Congratulations! You’re a woman who has made it in sports media. Or at least you’ve had some moderate success. Or maybe you just have a opinion. Anyway, you’ve garnered enough attention that you’ve attracted some trolls.

It’s kind of funny at first: They call you ugly, they call you fat, they call you a whore. They say things so ridiculous about your work that you think no one could possibly believe them. That you got your job because you’re sleeping with your boss. That you have a personal vendetta against certain players or teams. That other people write your work for you because you’re too stupid to do it yourself.

So you take the advice that people offer to you in droves: Don’t feed the trolls. Ignore them and they’ll go away. Don’t bait them. Lay low for a while. Take a break from social media. Stop offering up your opinion on everything. Don’t comment on such emotional topics.

Only they don’t go away. Months later, they are still coming. And coming and coming and coming. Their comments are cruder and more threatening. You’re starting to see those “ridiculous things about your work that no one could possibly believe” repeated by other people. You can see people repeating the narratives, the ones you didn’t justify with a response.

Trolls create multiple accounts to tweet vile sexual threats at you. They tweet at your co-workers, pretending to be you, asking them to rape you. One day, you spend your entire 8-hour work day reporting harassing accounts to Twitter. The trolls create new accounts as fast as you can report them and Twitter can suspend them. This has been going on for weeks, for months, for years.

So you decide to start standing up for yourself.

You correct people who tweet false information about your work. You put the worst of the worst on blast, hoping exposing them to the world will embarrass them enough to get them to stop. It doesn’t. You lose it a couple of times on Twitter, which you later regret. You are exhausted. Emotionally drained. No one knows how to help you, other than suggesting you “take a break from social media.” But you have to be on Twitter as part of your job.

So you start fighting back, and the trolls multiply tenfold. In addition to trying to fend off a deluge of insults and lies that flows over you every single day, you now find yourself having to defend your actions to the legions of well-meaning who want to know why can’t you just ignore the trolls. What satisfaction do you get out of baiting them? Are you doing this all for attention? Do you have a victim complex? You must, if this is your idea of a good way to spend your time.

Welcome to the plight of thousands of women online each year, including (maybe especially) on sports Twitter. It’s become my reality in the past several months. And let me assure you that, while having to navigate each day in the midst of being continually harassed online is bad enough, the “don’t feed the trolls” mantra — which any woman with an opinion will hear approximately 37,989 times in her social media existence — often makes matters worse.

Programmer and best-selling author Kathy Sierra, who went through her own horrific bout of online harassment and wrote about it on her blog, Seriouspony, says the idea of one “don’t feed” solution for all trolls is doing more harm than good.

“I still believe the whole idea of ‘don’t feed the trolls’ is at best meaningless and, at worst, dangerous advice,” Sierra says. “Today, we have no clear distinctions around trolls and harassment, so a ‘troll’ could mean anything from the guy trash-talking the iPhone in Apple forums to those who attacked and modified the epilepsy forums to cause seizures. A ‘troll’ could be a harmless prankster or a full-blown stalker bent on destroying your life (and provoking/manipulating others to join the attacks against you).”

Therein lies the first problem with the “don’t feed” idea: It assumes that all trolls are the same. They are not. Some get their kicks upsetting women whom they’ve never met. Some want attention. Some likely are mentally ill. Some harbor deep and disturbing problems with women. Some troll in groups, like wildlings, slapping each other on the back each time one of them “gets a rise out of” their target. Just this week, a troll told me upsetting me was the best part of his day.

ESPN’s Sarah Spain has heard the ‘don’t feed’ advice often, and says the one-size-fits-all-approach to combating trolling doesn’t always work.

“Sometimes simply ignoring them causes them to give up on their trolling, as the attention they sought hasn’t been given,” Spain says. “Quite often, though, the harassment doesn’t stop, and the target of their menace is expected to simply ignore and accept the terrible treatment. It never feels good to be harassed or insulted online, and it certainly doesn’t help matters any when you’re expected to keep quiet and just take it.”

Indeed, the nuanced differences in the motivation of those who troll is lost on many of those who try to advise women how to handle themselves online. Sierra, who has completely withdrawn from social media as a result of online harassment, says dealing with trolls is far more complex than what many think.

“‘Don’t feed the trolls’ is useful, practical advice when you’re talking about the harmless prankster who enjoys creating a little drama but has no personal investment in attacking a group or individual. If you don’t react, *they* move on,” says Sierra. “But sadly, that’s NOT what most women I see today are dealing with when we talk about online harassment.

“If you are being specifically targeted by one or more ‘trolls,’ then NOT responding will often lead to escalation of the attack. If Action A doesn’t get your attention, then they escalate up to Action B and C and so on. And the escalation today is far worse than ever because it’s being amplified on social media, as the trolls have both a willing online army and group of people trying to outdo one another and gain higher status for the damage they can cause. In that case, the troll doesn’t even have to care about you personally — he’s simply trying to impress others, and the severity of the attack on you (and the extent of the damage) is how they earn that status.”

In “Why the Trolls Will Always Win,” a piece written for Seriouspony, and republished by WIRED, Sierra talked about why some women attract trolls in the first place, and is has nothing to do with the common belief that trolls simply want attention.

The most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following,” “liking,” “favoriting,” retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid.” Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.

From the hater’s POV, you (the Koolaid server) do not “deserve” that attention. You are “stealing” an audience. From their angry, frustrated point of view, the idea that others listen to you is insanity. From their emotion-fueled view you don’t have readers you have cult followers. That just can’t be allowed.

