To see Roosh and his acolytes pilloried on an international scale has been a strange experience for me. I don’t write about them (because I’m busy, they haven’t earned my time, and they have mistaken attention for legitimacy, a delusion I have no interest in feeding), a hard and fast rule I’m breaking for the first time here.
But they write about me. If you Google “Lindy West” and “Roosh”, the first eight results are from Roosh’s various websites: “Lindy West Brags About Getting an Abortion”, “Lindy West Leaving Jezebel, Still a Whale”, “Fat Feminist Lindy West Goes Berserk Because She No Longer Fits in Airplane Seats”, “The 9 Ugliest Feminists in America” (I’m #1!), and on and on and on. For years, Roosh and his bootlickers have been feverishly monitoring my life, mining it for vulnerabilities that they can exploit. They have stolen my wedding photos. They’ve vandalised my Wikipedia page. They’ve posted pictures of my children and my husband’s ex-wife. They’ve written long, sexually graphic poems about me. They’re obsessed with a completely innocuous YouTube video I made four years ago (because I eat food in it), and still leave comments: “Fatty fucking fat ass get raped you stupid fat landwhale.” And I’m far from their only target.
So it was disorienting, last week, to see the person who orchestrated all of that hate issue this plea for mercy on Twitter: “Anonymous doxxed my family’s address. Whatever I’ve done in life, they don’t deserve to be harassed or harmed.”
I know that feeling so well: just please let me get through this intact. Please let my family remain unharmed. Please don’t make me move. Please let me live.
I know that feeling largely because of Roosh. I’m an anti-harassment advocate largely because of Roosh. And he’s right. His family doesn’t deserve it. Unlike Roosh, I actually oppose doxxing and death threats, even against people I dislike. So it’s difficult for me to enjoy watching anyone, even someone who’s tormented me with a pathological intensity for years, go through a hell I’ve devoted so much of my professional life to fighting.
And, ethical concerns aside, Roosh facing some karmic retribution for the havoc he’s wreaked on women’s lives doesn’t bring me much satisfaction, because it really doesn’t accomplish much. He was already a buffoon caterwauling on the fringe. That the whole world knows it now doesn’t change that fact. What matters is that we recognize that Roosh and his repellant worldview don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re an extreme crystallization of attitudes with real roots in our real lives.