from women serving coffee to their husbands to bearded bros extracting perfectly even shots for other bros. How dare you suggest that there may be some form of inequality going on here, shut up and play by the rules, bitch.

So where MBU had spent its energy ragging on my lack of barista skills, I decided I needed feedback from a source outside of the coffee world, so I turned to one of my favourite websites, Reddit. I shared the blog in the ‘Melbourne’ subreddit knowing that it’s subscribers would be a mixed bunch of all sorts, of all ages and from all walks of life.

This time, rather than having next to no barista skills, the men of the Melbourne subreddit decided I had next to no writing skills. In fact, my writing was my Achilles’ heel. The blog would have been perfectly fine if it wasn’t for my tragically poor style of writing. I was lazy and unoriginal, I used too much hyperbole and wasn’t conducting deep enough research before reaching these harsh conclusions. I couldn’t string two sentences together for goodness sake, what a waste of online space!



“This just plain old sucks. It’s dripping with hate and absent of personality. At least try to be funny and perhaps even a little bit original.”

Once again however, whilst the fires of reddit began to rage, fueled by men protecting men or perhaps trying to ease their own shame and misery, the same beautiful sequence reignited behind the scenes.

Once again my followers started to climb, majority women. Similarly to the girls tagging each other on MBU, in the background was a more silent, powerful message of support. I said this in the interview to Sprudge recently and I’ll reiterate it here, this blog is resonating because there is truth to it that both women and men are recognising.

“that’s boring, everybody is already saying how lame whatever the fuck hipsters are and their coffee, as soon as I read the first sentence about one of the cafes I was already frustrated by the lack of originality. It’s just fucking lazy that a writer can’t think of anything other than the word ‘hipster’” “Perhaps. Using the word hipster just means you don’t have to explain a lot of things. Like using the word apple means you don’t have to go about describing aspects of that particular fruit.”

Now, I really want to take a moment to answer some of these insightful and powerful questions from my trolls. Why? Because they are hilarious and this blog is all about comic relief. So here goes!

Q: Why does making fun of people, specifically male baristas, make you happy? Life going downhill?

A: First, there is no question that making fun of male baristas is both deeply enjoyable but also really easy to do. There is a never-ending supply of ammo being constantly created by said douchey dude baristas of Melbourne. Check out a few high profile cafes and see for yourself. When so much douche is being generated on a daily basis it’s really difficult not to tap into that sweetness.

Taking a different approach, Knisely puts it like this:



Male baristas can safely perform and inhabit a ‘coffee douche’ role in a way that women can not in nearly as comfortable a way … it is no accident that when you talk about a jerky barista most people will think of a guy most of the time … This isn’t because men are just worse people; it’s that women simply can’t get away with being cold or distant in a service work job for the most part,



So to re-phrase my answer, I make fun of male baristas not only because it’s easy but because they deserve to be made fun of. The double standards are stark - women inhabiting similar professional roles cannot and do not get away with having off days, with being cold, disinterested, disengaged or snobbish, and when we do it comes with risk. Lord, it’s a sad world we live in and laughing at douchebag baristas makes it a little bit brighter. (Dudes I’m passing you my invisible mankerchief now, I know this is difficult to swallow, blow hard).

Q: Why does the predominant race of the staff matter? Yeah, we need to make sure our hiring practices are non biased but she was relieved to go to a cafe with majority non white staff? Why? Was the coffee better?



A: Yes, the coffee tasted so much better. It was free of moronic, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic douchiness. It tasted like fucking heaven in fact. Cheers bra.



Well I thought it was funny.

I love you too.



Until the next post! ;)