Last Saturday a piece I wrote was published in The Times magazine. It was an article about accepting that I might not become a mother and choosing to get my ‘child fix’ by doting on my nephew and goddaughter. I thought it was a sweet piece, a little melancholic and touched upon a topic a lot of my friends were talking about.
It ran alongside a longer feature by the (very good) journalist Charlie Gowans-Eglinton. A pretty picture of her was on the front page alongside the words, ‘I’m not rich enough to have a baby’. I gulped. I knew a line like that would be catnip to the commenters.
I’ve been lucky that I’ve not experienced the lash of comments that many of my female journalist counterparts have grown accustomed to. I’ve had the odd mean jibe thrown my way on Twitter and the occasional deranged email but nothing too extreme.
With a tingle of anxiety, I read Charlie’s feature. It was about how she would go ahead and have a baby right now but she simply couldn’t afford to. It was a great piece - honest, rigorous and I found myself nodding in agreement when I read: ‘If I were pregnant now, it would be considered a geriatric pregnancy - but I would feel like a teen mum.’ My God, that’s how I felt! And then, because I was curious or perhaps in the mood to inflict a little pain on myself, I scrolled my thumb down to the comments.
I didn’t take them all in - there were already over 400 down there. I just caught words and phrases.
‘Two self absorbed women’, ‘what utter drivel’, ‘entitled millennials’, ‘it’s a blessing they haven’t opted for motherhood’, ‘more tedious, attention-seeking metropolitan women’, and ‘Why did you go into journalism, a pauper’s trade?’ (That last one might have a point.)
Oh, and this: ‘The ultimate denial of what it is to be a woman, swallowed up in narcissism, materialism and self-obsession of the most self-destructive kind.’
When I write them now, they seem faintly ridiculous, over-the-top, easy to take in your stride. But at the time, alone and scrolling through comment after comment calling me self-absorbed, middling and poor, it didn’t feel that way. I wondered whether I should have written the piece in the first place. When you write something vulnerable and you get those kinds of comments, it feels like you’ve taken off your clothes and someone is pointing and laughing at your naked body.
I have always been told not to read the comments. When I wrote my first piece for The Times about how antidepressants affected my sex drive, at the shoot, a girl who had written her own personal piece for the paper, advised me not to read below-the-line.
‘Really?’ I chirped. I was just delighted to have written a piece for a paper that, truth be told, I held above all others. ‘I thought The Times would have classy comments.’
She looked appalled at my naivety and assured me that no, in fact an editor who had recently written a piece about her children’s sky-high nursery fees had received comments saying her children would likely grow up to be criminals.
I once interviewed an influencer who had suffered a stroke while performing a headstand. The story was particularly ‘clickable’ because she was a beautiful yogi, filmed flows for her 25,000 followers and had an image of herself in the stroke-triggering posture.
The story went out and she called me furious, blaming me for the comments on the article. She told me that people were calling her stupid, telling her the stroke was her own fault and that she’d received a death threat. She wanted me to take down the story.
This was nigh-on impossible to do. I worked at a press agency and once a story was out of my hands and into the hands of the Daily Mail, The Sun et al, there was no way of getting it back. But I also resisted on the grounds that I didn’t want these bullies to silence her.
I pointed out how heinous it was to tell anyone who suffered a stroke that it was their own fault - and added that anyone threatening to kill someone because they dared to share their story of a yoga-related injury was clearly off their rocker. I asked her: have you ever left a comment on a website like the Mail Online? Have you ever gone to the effort of filling out a form to make a profile so that you can type your two cents’ worth on a story about someone suffering a stroke?
I explained that only maniacs sitting around in their underwear can be bothered to leave comments which means we only see the frankly terrifying thoughts of the unhinged minority. We don’t hear what the reasonable majority think who are likely sympathetic to the story, but too sane to actually leave a comment to say so.
In my own case, I closed the Times app. I remembered that everything I wrote in my piece was true. I had nodded with agreement while reading Charlie’s piece. The most important thing is to tell the truth as well as you can, I told myself. It is the closest thing I have to a North Star.
Then my sweet father messaged me to congratulate me on the piece. I told him about the comments. He replied with true dad wisdom.
Here’s the thing - the commenters are also entitled to their point of view. There were some gold comments mixed in with the ones accusing us of being symbolic of modern society’s death cult. I particularly enjoyed this one: ‘This may sound a bit out there… You could leave London.’ And I can’t deny I get where this one’s coming from: ‘Wish The Times would stop picking London-centric, media-based, spoilt kids. I’m sure there’s lots of interesting people with a different view beyond the M25.’ And actually, there were lots of supportive comments too. This was cheering: ‘Don’t worry ladies, enjoy your precious life. There are plenty of babies in the world, you are not letting the team down.’ It’s a shame that they get lost amid comments more cruel than constructive.
I thanked my father and didn’t mention that actually he too had been slammed below-the-line.
‘What a generation of whiney, selfish, entitled and overly precious humans we have now,’ one commenter ranted. ‘I blame the parents.’
What do you guys think? Is it human nature to seize upon the negative and overlook the positive? Is a no-reading-below-the-line policy wise? Or should we engage with comments to step outside our echo chamber? Take it to the comments (wink wink).
ENDS