You must be stopped. And if they cannot stop you, they can at least ruin your quality of life. A standard goal, in troll culture, I soon learned, is to cause “personal ruin.” They aren’t all trolls, though. Some of those who seek to stop and/or ruin you are misguided/misinformed but well-intended. They actually believe in a cause, and they believe you (or rather the Koolaid you’re serving) threatens that cause.

It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It’s a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family. Mission accomplished. But today, many women online — you women who are far braver than I am — you stick around. And now, since you stuck around through the first wave of threats, you are now a much BIGGER problem. Because the Worst Possible Thing has happened: as a result of those attacks, you are NOW serving Victim-Flavored Koolaid.

Sierra points out what many fail to understand. While some trolls will go away if ignored, there are plenty of others hell bent on destroying your reputation, your peace of mind, and, in media, your credibility. To those trolls, whether or not their target responds to them is irrelevant. Their game is to convince as many others as possible that the woman targeted simply does not deserve whatever attention she’s achieved.

But ineffectiveness isn’t the only problem with advising women not to feed the trolls, as WGN Radio’s Amy Guth, a target of trolling who successfully funded a kickstarter to produce a documentary about online harassment, well knows. In essence, telling a woman ‘don’t feed’ is telling her to be quiet, be silent. In that manner, the person dispensing the advice has done the troll’s work for them.

We’ve insisted again and again on the narrative that trolls will be trolls but that smart and strong targets flee and avoid, and as such, we’ve continue to reinforce the notion that women and girls should be afraid to speak up, the threat of an imagined backlash pre-emptively haunting us. In other words, we stoke the fire along the continuum that supports rape culture. She asked for it. Look at what she said/wore.

When carefully considered, it’s tough not to see ‘don’t feed’ advice as victim-blaming, particularly when it’s meted out by misguided-though-well-intentioned men, most of who have no idea what it’s like to be the target of sustained online harrassment. What’s worse, the suggestion that women ignore the invective hurled at them online is often offered up, unsolicited, by those who see only a small part of the larger picture. Jen Lute Costella, a popular writer who has been among the pioneers of hockey analytics, chafes at the attempts to regulate her online interactions.

“I’m pretty judicious about the ‘trolls’ I respond to, so when people send me ‘don’t feed the trolls’ messages, it gets under my skin a bit,” Costella admits. “I know they’re saying it because they disapprove of the troll’s behavior, but I deal with this stuff every day. If I choose to tell someone off, it’s my prerogative to do so. There’s only so much a person can take and internalize before they explode. Letting off some of that steam from time to time helps me avoid letting it fester too much.”

Sportswriter Shireen Ahmed agrees. “Mansplainers instruct you what to do and how to protect yourself based on zero understanding of what you are going through as a female sportswriter. If she decides to stand up for herself, she is ‘feeding the trolls.’ This is basically men telling a woman that, instead of defending her work, it is best for her to be silenced. It’s ridiculous. Defending one’s work and reputation is a part of sportswriting. We take it seriously. Harassers and armchair critics are inevitable.”

As anyone who has been the target of online harassment will attest, it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect women to simply silently accept the threats, taunts, insults, and falsities invoked against them daily — particularly when the vitriol is online, for the entire world to see, and enshrined in the Library of Congress. More important, online harassment is viewable by friends, family, children, and employers. For many women, leaving the worst invective sans response is simply unthinkable.

The annoyance of mansplaining aside, it’s often necessary for women to fight back on Twitter to set the record straight in order to salvage their reputation. Let enough false statements go unrefuted and they soon become accepted as fact, Sierra says.

“If you don’t respond to accusations, lies, even seemingly harmless statements that simply aren’t true, you risk leaving an online trail that shows up later presented as ‘facts’ and ‘evidence.’ Your reputation and the reputation of your employers and family members are all at stake and saying nothing is often worse than staying silent. Second, the notion that ‘nobody cares what the trolls think/say’ has been proven wrong for so many people in too many scenarios to count.”

While women who defend themselves against trolls and harassment are often labeled as “thin skinned,” “too sensitive” and “not cut out” for sports media, the fact is that followers are often seeing a very small part of what some women deal with all day, every day. Men who put trolls in their place are often lauded as having laid the smack down on someone, with high-fives all around. Women in the industry, though, aren’t afforded the same luxury, even though they’re often dealing with far more vile harassment.

CBS Sports Radio’s Amy Lawrence has been on the receiving end of criticism for responding to trolls.

“When I DO respond to those who harass, chastise, or insult me through social media, there is a common response. Others inevitably jump in to suggest I’m being too sensitive, too defensive, or too harsh,” says Lawrence. “Forget the fact that I’m reacting to a post or message initiated by a troll or critic, women who stand up for themselves online are judged more vigorously than men. Often we are perceived as less feminine if we ‘fight back.’”

Costella agrees. “I’m just in a mood to be a bit snarky with the people who make it their mission to annoy or try to intimidate me every single day and who are they to tell me the manner in which I do that? I mean, in hockey, if a player gets crosschecked a few times, most people expect that he’s going
to retaliate, but when you are a woman with an online presence, you suddenly have to display the patience of a saint.”

All of this said, we still have very little idea how to deal with online harassment, and everyone from Twitter Support to law enforcement is left shrugging their shoulders. In that sense, Sierra is right; the trolls always do win. That’s the bleak reality faced by many women day in and day out.

Given society’s helplessness in this situation, the least we can do is allow women the right to handle their own trolls however they see fit. Women living through online harassment don’t need advice, they don’t need suggestions, they don’t need lectures. They need support. That’s it. If you don’t like seeing women standing up for themselves online, you know where to find the the unfollow button.