Stalking in alt-right circles: how conservatives have made me a radical feminist

[M., a young 24-year-old mother whom some of you may have heard in the Radio Chaton podcast that she did with Solveig Mineo in 2018, gives her testimony about her harassment in so-called « right-wing » conservative circles, which has had a significant impact on her life and her health. There hasn’t been a #MeToo on the “right” circles yet, but it’s not the serious cases of misogynist harassment, revenge porn, and sexual assault that are lacking in this environment. The French version of her testimony is available in this link. We know for sure that this testimony will provoke hatred and contempt. It is in full awareness of the risks that we publish it, because it seems urgent to us to encourage women to raise their voices freely, these women who have been remaining silent for too long, hiding in shame, thus giving the harassers a full space to continue their violence in impunity.]

This story is divided into two parts. The first, more general, aims to expose the purely ideological reasons as well as the contradictions inherent in so-called “right-wing” movements that can lead a woman who has always felt this political sensitivity to deny it and to leave its activism. This is written from a purely subjective point of view: my words are solely mine and I do not claim to speak for other right-wing women.

The second, more personal, aims to testify about the (cyber) moral harassment that I have been through, as well as other women, in the same circles.

It took me an enormous amount of courage to write this article. First of all because it is not easy to dive back into traumatic events from your past, especially when you have never really managed to turn the page; secondly, because the unpleasant reactions it is likely to provoke are quite predictable. You could argue that these events only concern an echo chamber and therefore it is not interesting to talk about them. Moral (cyber) harassment, in its misogynistic form, affects absolutely all circles and all political, activist, social and cultural spheres: we cannot fight against a phenomenon of such a large scale by minimizing the scope of the testimony of someone, because it would only concern a restricted environment. The scandal of the « Ligue du LOL » in France also concerned a small sphere, that of left-wing journalism, and its scope was nevertheless exceptional. The same goes for the #MeToo phenomenon, which has its roots in the denunciation of rape and sexual assault within the community — restricted and inaccessible to the majority of us — of cinema.

Difficult then because, as in all cases of harassment, breaking the silence can lead to being targeted again — in this regard, we will remember the Mila case where, together, associations helping victims of cyberbullying, the school and almost all of Mila’s relatives advised her to shut up, to delete her social medias, to make people “forget about her”, if she wanted, one fine day, to return to a normal life. This injunction to silence, rooted in the fear of a new wave of harassment, is absolutely unbearable and constitutes a double penalty for the victims: first, they suffer unjust, immoral and criminally reprehensible acts, which in the most tragic cases can destroy their lives, resulting in suicide — then we tell them to disappear, not to rely on justice because “it is useless”, “it is only the Internet”, and finally we offer them as an ultimate solution to consult a psychiatrist to heal their trauma (in the meantime, stalkers continue to exist freely on the web with impunity, and above all will surely not go to see the psychiatrist which they would badly need).

However, it is essential that some stand up and take the risk, despite the potential consequences: in my case, I see it as a moral duty that I would have towards my daughter. If I want her to grow up in a world where she would not have to undergo these kinds of experiences, where harassment in the broad sense would be hunted, socially stigmatized and condemned to the height of the (immense) harm that it causes, each testimony counts.

Likewise, in a political context where the debate on anonymity on the Internet is resurfacing, and where this right to anonymity, accompanied by its essential corollary — freedom of expression — is threatened by the public authorities, it seems essential to alert and to fight firmly against individuals who abuse these rights to the point of endangering them. Because yes, beyond the liberticidal policies carried out by the governments, I persist and sign: the cyber-delinquents are the FIRST responsible for the hardening of the legislation in this matter. Yes, freedom of expression, when it concerns the realm of political ideas and opinions, must be absolute. No, it does not encompass the inalienable right to drive young women to suicide. Yes, the right to anonymity on the web must be guaranteed and protected, and yes, if it is not also protected by combating doxxing (the practice of researching and displaying on the internet information on identity and private life — real or fantasized — of an individual with the aim of harming them) within the political, activist, social and cultural circles in which one evolves, then one is a hypocrite.

