The good news is that women are running for office in unprecedented numbers. The bad news is this is America, and all of these women who have put themselves forward are being subjected to all the horrors that public women face: death threats, rape threats, and harassment, also in unprecedented numbers because social media allows so many avenues for it.
Consider what Erin Schrode, a candidate for a northern California House seat who lost the primary, faced on her social media accounts:
"All would laugh with glee as they gang raped her and then bashed her bagel eating brains in," one said.
"It'd be amusing to see her take twenty or so for 8 or 10 hours," another said, again suggesting gang-rape.
Then of course there was the ubiquitous anti-Semitism, which "included photoshopped images of her face stretched into a Nazi lampshade and references to 'preheating the ovens.'" That's the kind of thing that drove Democrat Kim Weaver out of her challenge to Iowa's Rep. Steve King.
The neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer published an article attacking her, and she actually was contacted by an acquaintance in the German government who inquired about her about her personal security plan when an extremist message board they were monitoring picked up "a threatening conversation." Weaver told the Times that "when you feel like you're in a fishbowl and you don't know who it is that's throwing rocks at you, it's disconcerting. […] You don't know if it's somebody sitting in his mother's basement in Florida or if it's a gun-happy white supremacist who hates you who lives a block away."
It's not just Democratic candidates being hounded by Trump's deplorables. Utah Republican Emily Ellsworth, running for the state Senate, ended up having to deactivate her Facebook account to get away from a male delegate who had "cornered her at multiple candidate meet-and-greets and messaged her around a dozen times on Facebook." Because he could. Being a woman of color, in particular, makes it all that much more intense, but all the more predictable and ubiquitous. And infuriating.
"It becomes so normalized, the types of things that people say,"" said Mya Whitaker, 27, a Democrat running for City Council in Oakland, Calif. “Being a black woman and existing, in some cases, is enough to piss people off."
Brianna Wu, the primary target for horrible men in Gamergate, is now running for congress in Massachusetts, and she gets that "normalized" problem. "I often look at it and I'm like: 'I know I should be feeling something right now. I know I should be feeling scared or angry or stressed.' And it's at a point where I can't feel anything anymore.[…] It's almost like fear is a muscle that is so overtaxed, it can just do nothing else in my body."
Nevertheless, they are persisting. As Lauren Underwood, a Democratic House candidate in Illinois, says: "I think that's part of the opportunity in running for progress. […] It's an opportunity to fix this and stop it from happening in the future."
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