One of my big takeaways from 2020 is that there is still a tax for women working in public. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, there are men who will harass you just for not hiding in the shadows. And other men will stand by as it happens (or ask for praise for not joining in).

This isn’t the same as harassing feminists for feminist work. And that’s the revelation for me.

One of the things I get harassed for most is taking a break. For being happy about it. And it was so confusing to me. If the goal in harassment is to get feminists to stop working, then shouldn’t my trolls be rejoicing in my week off?

At first, I understood this as an extension of the attack on feminism. Trolls want you exhausted, not rested and ready to fight. I also saw it as just a hatred of women. Seeing a woman happy and peaceful is infuriating to misogynists.

But that didn’t explain the angry posts that weren’t overtly directed at me. Subtweets. Anonymous message boards. Places where I almost never see what they’re saying. If they weren’t actively disrupting my break, then what was the point?

And that was the epiphany. It was just anger at anything I ever did in public. Even the most mundane, forgettable, meaningless post is still taking up public space. And they took their comments to (male-dominated) places where they could commiserate with other men.

My cute cats get a lot of likes. Even if they have no interest in dismantling the patriarchy, posting a picture of them gives me—a woman—another way to interact in public. And some men will always hate that.

It makes me think of the women who got death threats or doxxed for adding women characters to a beloved video game. They interfered on the misogynists’ utopia in which women didn’t exist—or only existed out of sight in the service of men.

So yeah, maybe it is all about feminism. But when being a woman taking up space in public is an inherently threatening act, there’s no escaping it. Except disappearing. And that’s just not an option for me.

I’m not sure if this realization is oppressive or liberating. It’s probably both. But for now, here’s a long thread that takes up a lot of space, ended with a silly picture of my cat luxuriating in a blanket that gave me peace and joy over the many months it took to knit.