Thank you very much in advance for your attention. Good reading.

Part one

Two essential things brought me, at an early age, to get closer to so-called “right-wing” circles:

• Like many women, a reaction to what I was going through on a daily basis. My teenage days in the South of France were driven by incivility and sexist and misogynistic attacks committed by foreigners or « French » people of foreign origin. Everyone knew that these individuals were responsible for the majority of harassment and street assaults perpetrated against French and native European women, but speaking openly about this problem was a real factor of social exclusion. The fear of being labeled as “racist” outweighed the need to name the problems in order to be able to solve them.

• A reason related more to my personality and my background: coming from a working-class broken family with conflicting relationships, I appreciated the importance given to family values ​​by the “right”, which I did not find within my original political sensibility (anarchist).

Like many young adults of my age losing their bearings, I was also going through an identity crisis and wanted to learn more about the history of my country, my ancestors and my civilization. I thought that getting closer to my roots would allow me to better understand who I am, as well as how to act in a world whose codes I did not understand. In this regard, it seems important to me to clarify my autistic type personality, which makes it extremely difficult for me to understand and apply social codes.

That’s what I came for when I got involved in activism. Not exactly what I found there. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t intend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In addition to great encounters, the so-called “right-wing” circles have been a gateway to my heritage, to essential things which structure my life today, such as the rediscovery of my pagan roots and initiation into disciplines that fascinate me such as runology. While they don’t have a monopoly on it, the “right-wing” circles have allowed me to awaken a whole bunch of political and cultural subjects and I thank them for it. However, if I have come to deny them and leave them without regrets, it is because these positive findings were largely outweighed by the negative experiences that are the subject of this article.

With hindsight, it seems obvious to me to have been immersed in movements that were built in reaction to the excesses and ideological absurdities of the left, and that paradoxically have become the exact reflection, the mirrors.

Faced with the ideology of deconstruction* and cultural relativism advocated by the left (*any concept, even if it is anchored in purely biological realities, is a social construction that should be deconstructed), the “right” essentializes, generalizes, categorizes and labels excessively, also becoming an environment ill-suited to free thought, innovative ideas and, more generally, to any development.

Thus, faced with gender theory (theory based on the postulate that biological sex and gender identity are mutually exclusive and that there are a multitude of gender identities other than “male” and “female”) the “right” lapses into an essentialism that is just as delusional and pushed to the limit, with an almost sickly obsession with the assignment of each biological sex to the gender identity that is supposed to correspond to it naturally. Thus, men are intrinsically made to lead, govern, work outside and fulfill themselves in the world of ideas, while women are made to be mothers, nuns or whores, confined to the purely material world of domestic work, and summoned to be the representatives of a “femininity” (as opposed to a caricatural vision of feminism) characterized by these beautiful “qualities” that are submission, passivity and silence – to summarize, by this beautiful “quality” that is domestication.

A rather flagrant contradiction that I was given to see during my stay in these spheres also resided in the constant criticism (which seems to me to be founded and legitimate) of the hyper-statization of our society led by the left, accompanied by its increasing desire to reduce our individual freedoms and to muzzle dissenting voices in total contempt for freedom of expression. That being said, the so-called “right-wing” circles turned out to be just as rigid and ideologically dogmatic as the statist left which they intended to oppose. The positions opposing the “classic” reactionary ideological corpus were not only debated and tested — which seems normal to me in circles with a culture of debate — but their voice carriers (especially when they were women) severely vilified and ostracized in order to be silenced.

