To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person: Words as Violence and Stories of Women's Resistance Online

by Alia Dastagir

Overview

An urgently needed reckoning with the harm, harassment, and abuse women face on the Internet, complicating how we think about violence online and featuring deep reporting on how women are surviving the trauma—by an award-winning reporter

When Alia Dastagir published a story for USA Today as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse, she became the tar­get of an online mob launched by QAnon and encouraged by Donald Trump, Jr. While female journalists, politicians, academ­ics, and influencers receive a disproportionate amount of online attacks because of the nature of their professions, all women online experience hate, creating profound harms for individual women and society.

In To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person, Dastagir uses critical analysis from psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, technologists, and philosophers to offer a uniquely deep and intimate look at what women experience during online abuse, as well as how they cope and make meaning out of violence.

Dastagir weaves together her story with those of thirteen other women, including a comedian who uses feminist humor to subvert her harassment and an ob-gyn who channels anger over her abuse to fight attacks on reproductive rights. Dastagir explores why language online cannot be ignored, how it damages bodies, when it triggers and traumatizes, and why women’s responses are so varied. Dastagir analyzes why online abuse is perpetrated by people across the ideological spectrum and how it intersects with the dangers of disinformation. She argues that while online abuse is often framed exclusively as a problem of misogyny, it is also connected to a culture of white supremacy and the systems with which it intertwines.

To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person is the book on online abuse for this cultural moment, when being online is a daily necessity for so many, even as we grow ever more polarized. Systemic solutions are key to combating violence online, but the narrative of reform does not help women today. This nuanced examination of what it means to effectively cope will empower women to raise their voices against the forces bent on silencing them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593727843
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alia Dastagir is an award-winning former reporter for USA Today who frequently covers gender and mental health. Dastagir was one of eight U.S. recipients of the prestigious Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. She won a first-place National Headliner Award for a series on suicide and was the first winner of the American Association of Suicidology’s Public Service Journalism Award. The Media Awards Committee for the Council on Contemporary Families named her story on America’s lack of affordable childcare the winner for Outstanding Media Coverage of Family Issues. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at NYU, where she is an Axinn fellow.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Just Ignore It

Alexandria Onuoha is on a bright spare stage dressed in white, bare feet, black hair slicked tightly back. She is kneeling, but when the music begins, she quickly rises, arms eager and legs unbound. Her joints share a smooth vocabulary. She is soft wrists and loose limbs, blooming bones and fluid hips. She dances from the inside.

I ask her, What does it feel like to dance?

“Like everything makes sense,” she says.

She lingers there, speaks of history, family, Blackness, womanhood. I count one, two, three, four times she tells me:

“I feel free.”

Alex is a dancer, but there were times when people did not think she moved like one. She was a Black woman studying dance at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college in the Northeast. She moved her body according to the instruction she was given, but she often felt stiff and mechanical. “Robotic,” she said. The dance genres she grew up in, the languages her body spoke easily, were hip-hop, liturgical, West African, dancehall. She used movement to fuse culture and art, sexuality and spirituality, past and present.

Alex struggled in her dance program, and she recounted to me the aftermath of going public with her experience. She had been unsettled by a white male guest dancer’s comments on her body throughout rehearsals: the way it was failing, the way it did not fit. She doesn’t remember precise words, but she remembers his tone registering as sarcasm.

Alex spoke to a professor about the guest dancer’s comments, but she did not feel she was taken seriously. When she got her grade, it was less than she believed she deserved, and she brought it up again to her professor, who she says dismissed her, telling her, in substance, “Sorry, this is just dance.” Alex didn’t think it was just dance.

Other professors made comments that suggested her body didn’t belong, and seemed baffled by the way it moved. She didn’t know what to call these critiques. Professors and guest dancers said they didn’t understand what her body was doing or what her art meant. She produced a choreographic piece combining dance from her Jamaican and Nigerian roots. When it was time to perform it, a guest artist said, “I don’t really understand what your piece is about, like, I am kind of confused, like, what’s the point of having Bob Marley speak?” She again told a professor she felt the comment was not right. The professor said the comment was fine. She told Alex to grow thicker skin.

Alex tried, but near the end of her program, she was exhausted. She was exhausted by the side-eye, the erasure of Black art, and what she saw as favoritism of white bodies. She decided she needed to speak. She wrote an opinion piece for her school newspaper on what she experienced in her program. She called it “Dancing Around White Supremacy.”

She didn’t know who would read it. She didn’t worry. When the article ran online, friends saw it and texted to say they were proud. But at night, when she got back from an event and logged on to Instagram, she saw the other messages. She read them alone in her room.

She did not cry. She was still. She thought: “I can’t believe I go to school with people who think like this.”

She didn’t recognize names, and not everyone used avatars, but she assumed the DMs were from other students. Who else, she thought, would read her school newspaper? In a school with a student body of less than two thousand, she imagined the messages were sent by people she ate with in the dining hall, sat with in class, passed on the way to her dorm. Online, they called her a “black bitch.” They called her a “n*****.”

The day after the op-ed was published, Alex had dance class. She walked into class with dread in her step. She felt sweat coat her back. She didn’t want anyone to know what was happening inside her body, so she made it unreadable. She disciplined her face.

When class began, Alex said, the professor didn’t talk about Black art. She didn’t talk about Alex, how she felt, what she and the other students of color needed. Instead, she suggested that students should be careful, especially with what they say about guest artists. Someone could get sued, she remembers the professor saying.

After class and the professor’s not-so-subtle chiding, some of the white women dancers from her class came up to her in the cafeteria and said, “Oh Alex, we appreciate you being so courageous.” But Alex said none of them spoke in front of the professor.

