Hateful emails won't deter me

Vile reactions to strong women can't silence our voices.

When I started writing for The Contrarian in January, the running joke was whether there would be enough fodder for a weekly column focused solely on gender and democracy.

As if. This is my 33rd entry in as many weeks. I have yet to miss a Wednesday.

Today, please allow me to get a little up close and personal and share a window into my inbox—and the email I received from a certain Robert G. Smith who signed off as “Bonecrusher Bob”:

This is not the first time Bonecrusher Bob has contacted me. He has tracked down various versions of my email address and sent me several notes over the years, just as snappy and articulate as this one—usually in response to op-eds written for the Los Angeles Times, his apparent newspaper of choice. In this instance, he was reacting to my recent piece making the case that California Gov. Gavin Newsom should sign AB 432, a bipartisan bill that passed the California legislature last week and would incentivize doctors to receive menopause training and require insurance coverage for menopause treatment.

Being on the receiving end of a targeted email from a stranger hit a little differently this week, though, as the nation grapples with the murder of Charlie Kirk and its fallout.

To be clear, this is not because it makes me fear for my own safety.

No, at least in part, it is just too hard to witness the unabashed and self-righteous hypocrisy of MAGA’s reflexive response and the speed in which the Trump administration has sought to demonize and crack down on “radical left”—whose “rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” according to President Donald Trump.

“While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left,” said Vice President JD Vance, offering no meaningful statistics nor facts to back the claim. (New York Times columnist David Leonhardt wrote in 2022 that the American right “has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left.”)

The Trump administration’s inability to portray accurately the full panoply of political aggression extends to every day aggression, judging by Bonecrusher Bob’s behavior. He is hardly the first to have taken time out of his day to share vile, violent reactions to ideas I put out in the world. Nor is Bonecrusher Bob a newbie himself to writing crude emails with “KKK” baked in. Aside from those he has sent me over the years, a quick Google search unearthed several others whom he has targeted since 2020, including a Cornell University professor who published a remarkably tempered response.

Like so many other women whose work and words have the benefit of a public platform, I am more than accustomed to misogyny. (“Never, ever look at the comments,” is the general rule of thumb—though I do read them at The Contrarian!) More broadly, online violence against journalists, especially women, has become a global phenomenon, one that undermines robust democracy, free press, and personal safety.

Mostly what I am feeling since receiving Bob’s email is a deep sense of obligation to the girls and women in my life. Much of my professional work is focused on developing leaders. By day, I run a law school center and fellowship program; I mentor high school and college students to become public writers; I support grassroots leaders in how to add the art of the op-ed to their advocacy toolkit. My own writing is focused on shining a light on long-ignored women’s health issues, including menopause, to highlight not just problems but solutions lawmakers can get behind.

The Bonecrusher Bobs of the world will not deter me. Gratefully, I suspect that is the case of others in my orbit. Among the teenagers I am coaching, one had drafted an op-ed over the summer, a firsthand account of how boys at her high school had begun parroting politically charged, aggressive forms of masculinity. “What do we do with the story now?” she asked me over the weekend.

My answer to her—and to all the girls and women I am lucky to call colleagues, students, family, and friends—is that we continue to raise our voices with conviction and clarity. We expose those who twist their words and tell incomplete truths or outright lies. And we counter them with the fullest version of ourselves, always well-researched, fact-checked, and with a commitment to a free, fair, and inclusive democracy.

And, when necessary, we share screenshots.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

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