The example of Occidentalist feminism carried by Solveig Mineo seems to be the most obvious example to illustrate my point. I am in fact convinced that this form of feminism is the most empirically represented among Western women: indeed, “mainstream” so-called “left-wing” or “intersectional” feminism, sprayed with public subsidies, has largely demonstrated its betrayal of western women. White women, of Western culture and atheistic sensibility (the majority of Western women, therefore) cannot decently approve it unless they kneel down and submit to the interests of religious extremists whose are the exact opposite of theirs — to summarize, to deny feminism. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, reactionary anti-feminism speaks even less to Western women, and the dichotomy made by the “right” opposing “hysterical” feminist tendencies & “social justice warrior” to “tradwifes” (traditional submissive women of the 1950s) is completely absurd and out of touch with reality. The social justice warrior and tradwife tendencies, in addition to representing almost no one in real life, are two forms of religious activism at the antipodes of the concerns of Western women: on the one hand, we have the religion of “Progress”, understood negatively as a synonym of deconstruction (I insist on the neutrality of the word progress), on the other hand traditionalist Christianity. Forgive me, but I know women well enough to know that the overwhelming majority of them do not recognize themselves in the deconstructivist delusions of third generation “feminism”, nor in the ideological contortions of intersectional “feminists”, who attempt with incredible acrobatics to combine feminism, imported patriarchal religions and unconditional welcome of individuals of intrinsically misogynistic culture, and reactionary anti-feminism intending to deprive them of rights which they consider to be fundamental and acquired.

Despite this promising market of “right-wing” feminism, the “right” refuses to get out of its losing repulsive preaching of blissful anti-feminism, just as it persists in wanting to reduce the rights and freedoms of women in the name of family values, without ever defending them by promoting positive measures that would generate new rights for all.

For example, and I say this after years of presence in these spheres, I have never (or very little) heard someone promote the extension of the length of parental leave, the reduction of school working time – at it’s done in certain European countries – for the benefit of outside school activities and more “family” education, nor even the revaluation of family benefits from a natalist perspective – we speak rather, in certain “right” spheres, of granting a “salary” to married housewives only.

On the other hand, there are still many people to fight in the name of « the children’s best interests » against assisted reproduction for all, known as « fatherless » reproduction. This article’s aim isn’t to discuss the merits of La Manif Pour Tous’ claims, so I will refrain from saying what I think, simply note that these activists want, again, to block the road exclusively to new rights accorded to women by taking the children’s best interests hostage. Why exclusively? Because I have never, for example, heard these activists protest against family abandonment in the name of the children’s best interests, therefore promoting measures such as the facilitation of forced recognition of paternity, a measure that would ensure at a minimum the financial participation of the resigning “father” in the maintenance and education of the child.

Let’s talk about it, the resigning “fathers”, those absent from the stereotypical speeches of the reactionary “right”, which is never short of superlatives when it comes to vilifying single mothers, considered neither more nor less as responsible for all the misfortunes of the world. The single mother, this woman who nevertheless had the courage — according to reactionary standards — to embrace her natural role of mother by refusing the “ease” of abortion, is portrayed as a woman inherently dangerous and destructive of civilizations, this through biased & ideologically oriented “studies” comparing the rates of crime, delinquency, suicide (…) of children from single-parent families and those from “traditional” families. This kind of study, obviously biased in that it does not indicate from what social backgrounds these single-parent families come from, what financial means they have to ensure their children a healthy and secure living environment, as well as the other criminogenic factors to be taken into account (drug addiction, alcoholism, violence etc), are used as “scientific” support by “right” circles to stigmatize single mothers and fight against “fatherless” assisted reproduction in the “children’s best interests”. However, strive to reduce these criminogenic factors through forced recognition of paternity, as well as by more substantial financial support for those who need it most (yes, it is indeed single mothers and not rich married housewives) in the “children’s best interests” is not part of the program.

This “double standard” is largely explained by the proximity of the “right” to the manosphere and masculinism (movements whose aims are to promote men’s rights and their interests in civil society, stating in particular that they are victims of the « excesses » of feminism). One can once again wonder about the obvious contradiction of criticizing statism on the one hand, and embracing the wacky theories and claims of masculinists demanding more and more state on the other. Among these demands, we no longer cite the aptly named sexual communism, which starts from the postulate that all men, regardless of their merits and personal efforts as well as their mental, social and physical condition, would have the RIGHT to a wife. So the whole society, with the help of the State, should mobilize to prohibit the sexual freedom of individuals and provide a well-built, virgin, docile and gifted in cooking wife to these gentlemen BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE FUCKING RIGHT TO IT.

