Warning: This post touches a sensitive subject and is not for the easily triggered type (rape/feminism)
Quitting Twitter might seem like a small thing to other people, but I had been on Twitter since 2012 and relied on it quite heavily for breaking news (and more importantly, the latest gossip). I regularly tweeted and as I mentioned before in my introduceyourself post, this actually filled the cravings of my writer side.
It wasn't long before it gripped me inside its vortex of feuds and trolls, mostly caused by provocateurs who thrive on inciting people. I spent almost all of my free time just checking and scrolling my feed; seeing what was trending at the time.
Some of the tweets are good inspirational things but I couldn't really get away from some of the bad stuff too.
I was always shocked to find out how people still practice rape culture. Blaming the victims. Putting the limelight on them. Making a horrible act where a person violates another person part of the norm. I couldn't believe it, but every time there's a rape case in the news, there will be people who would ask questions like:
"What was she doing at the time?"
or
"What was she wearing?"
Those are the most common questions that people ask. Some just go straight into it and says:
"She was asking for it."
or the ever popular:
"Boys will be boys."
This is the type of mindset that even the most educated people still have. When people fail to properly feel disgust at the rapist for their abominable act, it somehow propagates the rape culture even more and it is even more apparent in social media as people gravitate towards the latest thing that goes viral.
Usually, the camp is divided into three; the provocateur, the provoked, and the spectator. I was almost always the spectator and that really got me feeling down too. Like I was basically also part of the problem for not speaking out.
Blaming the victim is never right, but this was and still is the natural reaction for lots of people. And it was quite apparent on Twitter. These people were justifying it, by saying that they were "only pointing out the obvious". They said that they weren't dismissing the rapist's actions, but that they were "just sayin'".
It was so frustrating and tiring because all of them were so set in their opinions that it was impossible to reason with them. I was a bit depressed every time a case like this cropped up and it happened quite a lot (and from what I'm hearing, it's still going on now!). It was hard to cope or even have hope in that situation. I was starting to only see the negative things and that, I think, made me more cynical than the average millennials (who are all born cynical).
The rape culture was the worst part, but it wasn't the reason that I finally severed my ties with Twitter. The last straw came from something that was not really as offensive, but it still offended me so much that I immediately removed myself from Twitter.
It was a tweet from a friend of a friend. She was saying something about feminists. How she doesn't "consider herself as one" and she thinks "it's stupid to get worked up about equality". She said that men and women are created differently and all sorts of other stuff that I mostly agreed with. But the word "stupid" she used to describe people's efforts to reach equality, it just triggered something in me. I wish I had said something to her, but I'd never been the confrontational type.
I've seen so many people get labeled as a feminist in a negative way. Even arguments about not blaming a rape victim will get you comments like,
"Don't fight with a feminist, man, you'll never win."
This was, of course, said in the most patronizing way possible (because wanting to be respected is, of course, wrong for a feminist). I don't know how they made the leap from talking about not victim-blaming (which is basic human decency!) to feminism.
I guess with this person, it just made me furious that she was also contributing to the idea that feminism is a bad thing. Just because she is privileged enough to not have been subjected to prejudice because of her gender, she dismissed the whole concept of feminism. It was too blatantly ignorant and that was the final straw for me after all of the frustrations that I felt before.
Quitting Twitter was the hardest thing I’ve done because my life was molded around it. It was a source of information, a place to share my thoughts, and it was the place where I seek validation from.
There was a cooling off period of 30 days after I deleted the account. There were quite a few close calls where I almost ‘fell off the wagon', so to speak. But I managed to hold on until the break up was official. That was about five months ago and I’ve been Twitter-free ever since.
We’re all just trying to create a better world by being the best version of our selves and this is my way of achieving that.
Thank you very much for reading another needlessly long post from me 😉
Do comment below to let me know what you think.