Each new message was a punch to the gut: My breath caught, my hands went cold, a tingling spread beneath my skin. The tone turned Biblical, implying outcasts and witches, diseases and hellfire. Though I was a feminist who’d just written an explicit account of sex, I inwardly shrunk to someone small, young, and terrified of being ousted from the tribe. How dare I think I could own my sexuality, break from convention, or explore dark themes? My body was not my own territory with which to experiment; it was theirs, and they had arrived to plant their flags.

But slut-shaming only succeeds if it alters behavior. Its primary corrective purpose is to corral a woman back into line, to shock her with such a jolt that she stops doing things that trouble others. In a slut-shamer’s ideal world, the label would act preemptively. Notice, though, the modern woman’s relative lack of fear, how she goes about living her life regardless, so that by the time the commenters arrive, it’s too late. After the presidential blowjob. After the sex tape. After the onstage twerking, or the provocative article. Notice how the very use of the word in such instances says more about the speaker than the target.

In the long run, slut-shamers weren’t going to stop me from saying or doing anything. More immediately, though, some of their punches landed. In bed with my boyfriend, I didn’t want even the remotest hint of dirty talk. I watched the familiar internal dance wherein anger that has nowhere to go twists back on itself. I intentionally over-ate, relishing the comfort of both food and extra flesh. My mind chatter turned caustic about the most mundane things: how stupid to not get the cheaper airfare, what an idiot I am. I dashed off an email to my brother 3,000 miles away, asking him, “If I’m ever homeless, can I come live with you?”

That’s what public slut-shaming conjured up in me: not mere embarrassment or outrage but fear of total exile. I reflexively turned to my nearest male relative for protection even as a mental voice sneered at me for doing so. My brother wrote back to say yes, of course I could live with him. He went on to remind me that my family and friends were proud that I’d taken on difficult terrain. He rhetorically asked how many people would come out looking perfect if they exposed their entire relationship history on paper. He listed off the rational, decent men who’d helped bring my book to fruition: the fellow writer, the agent, the ex-husband, and current boyfriend. “You knew there would be slut-shaming,” he concluded. “I can’t even imagine this bothers you. If it does, cut that shit out, now.”

I tried. I blocked the abusive accounts, saved all the messages and tweets to a Word file, and stashed it in my “To Do” folder, where it loomed on my desktop, daring me to open it. I put it off for months. On one level, I knew these were just trolls, and other writers had unanimously advised: Don’t feed the trolls. As I blocked a few, a quick glance at their profile pages produced a deep sadness in me—for them. In quieter moments I even felt like I could sense the terror below their rage, a reflexive shrinking from chaos that I recognized in myself: If women pursue sexual freedom, where do we all end up? What happens to the family, to children, to society, to love? The only reason I felt free to even try an open marriage was because I didn’t have children. I wondered how many of these guys were husbands, fathers, men with their own cacophonous appetites, men with something to lose. Or, worse still, what if they were men with nothing to lose?