Comedian Chloe Petts: 'Dear internet trolls – I'll wear whatever I like'

As a person vaguely in the media who possesses a body and clothes, I’m no stranger to the hatred and vitriol that comes from all directions when online. I’m talking about trolls – not little plastic figurines that sit atop your pencil, but hairy, smelly men who live under their mum and dad’s house and reply things like, “that dress makes you look pregnant” to the tweets of the Loose Women. 

Of course I’m being facetious; internet trolls can take many forms. From middle-aged women who didn’t like an answer I gave about the civil service on House of Games to football fans who call me a woke snowflake for publicly liking women’s football (joke’s on them, I do rude gestures at eight-year-olds who support the opposing team regardless of gender), the internet is a shield behind which we can all hide from the consequences of our hateful words.

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I was recently exposed to my largest deluge of online malevolence when I was given my own segment every Saturday morning on popular rolling sports news channel Sky Sports News late last year. I would start the show by doing an anarchic comic monologue that rounded up the previous week in football, in which I could tell it like it is, as long as it is grossly centrist and in keeping with the sponsors’ values. 

Some disgruntled viewers took to the internet, initially in their tens and then their hundreds, critiquing my appearance and the clothes I chose to wear. A 6ft 1in lesbian who wears a wide-leg trouser and a functional shirt clearly wasn’t something they were used to on their glamorous sports channel and boy did they let me know.

One morning I was really excited to wear a new shirt and jacket I’d purchased the previous day. I received a Twitter notification and found that someone had taken a picture and video of me, posted it with an insulting caption and now hundreds of people were replying with their hot takes on my sartorial choices. One stranger wrote: “Who would wake up in the morning and choose to wear that?”

I was pretty upset and turned to some of my colleagues at the channel. It was former Rangers striker Kris Boyd who gave me the kindest advice. The gist of Kris’s words was that all people who work in the media are subject to abuse at some point in their careers but it seems to affect women more, particularly women who aren’t white, thin, able-bodied or straight.

 I then asked famously cantankerous ex-referee Mike Dean what he thought coz he’s no stranger at all to being called a “wanker” by hordes of football fans baying for his blood. He said three simple words: “Ignore, ignore, ignore.”

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I think Mike is correct but simply muting and blocking trolls and switching off my social media still wasn’t enough. When you’re being faced with a deluge of abuse online, you can shield yourself from it, but it didn’t stop this feeling in me that my image was being taken out of context all over the internet and, even worse, the insidious sense that people in my real life were somehow reading all of these criticisms and thinking the same thing that those online were saying.

I don’t believe that people should be beyond criticism. If you don’t enjoy something I’ve made then you’re entitled to share that opinion with your followers, but tagging me in a series of vitriolic tweets seems to go beyond a healthy engagement with my work into an arbitrary dislike of someone who you’ve never met. I was perplexed as to why it felt so integral for someone to take time out of their day to try and ruin mine.

It’s difficult to know what I can contribute on the subject of trolling when so much has been written about it and any sweeping statements seem trite and overdone: “be kind”, “remember that your words are reaching a real person with thoughts and feelings”, “people who troll are just cowards themselves with horrid little lives”. All true, but also vomit. If people on the internet haven’t got that it’s horrid to be horrid by now, then they’re unlikely to ever come to this conclusion.

Therefore, my advice would take a more pragmatic approach. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever truly stop trolling; it would take the complete rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of dimwits or total global reform in how we legislate the internet and that seems unlikely to happen soon. Therefore, it’s about how we change our own personal attitude towards hate speech and the internet.

It’s very easy to think that trolls represent the real world because our brains can’t distinguish between near threat and faraway threat, but as long as a troll isn’t on my street shouting that they don’t like my jacket while wielding a knife then they can’t hurt me. It’s also pretty powerful to think that I’ve angered hundreds of men across the internet simply for existing. 

And, if all else fails, you could write an Edinburgh Fringe show about your experience so you get to have the last laugh, muahahaha. 

Chloe Petts brings her brand new show, How You See Me, How You Don’t, to the Pleasance Courtyard, Forth as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 31 July to 25 August at 7pm and then on a UK tour. Chloe Petts’ debut stand-up series for BBC Radio 4, Chloe Petts’ Toilet Humour, is available on BBC Sounds.

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