If I had to summarize my point, I would say that as a person advocating for intellectual freedom and tired of the ideological formatting of the left which almost confers on Stalinism, I did not find on the “right” what I was looking for. I have found a circle dominated by reaction to the left and which has nothing to envy it for when it comes to totally disconnecting from realities. I have found an environment that does not want to win, that perfectly enjoys playing the role of an opposition figure and taking positions that are intentionally caricatured and repulsive. As a woman, who arrived in these circles as a “moderate” feminist, who has always been attached to criticizing allegedly marginal behavior within her political family without ever falling into a form of stupid misandry, I found an environment determined to silence women who do not accept to be a showcase for the reactionary agenda.

And well… To play the game is to accept having to do permanent acrobatics to satisfy fundamentally contradictory demands: it is fashionable to appear “feminine” and attractive (as opposed to the supposedly “ugly”, “masculine” and “sexually repulsive” feminists) while adopting a prudish appearance and attitude. We will be congratulated for exposing our life as a “devoted” stay-at-home mom as long as our presence remains reasonably discreet (a “real woman” does not expose herself publicly to excess, she is supposed to be satisfied only with the attention that she receives from her husband and master). We will be expected to satisfy unrealistic purity standards while our “comrades” are admitting all the possible compromises regarding the rather liberated lives of their – masculine – favorite opinion makers (because yes, the reaction to the insane egalitarianism advocated by the left is manifested on the “right” by the consecration of the inequality in rights and consideration between men and women, under the guise of respect for the “natural order”… Because Mother Nature, it is important to respect her, except when it comes to protest against natural phenomena as old as the world, such as feminine hypergamy (the fact that a woman freely selects, among her pretendants, the spouse with the highest status).

We will be praised, promoted, relayed, if we courageously denounce imported foreign religious misogyny… But summoned to silence if we wish to show honesty and also denounce indigenous misogyny, because we should never “sow division” and “fuel the sex war” within our ranks (which is strangely less of a problem for “our ranks ” when it is the manosphere that does it).

I hear the accusations of schematization, of generalization of marginal behavior to the whole of an activist circle… If this is indeed the case, how to explain the colossal efforts which have been deployed to silence the few women daring to publicly denounce these “marginal” views? How to explain that circles wanting to be the gatekeepers of the individual freedoms of citizens — facing state interference — and of their right to express their political opinions without being doxxed, indexed and socially ostracized for this, regularly remain silent when some of their activists redouble their ingenuity to stalk and publicly expose the privacy of people who don’t suit them? The answers to these questions (they will surprise you) will be the subject of the second part of this testimony.

Thank you for reading.

 

Part two

My story begins in 2017: I was 21 at the time and lived alone in Paris, where I studied. This year corresponds to a very strange moment in my life: my mother passed away two years earlier, so I was now an orphan – this tragedy, added to others, plunged me straight into the abyss, and I was diagnosed with melancholy (this is the most severe form of depression, where all the symptoms of the disease are exacerbated). At that time, I escaped boredom, loneliness and depression on social media, where I got involved in activism and, as one thing led to another, I had a lot of meetings within the Parisian “alt-right”.

