Facebook has moved far away from its original purpose for me. I mostly use it to send messages or read funny or insightful articles written by strangers.
Once upon a time I would scroll through my newsfeed to catch up on friends’ holidays, family occasions and other milestones. Some of that stuff still exists, but the personal posts are few and far between.
Sometimes when I’m scrolling, I will realise my feed is filled with REALLY weird stuff. Within about half a dozen posts it hits me that I’m in the HouseGoesHome newsfeed.
HouseGoesHome doesn’t follow many people, it’s mainly a way to share my daily posts without bothering people who aren’t interested in reading them.
So Facebook has curated a feed for me and it can be a bit terrifying sometimes. It’s a portal into the minds of some very strange people.
Back in my safe space of my personal feed, I am obsessed with a page called the People’s Republic of the Northern Beaches.
It’s a satirical page, featuring this description in the “About” section: “Welcome to The People’s Republic of the Northern Beaches, where every minor inconvenience is treated like a constitutional crisis on a daily basis.”
Cracks me up every time. The most recent post was about farmers’ markets. It included paragraphs like: “The Ministry also confirmed that every single purchase must be accompanied by a story. You cannot simply buy tomatoes. You must explain they were grown by Greg, whose grandfather first planted seeds during the Whitlam Government before passing the family soil to his son, who now sings to every vine at sunrise while collecting rainwater blessed by a Mullumbimby naturopath.
“The tomato itself remains objectively identical to the one sitting in Coles for $3.80. But this one has a backstory.”
Classic!
Facebook also serves up posts to me from like-minded people that its algorithm thinks I might enjoy. Sometimes it totally nails it.
Yesterday it send me a post by a woman whose page is called Holdin’ Holden. There was nothing satirical about that one. Its subject matter was angry men who are abusive to women online, demanding they conform to a stereotype of attractiveness and subservience, asking: “Who’s going to want you when you’re old and alone?”
Choice paragraphs in Holdin’ Holden’s response – on behalf of independent women – to that question included: “We’d let our tits drag on the floor and our vaginas fall out before we’d settle for you.
“We’d rot into a carcass our animal companions can feed on while our body waits to be discovered if it meant we never had to hear from you again.
“We’d rip out our uteri, swing them around our heads like a lasso, and fling them into oncoming traffic before listening to you tell us what’s attractive in a woman.
“We’d fossilize into a museum exhibit labeled “Woman Who Died Ignoring Mediocre Men” before lowering our standards for you.
“We’d become one with the forest floor and let mushrooms use our skeleton as an Airbnb before asking what your favorite podcast thinks about female attractiveness.
“We’d let the raccoons lorded over by Jimothy sort out our estate before taking relationship advice from a random man wearing sunglasses in his truck profile picture.
“We’d rather haunt an abandoned Victorian mansion making spooky “ooooOOOooo” noises for eternity than spend one more minute wondering if we’re your type.
“We’d let archaeologists argue over our pelvis for three hundred years before we cared whether you found us “wife material.”
“We’d rather become sea glass. We’d rather become compost. We’d rather become folklore.
“We’d become the mysterious old woman in the woods children are warned not to disturb instead of signing on to wash your crusty ass tighty-whities for an eternity.
We’d rather rot for a million years and become one of those skeletons archaeologists find curled up with a dog and think, “Wow… they looked happy” instead of listening to you whine about “a woman’s place.”
“We’d melt into a dusty pile of wrinkles and stretch marks if it meant you’d stop talking about what you “prefer” for ONCE.
“WE’D prefer you just go away.
“You keep threatening us with a future we already chose over settling for men like you. Don’t you get it?? NO, you obviously don’t, or I wouldn’t have to spell it out for you like this.
“If you want a subservient woman, go find one. Go! They exist! Go bother them!
“Stop begging for independent women to clip their wings and become your bangmaids.
“You’re not going to put us in our place because we know our place: NOT WITH YOU. We. Are. Not. Interested.”
Strongly worded, yes? I hope the trolls got the message, but I doubt it.
What many trolls don’t realise is that their ugly comments sometimes pop up in their friends’ Facebook feeds. There is one former colleague who isn’t my friend any more after I saw some of the awful things his says to women he doesn’t know.
I will never understand trolling. Ever.
A woman called Tova Leigh posted a body-positive image of herself in a bikini on her Facebook page and was pronounced an “ugly, fat old cow” by a stranger called Predrag.
She fought back, posting: “I read your comment and felt curious about the kind of person who would leave something so unkind. I went to your profile, hoping to understand more.
“What I saw made me feel sad.
You were surrounded by your beautiful grandchildren – one of them a little girl. And I found myself wondering how she would feel, one day, if she knew this is how her grandfather speaks to people online. To women. To strangers.
“I want to be clear: your words did not hurt me.
“They didn’t hurt me because I don’t know you, and your opinion of me holds no weight in my life. They didn’t hurt me because I genuinely like who I am and the body I live in. And they didn’t hurt me because I’ve learned that cruelty rarely comes from strength – it usually reveals something unresolved within the person offering it.
“But your comment did remind me of something important.
“It reminded me why I do the work I do.
“I am a mother of girls. And I never want my daughters to believe that a man’s opinion of their bodies, their age, or the way they choose to live should make them smaller – physically, emotionally, or otherwise. I never want them to shrink themselves to make others more comfortable.
“So instead of hiding, I stand here – visible, unapologetic – celebrating the woman I am, in the body I have.”
Go Tova! Go Holdin’ Holden. I love your work.
And please don’t stop posting The People’s Republic of the Northern Beaches, you make my day.
Song of the day: Extreme “Words”
housegoeshome 
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