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.

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.”

I have seen innumerable poorly sourced posts and essays about how the wage gap doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately, it does. Here’s the evidence for it:

Adjusted vs Unadjusted Pay Gap

The unadjusted pay gap is where you compare every single female and male worker – no matter their individual characteristics. This has been widely disparaged because women and men work in different jobs, fields, or positions (more on this later). Still, using this measure, we see that women make about 79cents for each dollar a man makes (stats current as of 2010).

But perhaps you’d prefer if we look at the pay gap between “equitable” individuals. Sure! If you adjust for human capital differences like education and experience, you’ll see that women make about 82cents for every man’s dollar. If you then also account for societal variations (industry, occupation) we see that a woman will make about 91cents for every dollar her male peer makes.

Furthermore, we know that compared to the past (1980 comparison year) the individual’s occupation explains much more of the pay gap than before (33% vs 11%), followed by industry (17% vs 9%).

Education on the other hand, explains very little (or none at all) of the pay gap.

Therefore, the pay gap still exists, but is mainly made up of differences in pay rates between occupations.

But, you ask, what does that matter then? If women are just choosing lower paying jobs?

I’m glad you asked!

First, let’s remember that around the world, women are still expected to be the home and child caretakers. We also know that, around the world, women do more unpaid care work than men.

As such, women require more flexible and predictable schedules. (Mom can’t pick up that extra shift if she needs to pick up her kids from daycare! Dad won’t have to worry about that though, since his wife always takes care of dinner!)

As a result, women end up with fewer opportunities to work in the fields they choose, derision from bosses who expect workers to be “enthusiastic” about extra shifts, and most importantly – fewer high-paying fields to choose from.

Simply put, the fields where women are able to obtain this (culturally expected) flexibility tend to be low-paying.

The tendency for women to “pick” lower-paying jobs is explained by the social pressures and expectations limiting her choices in the first place.

Moreover, natural experiments in Denmark (one of the “most equal” countries!) shows that mother’s but not father’s lifetime earnings drop as a result of having a child. This is despite legal protections for mothers and maternity leave policies (although, they definitely help mitigate the problem.)  

More facts:

There is very little evidence that personality factors or “innate” gender differences have anything at all to do with the pay gap

For the little evidence that there is, there’s also substantial evidence that such differences can be eliminated by addressing cultural biases and counteracting this “gendering”

There are still a significant number of countries where even non-pregnant and non-nursing women are not allowed to do the same jobs as men

Studies show that implicit biases against women still reduce their hiring rates (i.e. when the candidates’ identity is obscured, but no other part of the hiring process is changed, women are hired more)

TL;DR The gender pay gap still exists. It is now mainly explained by social factors preventing women’s access to higher paid positions. These social factors both result from and support women’s oppression.  

All of these statistics come from “Why is there a gender pay gap?” by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2018) from Our World in Data.

Our World in Data is a highly respected online publication based at the University of Oxford. They are often cited by both national and international news outlets, scientific journals, and medical journals. Further, their reports and data are used by a number of institutions for higher education.

When you look at white collar jobs vs blue collar, blue collar on average pays more because nobody wants to work them, especially women, because it’s outdoors, dirty, and dangerous. White collar is mostly inside jobs, usually with AC, and is more populated by women.

Men also just more skilled than women. Lets take "drive a car" as an example

Men can drive cars, women can drive cars too.

But….

Men can drive cars expertly, men know the engine, men know the system, men fix cars, men modified cars, men change the oil, men build the cars, men design cars, men do this, men do that, etc…

Women…… still can just drive cars.

She's literally cis, she just has XY chromosomes but still has, you know, a vagina.

I know that sort of thing drives terfs insane, but it fucking happens.

Anyway, it's great how even cis women can't participate in cis woman sports.

Maybe women shouldn't be allowed in sports at all? Sports are so masculine.

they really make women look like men, which basically makes them men, when you think about it.

fucking jackass morons.

Edit: if you daydream about killing people and then get sad cuz it's illegal, you are just as bad as the worst of the men you hate.

Femoid -> female humanoid

So, moid -> male humanoid

Also imagine what this persons response would be if a man posted this about women

The screeching and calls of “misogyny” but when they dream of genociding and mass murder it’s fine and normal behavior

This is why I don’t see the difference in a Nazi or them at this point

Also imagine what this persons response would be if a man posted this about women

The screeching and calls of “misogyny” but when they dream of genociding and mass murder it’s fine and normal behavior

This is why I don’t see the difference in a Nazi or them at this point

Also imagine what this persons response would be if a man posted this about women

The screeching and calls of “misogyny” but when they dream of genociding and mass murder it’s fine and normal behavior

This is why I don’t see the difference in a Nazi or them at this point

Yeah....no. Men are often considered creeps for the most innocent behavior. Whether it's walking on the same side of the street as a woman, being in the vicinity of children, taking pictures in a public place, etc, it is a frequent concern for a lot of men, especially in the age of social media.

I've used this before but

Minding your own business and being the opposite of a creep is not enough to keep people from making assumptions. and those assumptions can be devastating.

It's far more common than you might think.

I saw a twitter post about a woman complaining that her boyfriend wouldn't go to a lingerie store and buy her a few pairs of panties. But from the boyfriend's perspective, he is going into what is essentially a women's only store and buying up what are normally a woman's most private pieces of clothing. He could be mistaken for a panty sniffer, a cross dresser, someone using such things to lure in kids, etc. That may sound silly to women who don't have to worry about false accusations as much, but it's a reasonable concern.

Heck, men cant even avoid accusations for their professions. Male children's photographers, Male gynecologists, Male teachers/caregivers, etc. I have seen many posts questioning their motivations on taking on those jobs. The Daddy Day Care movie even showed a scene where women viewed the men as creeps for wanting to take care of children.

"I'm buying these for my girlfriend" may help diffuse the situation.

"This is my daughter, not a stranger" may have dissuaded a call to the police.

"I was helping a lost child" may be entirely warranted.

We as a society understand the threat of false accusations when the victim is black or gay. We should recognize that this is the world for a lot of men. Covering for themselves is not "fragile masculinity", but often necessary to avoid a terrible situation.

noun

1. reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity.

proven

adjective

theres demand-pull, cost-push, and inflation expectations. with demand pull, theres higher demand for workers, bc the demand is higher than the supply, so the wages increase to attract more workers and the prices increase to cover the labor costs (so the labor costs dont cut into the bigwigs salaries). with cost push, the cost of production rises and pushes the prices higher. with inflation expectations, businesses and people make decisions based on expected inflation which causes inflation to rise. what youre missing in your "explanation" is *why* there are more workers- because theyre needed. the real reason inflation rises is because people high on the corporate ladder arent willing to sacrifice their bonuses to keep prices at a decent or even affordable level.

"women werent in the work force for a reason" women have always worked. prior to world war 2, women were about 20% of the workforce.

“what you’re missing in your "explanation" is *why* there are more workers- because theyre needed. the real reason inflation rises is because people high on the corporate ladder arent willing to sacrifice their bonuses to keep prices at a decent or even affordable level.”

…And they love women entering the workforce, thus doubling the need for jobs, thus giving them the reason they need to cut wages. Corporations love feminism and they love you advocating for it. Even women back then were arguing against suffrage and entering the workforce because they had the foresight to see the damage it would cause to the economy and to society. Women were happier back then than they are now as all the studies on this subject have shown.

thats not "in local communities", dumbass.

and "over 90% of women were against suffragettes" 420% of statistics are totally made up