Looking back, it’s hard to know what I was doing there. If I had to draw up the sociology of the circles in which I was involved in Paris, I would say that it is less about militant circles than idle bourgeois clubs, Macronists deploying considerable efforts to be integrated into the “higher spheres” of Parisian society by day, “dissidents” by night, whose political and metapolitical activism is more or less unloading an accumulation of frustration online – frustration that has its source in living permanently in a state of cognitive dissonance, in wanting to be “far right” without giving up the material comfort of the beautiful districts of Paris, which necessarily implies the sacrifice of one’s intellectual and moral integrity on the altar of a start-up stuffed with leftist idiots…
For my part, let’s just say that I grew up in a popular environment, far from suits and ties, heeled ballerinas and medallions bearing the effigy of the Virgin Mary. The contrast was accentuated by the fact that I liked to wear a « gothic » style, to dye my hair black and to get tattoos. Ideologically, the ditch that separated me from my “friends” of the Parisian “right” was as great, if not more, than the one that separated our ways of dressing ourselves. As stated in the first part of this testimony, what brought me to get closer to “right-wing” circles was first and foremost the desire to fight against the violence suffered daily by indigenous women, because of immigrant populations. If I was also fond of European history and traditions, this had never made me a reactionary, and I had always presented myself to my « comrades » as a feminist. Indeed, while I firmly rejected so-called « third wave » feminism, its intersectionality and its ideology of deconstruction, I was committed to equality in rights and consideration between men and women in the West. Beyond simple equality in rights, I was proud to live in a society where the destiny of individuals was not predetermined by their biological sex, where women could become whatever they wanted (including being housewives, which is the choice I made) and where the fundamentally misogynistic debates of another century (dare I say another culture?) about virginity, physical appearance and the sex life of women definitely belonged to the past. Originally of anarchist sensitivity, I attached great importance to the notion of freedom, and if I could conceive an established order, I appreciated that it was pragmatic and did not interfere with religion or ideology.

In addition to these rather incongruous connections in Paris, I created, on the advice of a friend, an account on the social media Twitter, in order to exchange more easily with people sharing my political views as well as my personal interests. So, in 2018, I met Solveig Mineo, the leading figure of “Occidentalist Feminism”. Very quickly, I realized that I had much more in common with her than with all of my “friends” on the Parisian “right”; I recognized myself in her vision of feminism centered on the defense of Western women’s interests, neither deconstructivist nor reactionary, in her interest in pre-Christian European civilizations (although being at that time of Christian faith myself, which Solveig has never reproached me for) as well as in her unconditional defense of freedom. Quickly, we became friends and exchanged our experiences after several years of “right-wing” activism: Solveig explained to me that her right-wing feminist activism has caused her many problems with the reactionaries, traditionalist Catholics in particular, and that she used to be the victim of violent campaigns of harassment carried out by personalities straight out of a psychiatric asylum (we will come back to this) – this in order to silence her and prevent her from offering an alternative to the classical reactionary and predominantly Catholic “right”.

She told me sordid doxxing stories of her family members. She told me that a traditionalist Catholic bragged about spreading her address to someone linked to the terrorist organization Daesh. She warned me that she was also the target of an anti-Semitic Catholic rapper, infamous for his escapades mixing drugs, stays in prison and domestic violence, and that he invented her Jewish and Maghrebian origins. (I will find out later that this is a classic dehumanization technique of the “right”: if the first nutcase proclaims that you are not European – let alone that you are Jewish – then it will absolve him of the disgusting behavior he will adopt towards you, and he will be free to insult you, to slander you, to harass you and to doxx you at best with general indifference, at worst with applause), and that the main occupation of this sad character was to write “articles” and to diffuse slanderous videos about the personalities which he didn’t like. I learned that the wacko portrayed my friend as a pimp mother « infiltrated » into « right-wing » circles, and that she was at the head of an occult prostitution ring run by Jewish high masonry. Just that.
“But… nobody can decently believe that, can they?”

She replied that the video in question had more than 20,000 views on Youtube. So I sincerely hoped that these views were from idle guys wanting to have a good laugh… I will learn that this is not really the case, and that the microcosm of misfits that follow this guy is obsessed with “infiltration”. I then wondered: how can people who have never built anything of any consequence to fight against the system they claim to want to overthrow, who any rational person at least takes for crazy people, and whose danger is only directed against themselves, pretend to believe that someone is seeking to “infiltrate” them? Social ostracization, bulimia of anxiety-inducing conspiratorial content and confinement in echo chambers where one only exchanges with fundamentally paranoid individuals are relevant elements of the answer.

