For a few years, a seemingly peaceful message had been spread all over the internet: feminism was aggressive and no longer needed. Society had progressed to the degree that opportunities, respect and fairness were equally given to men and women in first world countries. Whereas in many countries, opportunities are no longer denied based on sex, it is not only accepted, but encouraged, for women to be socially annihilated when they speak out against powerful men. Or for any other God-forsaken reason. The crowd’s appetite seems insatiable.

Sure; you see businesswomen, female politicians, scientists and other prominent professionals. They’re all over TV screens, creating a false appearance that attitudes towards women have changed.

A woman’s every choice, word, reaction and gesture are still being picked apart, held to impossible standards and used against her. There is no bona fides or fairness in how the public and grifter platoon treat women to this day.

There are entire channels dedicated to micro-analysing women’s every look or gesture. So-called body language experts have exploded in popularity, only focusing on what the masses click on: the attempt to “prove” that successful women are liars and manipulators. Never mind that body language analysis is pseudoscience, not validated as accurate by any study. Never mind that the subjects these people pick are chosen for one reason only: they are already targets of communal hatred and hordes of people would consume any speculation confirming their bias, however absurd.

Singling out a facial expression and weaving narratives around it is no better than pointing the finger at someone and shouting “Witch!”. People nowadays were not supposed to be that stupid. And still, they flock to this nonsense in the hundreds of thousands (at least).

“The left has lost its marbles”, they said a few years ago

Like many, a few years ago, I was bombarded with material showcasing outliers of the left, and indeed, feminism. Blind hatred of men, wanton promotion of vulgarity and the like. A handful of blue-haired, screeching women constantly graced videos impugning the left, which had apparently gone insane overnight. It dawned on me much later that these were carefully selected oddities, neatly packaged by a propaganda machine, roughly a year before the 2016 US presidential election and ongoing. I had to face my own stupidity, and the fact that certain terms I’d repeated were, in fact, dog whistles, empty of any meaning and designed to stir a strong reaction towards certain societal changes.

Every field of activism has its extremists, its crazy people and pretenders, taking on a cause, at times in absurd ways, to gain momentary popularity. It does not, by any means, invalidate the main issues. The left, of course, is full of fake activists, reluctant to diverge from popular opinion for fear of losing their status. This year in particular, it became very obvious, given the few voices supporting Amber Heard, legally targeted by DARVO expert Johnny Depp in an obscene circus people still refer to as a fair trial.

The left is not the problem. Nutters and grifters are the problem, and that goes for any line of thought. Also, I can’t help but notice how many public speakers who started by denouncing the excesses of feminism ended up focusing on “the woes of the white race” and blaming many societal issues on immigrants, as if they’d been wearing a thin veil of civility all along.

All that could be imputed to “social justice warriors” a few years ago fully applies to them. Black and white thinking, superficiality, slogans, memes, dehumanisation, cruelty, cult-like behaviour, petitions to get people fired. There is, of course, money to be made by pandering to that ever-expanding crowd, either sincerely or not. There is money to be made by placing the victim status on men who behave poorly (even atrociously), every disturbed Incel unable to find a partner and so forth.

Misogyny is not an issue of the past. It never has been, though some of us were fooled into believing it.

MeToo appears to have been a trend and nothing more, embraced and praised by all – until the opposite direction became more profitable. Today, there’s a fresh public appetite for dissecting and invalidating the experiences of domestic violence and sexual assault victims. This, by the way, is not an assumption. It’s out in the open. Amber Heard, Evan Rachel Wood, and more recently, Angelina Jolie, all became targets of intense campaigns to invalidate their experiences, despite the evidence they could provide.

The public seems hungry to dissect perpetual victims of harassment, such as Meghan Markle, presumably for existing (it’s impossible to decipher what people are actually imputing in her case). Bot Sentinel have analysed this harassment campaign for a few years, pointing out many of the accounts responsible on social media, as well as the organised and persistent nature of this content. The manner in which this woman is put under a microscope is quite simply unhinged. No decent person would accept this level of scrutiny for themselves, or anyone they personally knew, as anything less. And still, people consume it voraciously.

2022 was the year merchandise was sold, mocking a woman’s testimony of sexual assault

No internet spectacle was more disgraceful than the sideshow industry created around the Depp v Heard trial. This included merchandise with photos of Amber Heard crying during her testimony, recounting Depp’s abuse (which she had ample evidence of), as well as a sex toy mimicking the bottle she described having been raped with.

A smear campaign against Amber Heard, initiated in 2016 by Adam Waldman, Depp’s psychopathic lawyer (sorry, the term fits this time), resembles the modus operandi of Cambridge Analytica. When it comes to the latter, it’s not difficult to understand how they manipulated people’s frustrations for their political agenda. Those frustrations were real and ripe for the pick. When it comes to Waldman’s campaign, it’s worth considering not only how it worked, but why it worked.

Tropes such as the femme fatale are still being used against victims of domestic violence, even when the perpetrator has every advantage over them, in terms of wealth, status and connections (and quite often, age). Even when there’s a ton of evidence pertaining not only to the abuse, but the perpetrator’s long history of unhinged behaviour, including violence. Instead of researching said history, people quickly believe these tropes.

Recently, hundreds of experts in domestic violence have spoken out in support of Amber Heard.

Some targets of mobbing/harassment don’t learn a thing

A couple of years ago, I defended an asshole who, despite admitting to emotionally abusing women, had been unfairly accused of crimes and brigaded, along with his family. This included false reports to the police, CPS and a swatting attempt – all done in the spirit of tormenting these people for the sake of it. What was done to them was, in no uncertain terms, grotesque.

This year, having gone through this public mauling, the same individual supported Johnny Depp’s smear and harassment campaign against Amber Heard, as if he didn’t know the obvious: crowds will attack unprovoked and for no good reason. Crowds dehumanise and seek to annihilate an individual, adding confabulation to the few facts they can actually verify. All the time. The need to portray women and alleged victims (in this case, a proven victim, as per the UK verdict) as liars and manipulators took precedence to his direct experience with the mob.

People don’t learn. They don’t develop a genuine principle that harassment is immoral, even if it happens to them. Until the vast majority reach the conclusion that this behaviour is unbecoming of a civilised society, targets will continue to be swarmed.