The comedian and content creator Suzanne Lambert gets insulted too often by misogynists on the internet to remember every little thing that’s been said about her. But of course, she has her favorites.
There’s the typical stuff: that she’s ugly, unemployed, a loser. Occasionally the boys will flex their creative muscle, saying things like she’s the “Temu Regina George” or looks like a “muppet,” which gives her a little smirk.
And then there are the men who say such wildly insane—yet unintentionally hilarious—things to her that she actually, genuinely laughs. Over Zoom she repeats one to me (it’s so graphic I can’t repeat it) and we both dissolve into giggles.
“Disgusting,” Lambert says, still laughing. “And also, he’s right. I was like, Oh my God, that’s really funny.”
Her attitude exemplifies how liberal women online are now approaching internet hate and misogyny, which spiked tremendously after Donald Trump was elected (thanks in part to a so-called “bro wave” in November). The philosophy is pretty simple: Insult them back.
“In general, I think embarrassment with men is a very powerful tool,” she tells me. “And any way that you can embarrass them, whatever that looks like for you and playing to your strengths, is always incredibly effective.”
Lambert, a self-described former Republican originally from the South, was working at an investment firm in Washington, DC, and doing comedy on the side when she began to post videos making fun of hateful Republican rhetoric, anti-LGBT activists, and misogynists on TikTok.
“After the election and the messaging coming out, I was like, I can't listen to this for four more years, about how we have to be nice. We’ll all get through this if we hold hands and sing around a campfire,” she says. “I was like, no. I was pissed off.”
Her videos immediately resonated with frustrated liberals, who were staring down the barrel of another four years of the Trump administration and feeling tired of the constant hateful rhetoric from the right.
“MAGAs already perceive us as stuck-up and mean. May as well show them what mean really is at this point,” wrote one woman on her very first video.
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Lambert’s videos are indicative of a larger cultural trend. The 2016 era, which preached answering the hateful rhetoric from Trump and his supporters with decency, is over. This era was best exemplified by Michelle Obama’s famous “When they go low, we go high” speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, but even Ms. Obama herself seems to be over it. In her speech at the 2024 convention, she adopted a much more aggressive tone, calling Trump “small” and “petty.”
“It’s his same old con: doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better,” she said.
And since the new Trump administration has led to misogyny running rampant, many of the ways liberal women have found to “make fun of them back” is responding to the ridiculous, gross, and frankly unhinged things men say to them on a daily basis online. Where the general consensus used to be that it was better to just ignore these “trolls,” a new generation of women is bringing them out into the light.
The woman perhaps best known for this is Drew Afualo, a creator who has built a huge brand on TikTok over the past several years by roasting the misogynistic and fatphobic men who find themselves in her DMs (she’s since turned her success into a podcast, The Comment Section, and book, Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve). Afaulo, who declined to speak to Glamour, told Bustle last year that she was tired of always turning the other cheek when men said horrible things to herself and other women online.
“I don’t believe that just because I identify as a woman I have to tip-toe around their feelings when they don’t give a fuck about mine,” she said.
That’s a philosophy also embraced by Reb Masel, a.k.a. Reb for the Rebrand, another successful TikToker who is known for her witty and scathing responses to misogynists and trolls. Reb, a lawyer by day, tells me that there’s no reason why women shouldn’t be able to respond to online abuse.
“The idea that women who are educated, who are smart, who are successful…that they wouldn’t use that intellectual prowess to clap back at people who are loudly ignorant or abusive or angry online, to me, is crazy,” she says.
It’s about more than punching back, though. For too long, she says, men have been able to hurl hate at women online with very few consequences in their real lives. It’s time for that to change.
“We’ve allowed people like that to exist for so long under the guise of free speech or under the guise of, well, we can try to educate them,” she says. “If people don’t want to be educated, they’re not going to be. So we might as well make what they are something that is intolerable in our society and that isn’t a repression of their free speech or the marketplace of ideas.”
For Reb, the issue is especially poignant. She was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014 when her classmate Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree driven by his own misogynistic ideals. Six people died and 14 others were injured.
“I think of them every day,” says Reb. “I really hope that if I do even a little bit to combat the misogyny and rhetoric in this lifetime, then I will hopefully prevent that from happening. Because the line is very thin between someone just commenting shit online and leading to that or encouraging that and inciting that.”
And then there is the simple truth: Hating women is embarrassing. We should start making society recognize that.
“The best way to infiltrate the impressionable minds and the culture of our society is to humiliate the people who are taking sides that we shouldn’t tolerate,” says Reb. “Because I would rather end up having my voting rights and reproductive rights and rights to personhood rolled back as a woman while I’m making fun of them for being fucking clowns then do it with my mouth shut and saying, ‘We should love everyone.’”
She adds: “If I’m going down with the ship, I might as well be fucking hilarious while I’m doing it.”