On my side, I hadn’t dived deep enough into the abyss yet, but I still had a few stories to tell her. I have indeed observed for some time the porosity of so-called “right-wing” circles with the manosphere and masculinism (see part 1). The people I frequented, in reality and on social medias, gave me the impression that the “right” was far removed from the real concerns of our fellow citizens: while France is on fire and the absolute and obvious priority is to make our country safe again, my “comrades” seem to indulge in helpless activism. Convinced that the West is in a state of “moral decadence”, “deliquescence” and “mortal sin”, if they do not all agree on the solutions, at least they all agree on the guilty: women of their own blood. For some, European men should stand together with Arab-Muslim men with “traditional” values ​​against “decadent” white women: the most rigorous Islam would be a source of inspiration, a model for Europe, and the establishment of a “White Sharia” (basically the same as the Sharia, but without the Arabs) the solution to all our problems. I even read a guy wondering whether, in order to save Europe, we had to legalize rape… For others, European men should abandon the women of their people in favor of Asian women, allegedly more submissive (whereas European women who choose a foreign partner deserve death), or in a softer version, they choose the way of sex tourism in “traditional” Eastern Europe. Western European women, for their part, should be left alone with deeply misogynistic imported populations, and deserve to be assaulted, raped and slaughtered if they ever had the misfortune, strictly hypothetically, to “like” a Facebook page promoting diversity.

All these findings led us to work together on two podcasts in the spring of 2018, one being about the Toronto massacre perpetrated by Alek Minassian, and also about the MGTOW (men going their own way) and Incel (involuntary celibate) movements, the other, in the logical sequence, to the porosity of this manosphere with the so-called “right”. Since these podcasts are still available online. I won’t dwell on their content, but rather focus on the violent and completely disproportionate reactions that followed. These podcasts were about denouncing extreme misogynistic ideologies carried by marginal communities but constantly try to enter what I considered to be my political family. Regarding the moral harassment which followed and which continues today, several years later, in a sporadic manner, the deafening silence of the majority of my “comrades” and the total absence of public support from other women in the circle (who were telling me in private, however, that they recognized themselves in my experience and adhered to my speech), I quickly realized that the intruder was me, and that the stalkers were here at home.

• So I was the subject of an absolutely delusional doxxing campaign on social media. My old “friends” of the Parisian “right” turned their backs on me and, like cowards, let my anonymous cyber-stalkers do the dirty work by just sending them private photographs from my personal facebook — some were pictures of my teenage days, others pictures taken during parties, in order to shame me and portray me as a « degenerate » (in their vocabulary, this is meant to refer to a person devoid of moral values ​​with an excessively “liberated” life. In fact, this means any woman who has had a normal life, not meeting their unrealistic purity standards). They also gave them my legal name, which I had to change because of the following threats of physical violence directed at me and my family.

• I discovered personalities straight out of a bad horror movie; in a nutshell, the story of my harassment within “right-wing” circles could be summed up as a dive into the heart of human madness and social misery.

So I had the immense privilege of being the new target of a longtime stalker of my friend Solveig, that « rapper » mentioned in a previous paragraph. A true outrageously anti-Semitic traditional catholic, who sees anti-Semitism and religion as a means of redeeming himself within the most extreme fringes of the “right”. He, in fact, desperately wants to make them forget about his foreign origins and his drug addict past. Publicly denounced by his ex-partner and mother of his child in a video which recorded, at the time of its deletion, several tens of thousands of views, this one portrayed his deeply violent, unstable and paranoid personality (it is important to note that he is also known for his stays in prison as well as in a mental asylum), not to mention the staggering list of domestic violence committed by this sad individual on her person in the presence of their child.

I thus learned from the mouth of this curious character who I have never met in my life that I was Jewish (obviously…), that my partner was also Jewish and that we were part of an occult BDSM/prostitution club directed by – I give it to you on the spot – Jewish High Masonry. To back up his claims: a Fifty Shades of Gray parody website which does not even exist to this day and which absolutely does not concern us, that website having been created several years ago by an internet “friend” that we have never met. Photos of a sex worker were also released, awkwardly trying to portray her as me, but the operation was a failure (we didn’t have the same body type or the same tattoos …)

As misfortune never comes on its own, I was also the target of another uplifting personality This time, it was about a failed YouTuber who, not considering himself to be recognized as the genius he is, spends his free time fomenting conspiracy theories to explain his lack of success. In reality, if no one listens to him, it’s because the main subject of his channel – that he regularly feeds with eleven hours live (!) filmed with a poor quality phone and a low-speed connection – consists of his fighting against the “whore-ification” and the “degeneracy” of “modern women”, and that this does not interest anyone sane. Indeed, who of normal constitution would want to listen to someone explain to him for eleven hours that his mother, his sister, his daughter, his girlfriend and his friends are « whores » for a whole lot of absurd reasons (which include — and I swear I’m not making it up — having acne, loving English bulldogs, owning a horse …)?

