When former Texas state senator Wendy Davis started seeing photoshopped photos of herself in sexual positions flooding her Twitter and Facebook streams, she finally decided she had to delete the social networks from her phone.

“I have lots of bots who follow me. I could literally say it’s a beautiful day in Texas and the responses I get on Twitter are ‘baby murderer’. But it rose to a sexualization during my campaign,” she said. “For my own peace of mind, I finally just took them off my phone. I knew I wasn’t going to be disciplined enough to not go down the comment stream.”

Davis, who rose to national prominence in 2013 when she staged an 11-hour filibuster against sweeping restrictions on abortion in Texas, spoke out about her trolls, the media, and its very personal impact today. As part of South by Southwest’s day-long online harassment summit, she joined a broader conversation about the internet hate mob Gamergate and how to make the internet a safer space for women and minorities.

Davis said her political reputation had been damaged by internet trolls, especially during her failed bid for governor of Texas in 2014.

“These photoshops of me in very suggestive sexual positions were inviting people to view me purely as a sexual being and not someone who had a lot to offer in terms of my policies,” she said. “It sought to diminish me and have voters view me through just that lens.”



On Monday she will launch Deeds Not Words, a new online initiative to get women involved in political action.

The former senator said those trolls were inspired in her case by the top of the media food chain – large newspapers and TV stations that report on women differently.

“There was an article in the New York Times Magazine called Can Wendy Davis have it all?, which was really about my bona fides as a mother,” she said, arguing that the angle would not be taken if she were a male politician with the same career path. “It’s part of giving permission to the online harassers, saying that it’s OK to critique women differently and to talk about women differently.”

She called it “dog whistling”, or using subtle, coded language to imply something nasty. The question of whether someone can “have it all” is often applied to working women in discussions of whether they can have both children and careers.

“That Times story, it whistles,” she said. “It invited people to consider whether I should be appreciated in a very specific way.”



Stories like inspire “an intense effort to try to paint me in a way that would be seen as not capable of leading, to be seen in a way that dismissed me and was gender-based.

“It’s deeply unsettling. To be viewed, to be minimized, to be diminished and sexualized in that way is upsetting.”

The audience in the room at her talk consisted of a few dozen people – mostly women – who had all come through extra security to get into a section of SXSW’s massive tech conference that discussed gender.

“Twice, reporters have asked me whether I’ve ever had an abortion,” she said. “I responded that when you begin to ask every male candidate whether he’s ever impregnated someone who’s had to have an abortion, then I’ll answer you. Not ’til then.”

