Nearly 8 years ago I released a video that would eventually receive over 50 million views.
When my friend Steve Cohen first said, “I want to make a video of this” – the “this” in question being a long rant I had written in the days following the 2016 election – my first thought was, “Who is going to want to watch 8 minutes of that?” I had no idea it was going to end up becoming what it did.
“Going viral” as it is called in the parlance of our times, is a strange experience. You wake up one morning and your phone is on fire and every single platform is clogged with alerts and as soon as you clear them out another couple hundred have popped up. It is overwhelming and thrilling and bizarre. As a stand-up comic and writer I spent years wanting my work to get the kind of attention this one video did. When you are a creative, and especially a woman, you are told not to be angry, not to be divisive. And then there I go and do just that and celebrities are retweeting me and strangers are thanking me. I could say something about being rewarded for breaking the rules, but the truth is that marginalized people are rarely thanked for breaking the rules - or for playing by them. In this case, it happened to be true - if getting 50 million people to watch a video is a “reward.”
Yes, there were some rewarding aspects to it. I had some conversations with friends who told me that it meant a lot, made them cry, or helped them to change their perspectives on a few things. That was touching and meaningful, as were the many emails I received from strangers telling me that I was able to express all of the thoughts and feelings they couldn’t find the words for. I learned a lot from those exchanges. As someone who always has too many words to go along with my too many thoughts and feelings, I take for granted that myself and many of the people I know have avenues with which to express themselves. But it’s not the case for others.
Of course it was scary, too. There were emails with threats of violence, rape and death and even more that were just vitriolic and full of hate. For a long time one person in particular just kept getting a new screenname every time I blocked them, I guess because they just enjoyed harassing me that much. I was the subject of an “Alt Right Takedown” on Facebook – which is when a bunch of people report you at once and get your banned. That ruined a Thanksgiving, after I burst into tears at the table and then hid in the bathroom. Right wing influencers, including Tomi Lahren, recorded rebuttals to me on their channels. I started to wonder if I had to take steps to protect my personal safety, not knowing what those steps should even be because there’s no handbook for such occasions, no place to report this stuff to that gives a damn. As one friend said, “Welcome to the world’s worst club.”
Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night panicked about something I may have written online, even though I make it a habit to never post at night, or when I’m drinking, and even when I hadn’t been doing either. I often wonder: Amidst all of the many traumas I’ve had to process in the last number of years is this just one more?
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