Thus, even if this mental case had a small audience due to the extreme length and the appalling technical quality of his productions, we should remember that his obsessions and his ideology are not exceptional: the only purpose of the youtube channel of English speaker « Black Pigeon Speaks » consists in affirming that « women destroy civilization », « feminism has emasculated men and » Islam was right about women « . He has 547,000 subscribers on Youtube and is even certified. His ideology influences the entire manosphere and reactionary circles more broadly.

All this little world thus spent months harassing me on social medias, insulting me (dirty whore, drag, degenerate, drug addict, scumbag…), writing defamatory texts of several pages against me (in which they always had to invent for me a sex life and unbridled occult activities), broadcasting photo montages of my face from a video filmed without my knowledge in a public place, cut at the most disadvantageous times to make me look « ugly » and « fat », threatening to harass me even more violently if I don’t shut up and delete my social medias — when it wasn’t threatening me of physical violence… When I got pregnant in 2019, it was about attacking my family, saying that my daughter had been conceived during an “orgy” and that I would not know the identity of the father of the child… Going into the smallest details of my harassment would take too long; just remember that my sanity had deteriorated horribly and that my stalkers were enjoying the situation, my old « friends » having told them about my mental health issues. Knowing that I was deeply depressed, some did not hide the desire to push me to suicide.

Even more distressing and deeply twisted are the reactions of these false friends and false protectors who pretended to want to help me. Their first “advice” was precisely to never fill a proper complaint, telling me that in these circles, it was very frowned upon to denounce a “comrade” to the “system” by going to the police. I learned that the harassed women had to have a racial solidarity with the white harassers of the “right”, because these would already be persecuted enough by the “system” (I thought that was feminists who liked to victimize themselves…). Even if these “comrades” insult them, harass them, defame and doxx them in total illegality and impunity. On the other hand, few “comrades” feel in solidarity with white female victims of harassment and dare to stand up for them publicly. I was systematically advised to delete my social medias, to make people “forget about myself », if I wanted peace. Strange advice from activists who are supposedly unconditionally gatekeepers of free speech.

What was even worse is that I was in a state of huge psychological fragility, that I was isolated and drowned in my problems, so that I ended up swallowing the nonsense of these false friends who had succeeded, through incredible methods of psychological manipulation, in moving in my mind the source of my sadness from my stalkers to my lifestyle and feminist beliefs :

“Being a feminist makes you miserable. You have been manipulated into believing that you can be equal to men, expose yourself publicly and be an activist, when you are not designed by nature for this. You can see where that got you (implying it’s exposing yourself to the problem, not the harassment). All this isn’t made for women, you’d better find yourself a husband, start a family and be fulfilled in the education of your children and the domestic work. You will be much happier and peaceful. ”

“Okay, this harassment has gone way too far, but you still have to admit that you are degrading yourself… You shouldn’t dye your hair, dress like this, go to parties… You are quite intelligent and ‘catchable’ to change and advocate for the real woman, the traditional woman. We will eventually forgive you.”

So stuck in the echo chamber of the reactionary “right”, I ended up hating myself for absolutely trivial things, which wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in normal people, in the majority of the population: having adopted a slightly provocative style during my adolescence and the first years of my student life, going out in the evening, not having “preserved” myself for marriage, being tattooed, not practicing religion assiduously, having drinks from time to time with my friends at 22 rather than thinking about getting married…

I got to such a level of indoctrination that I wondered, in the end, if my harassment had not benefited me, in that it had allowed me to « open my eyes ». Worse, I was now convinced that I had something to be forgiven for (why and by whom?), that I should repent.

