Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

More than ever, our cultural conversation is taking place on Twitter and Facebook — and yet, women who are bullied online are told to leave those spaces or deal with it. Worse still, talking about this harassment is typically met with aggression: It's not uncommon for those who share their experiences to receive a new deluge of threats, often while they are accused of trying to get attention. I’m sick of talking about this horrifying reality like we’re litigating the dynamics of a middle school lunchroom. The public forum is increasingly being conducted online, and it’s about time we acknowledge that social media is a place where women are systematically silenced.

Unfortunately, this requires me to talk about Martin Shkreli. Last week, before being convicted of fraud, the so-called “Pharma Bro” released a Facebook video, announcing, “Trial’s over tomorrow, bitches. Then if I’m acquitted, I get to f*ck Lauren Duca.”

I responded with a single tweet, along with a screenshot of an email from a reporter asking for comment: “Here's my statement on Martin Shkreli: I would (still) rather eat my own organs. So much as touch me, and I'll gladly chop off one of yours.”

Somehow even this irreverent rebuttal was painted as melodramatic by people who had decided Shkreli couldn't possibly be serious about the things he was saying. Mostly, they would have preferred that I kept my mouth shut.

Maybe “I get to f*ck Lauren Duca” is a threat. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a former CEO treating me like some kind of sexualized cat toy for him to bat around on a livestream with zero regard for the fact that his personal amusement amounts to my public humiliation.

There was also the corresponding onslaught from Shkreli’s followers, including intimidating messages that referenced my parents' names. I called to tell them to be careful, and my dad said he would make sure the alarm was on. That was really all we could do about it.

This sort of thing has been going on for over seven months now. When Shkreli was permanently banned from Twitter for harassing me back in January, death and rape threats were appearing in my inbox with more frequency than the phrase “nice to e-meet you.” My appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show weeks earlier resulted in a flood of harassment, which Shkreli clearly saw as an opportunity to elevate his performatively villainous profile. Things escalated when he DMed me an invite to Donald Trump’s “inaug,” to which I publicly responded that I would rather eat my own organs. Faced with definitive rejection, he doubled down, regularly tweeting about having a “small crush” on me. I opted to mute and ignore him, thinking it denied him the satisfaction of knowing that he had been blocked. That is, until he reworked his Twitter page, changing his banner photo to a collage of my face and replacing his profile picture with an image of his face cropped onto my husband’s body.

It took me all of 45 seconds to click “report” and tweet “how is this allowed @jack,” but the trolls reacted as if I had launched an organized campaign to have Shkreli removed from the site. I received countless messages, ranging from unsettlingly earnest pleas that I reinstate his account to credible threats of doxxing. What does that mean, exactly? Well, within an hour, someone had access to my Social Security number and other sensitive biometric data. They were going to post my private information online if I didn’t let Martin come back — as if I could do that even if I wanted to, as if I were the goddamn queen of Twitter. Discussing these impracticalities reveals the frustrating impossibility of my situation but also potentially misses the point: The problem wasn’t my particular profile, or the amount of effort with which I responded. It was that I had spoken up at all. The volume and tone of the harassment I received as a result of responding to harassment totally dwarfed anything I’d experienced before, and I say that as someone who had been Photoshopped into a gas chamber on more than three separate occasions.