Members of the school administration met with her after the op-ed was published. They said her choice could follow her, and they wanted to make sure she understood all the potential ramifications for her future academic career.

They did not say the words perhaps silence will keep you safe. But that was what she believed they meant.

White Supremacy

The problem of women’s online abuse is almost always framed as a problem of misogyny, but Alex’s story, and the stories of countless other women, show that violence online is also linked to a struggle over the structural power of white supremacy, to the other systems with which it intertwines. Alex could not ignore what people were saying to her online, because language can be used to maintain power or to resist it. It can be used to keep certain people in their place or to fight a system that ranks human life. Language carries long histories and deep hopes. Our brains and our bodies experience language, reacting to generosity or to malice. Language influences how we see ourselves, how other people see us, how they treat us. Language shapes public life. So do silences.

When Alex was abused online, she was punished through multiple attack vectors: her gender, her race, and the norms of behavior for Black people in predominantly white spaces.

Black women online experience what feminist scholar Moya Bailey termed misogynoir, an anti-Black racist misogyny that produces a “particular venom.” Research by the UK charity Glitch analyzed social media posts from July 2022 to January 2023 and found over nine thousand more highly toxic posts about Black women than white women, rife with stereotypes “such as ‘the angry Black woman’ (‘Sapphire’), fetishisation (‘Jezebel’), and fatphobia (‘Mammy’).” Black women journalists and politicians are 84 percent more likely to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets than are white women journalists and politicians, according to a 2018 report from Amnesty International. A 2023 study led by Michael Halpin of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, found that women of color are “doubly denigrated” by the incel community “through a combination of racism and sexism.”

Before the 2014 harassment campaign dubbed “Gamergate” became a cultural inflection point for the issue of women and online abuse, Black women were already navigating rampant misogynoir online. Gamergate was an explosion of masculine aggression toward women game developers, feminists critiquing video game culture, and anyone who dared defend them. Trolls organized on forums like 4chan and Reddit and the text-based chat system IRC to spread lies and disinformation about women they did not like, and they used those stories to justify attacks. Alice Marwick, principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, told me that during Gamergate, trolls “were looking for proof of concept,” and they discovered their strategy worked: “It shuts people down, it gets them to stay off the Internet.”

Most mainstream coverage of Gamergate focused on misogyny as an animating force, neglecting a deeper interrogation of the way racism also shapes the experiences of women online. Black women are gamers, too, and savvy Black digital feminists had already documented the harmful behavior of 4chan users who coordinated to impersonate and harass Black women online. Just months earlier, Shafiqah Hudson, Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam, and Sydette Harry had created the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, a nod to Hudson’s Southern roots, letting the trolls know “we see you.” Scholar Jessie Daniels, an expert on Internet manifestations of racism, told me the cultural conversation around Gamergate flattened the race element. White supremacy online, she said, does not get nearly enough attention as misogyny, despite the fact that misogyny and white supremacy are constitutive of each other. They are, she said, “of a piece.”

White supremacy is what Alex implicated in her op-ed—the same belief that animated the people who would call her slurs, the same belief she suspected influenced her professor’s reaction after the op-ed ran and which she believes also explains why some of the white women in her class did not defend her that day, a silence that tells its own story about white women’s complicity in Black women’s oppression.

Editorial Reviews

A meticulous accounting of the effects of online harassment, the way it can upend women’s careers, their health and their minds.”—The Washington Post

“This is a deeply researched and clearly argued book, and Dastagir’s empathy and forays into her personal life make it particularly effective. A brilliant analysis of gender-based violence on- and offline.”—Kirkus Reviews

“An astonishing, brilliant, and timely book, Dastagir’s To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person sheds more light on misogynistic online culture and what women face today as a result than any other book I have read. A courageous, moving, and vital piece of reporting that I want to press into the hands of every person with an Internet connection.”—Kate Manne, author of Unshrinking

“Alia Dastagir has written an urgent and necessary argument for a more humane internet and, as a result, a better world. Weaving together profiles of women who have become the center of targeted harassment campaigns, To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person untangles the violence of internet abuse and shows how it silences the voices we need to hear the most. This book is both a manual and a manifesto for bringing about a better way to exist online. Dastagir has written a must-read for our digital age.”—Lyz Lenz, New York Times bestselling author of This American Ex-Wife

“Online harassment is not only a common precursor to offline violence; it is violence. To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person marries scientific research and lyrical writing to remind readers that our bodies react to violence in different ways and that resisting patriarchal and white supremacist forces is never easy, but the fight will always be worth it.”—Carrie Goldberg, author of Nobody’s Victim

“This beautifully written book gives us the courage to make sense of the concerns we all hold about the harms of the Internet and is a clarion call that our humanity is valuable and worth caring deeply about when it comes to how we engage with technology on an everyday basis.”—Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

“To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person will be an affirming, helpful balm to all women who have experienced any form of harassment online. It is painstakingly researched and emotionally generous toward its reader, powerfully acknowledging the legitimacy of trauma caused by online abuse and providing real, helpful solutions and reframes.”—Stephanie Foo, author of What My Bones Know

“You are lucky to be holding this book. Lucky because it will make you rethink violence and language and the ways the two create each other. It will make you rethink misogyny and the way it’s not just about women but also white supremacy and structural oppression. But more than this, you are lucky because Alia Dastagir has written a way through these seemingly entrenched systems—by writing with immense care about those who fight back.”—Cris Beam, author of I Feel You and To the End of June

From the Publisher