Fun fact: I would never be “forgiven”, because the unrealistic purity standards advocated by the people who do not meet 10% of the specifications are a great excuse to despise women in their almost totality. The goal is not to help elevate oneself by preaching what one believes to be right, the goal is to bring others down, to smear them, to defile them.

So when I got pregnant, my partner and my unborn child were insulted badly. It doesn’t matter that I “settled down”, that I gave up working to take care of my home full time, that I started preaching their nonsense myself. When I was a feminist activist, people tried to silence me because I refused to preach the reactionary nonsense and, when I did, they tried to silence me because “I took myself for what I was not. ”, because I was“ rotten forever ”,“ broken ”,“ destroyed ”by feminism and a mostly fantasized “ liberated ”past.

I have never felt so bad in my entire life. My self-confidence was totally shattered by months of daily harassment. I was plagued by the disconnect between my efforts to reform my life and my way of thinking and the despising and insults I received. I received extremely threatening emails from someone who tried to blackmail me, threatening to display intimate photos (even though I had not sent intimate photos to strangers, but I had become so paranoid that I ended up believing that it could be true …) and elements of my private life if I did not disappear from the network.

In 2020, I am better: I live in the countryside, I have a simple and happy family life, I have cut myself off from political circles and from these toxic people… I still have an account on Twitter, but it doesn’t refer to activism, and it mainly serves me to interact — especially in English — with other users sharing my interests (paganism, permaculture…) But it would be wrong to say that these weirdos left me alone. My stalkers have written to the users I interact with regularly, saying the worst horrors about me, blatantly lying about my identity, my background, my life, my heritage, eternally spreading my old photos and other delusional slander intended to shame me. I made up my mind: my stalkers’ obsession with me borders on erotomania, there is something deeply psychiatric about it, and the discovery of some of their identities only confirmed my suspicions.

So I found out that some of my stalkers were failed people that I rejected romantically, and who felt that if they can’t have a specific woman, then no one should have her, and you have to spoil her reputation by hoping that all men will behave like them, like cuckolds, because you really have to be one to favour the opinion of an anonymous stranger over the desire that you have to build something with a woman you are attracted by… In the middle of this freak show is also an older woman whose partner I had the misfortune of dating before she even met him, “feminine but not feminist” as she says, but who looks, speaks and behaves like a man who, according to the statements gathered from common friends, feeds a morbid and sickly jealousy towards all the ex-girlfriends of her partners.

I was there. Rotting my existence fighting against probatio diabolica, aka trying to prove something impossible, that you are not something, to strangers who will never have a place in your daily life. Getting lost in interminable arguments worthy of kindergarten… Trying to dismantle the slanders of marginal people straight out of “Strip Tease” or “Confessions Intimes” [French real TV shows about social cases…], without ever having met them in real life… I wasted precious time and energy, and messed up my soul conversing with sewage rats.

I would like to avoid this happening to young women who read this testimony, and who have been, who are or will be cyberbullied, whether this cyberbullying takes place in “right” circles or elsewhere. To you, my sisters, I advise:

• To give no credit to the words of strangers on the Internet. Anonymous trolls are by definition immaculate: you don’t know anything about them and you don’t know their background. They try to make you feel miserable because they very likely have miserable lives in reality (discovering the identities of some of my stalkers confirmed this intuition). Block these people. File a complaint and defend yourself judicially if you wish.

• Never give in to bullying. Firstly because you have the inalienable right to exist, whether on the Internet or in real life. They are the ones who have illegal activities, who should see a psychiatrist and hide themselves, not you. Misogynistic cyber-stalkers hate women who do not want to be silent and that they cannot control; sooner or later they will find another victim, once they realize that you are a « hopeless case ». Resist. Just as public space does not belong to street stalkers, the Internet does not belong to cyber stalkers.

• Don’t stay alone. Surround yourself only — I firmly insist — with people who dare to support you in public. False friends who privately “support” and “advise” you, while continuing to be around your stalkers, must be eliminated from your circle of friends. They may even be providing your stalkers with information.

To all my sisters, I wish good luck, from the bottom of my heart. Many thanks for reading me.