'She needs to get the f**k over her childhood trauma.' Heather Armstrong, and what we expect women to withstand on the internet.

Trigger warning: This article discusses suicide and may be distressing for some readers.

When blogger and author Heather Armstrong died last week, at just 47, she was widely eulogised as the 'Queen of the Mummy Bloggers'.

Armstrong started her blog, Dooce, in 2001, and over the next decade showed how a woman in the internet age could, as the New York Times described it, "make her life into a living". 

But as one of the 'original influencers', she couldn't have possibly anticipated what that kind of life entailed. That she had signed up to a life marked by strangers' opinions, and that those opinions would continue even after she died by suicide. 

In the days after Armstrong's partner confirmed her death to the Associated Press, thousands of tributes were posted online. A number of Armstrong's contemporaries referenced the hate she'd received as a public figure, and how it had affected her. Armstrong herself referenced how her mental health had been impacted by the commentary about her in an interview with Vice in 2019, describing it as "untenable". But in one dark corner of the internet - where the hatred for Armstrong had been unfolding for years - a group of people became immediately defensive. 

Between profoundly cruel remarks about Armstrong's suicide and what it means for her family, the consensus was: She's not exempt from criticism and commentary. We're not going to absolve someone of their sins just because they've died. And if you live a public life, this is the price you pay.

But when did we decide this was the price? Surely, too, it's time for an honest discussion about the types of people who are disproportionately paying it.

***

The story of Heather Armstrong, the human being, is complicated.

She wrote openly about her depression and alcoholism, her decision to leave the church she was raised in, the highs and lows of motherhood, and the ugly parts of her career. There is no way to piece together a narrative that explains her death, because suicide and the reasons for it are fundamentally unknowable.

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A post shared by Heather B. Hamilton (@dooce)

The story of Heather Armstrong, the internet personality, is far more simple. It follows a familiar trajectory to anyone who's watched a woman rise online, and then inevitably fall. 

Dooce.com started with Armstrong writing (under a pseudonym) about her bosses at work. She thought she was being careful, never using their names or mentioning the company, but within a few months the blog was discovered and she was fired.

From here, her traffic grew. The idea of being fired for what you write on the internet was entirely unheard of, and was picked up by news outlets. 

But Armstrong was quickly learning that what she wrote affected real people. She posted stories on her blog making fun of her neighbour's dog, and then her neighbour found the website and stopped speaking to her.

Dooce went quiet for six months, but when Armstrong came back, her audience immediately returned. When she discovered she was pregnant, she wrote prolifically, certain she'd have to quit as soon as she had a child. Of course, what Armstrong did instead was birth a baby and a 'mummy blog'. 

She shared her unfiltered truth about motherhood, including her experience with postpartum depression and inpatient care.

A few years into launching Dooce, Armstrong started to monetise it with banner ads. At its peak, the site had over 8 million monthly readers, and was earning $40,000 a month. In 2009, Armstrong appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was named by Forbes as one of the 30 most influential women in media.

But with this popularity came a new audience: people who followed her every move because they hated her. They left comments for her directly, but also created forums to discuss her. 

The general philosophy behind these forums (which I won't name) is that anonymous users can say whatever they like because they're not speaking directly to the person they hate. Armstrong, for example, would've had to find the forum in order to read what was written about her - which of course isn't difficult in an age of Google alerts. 

The commentary ranged from accusations that Armstrong had sold out ("I’m Depressed, brought to you in part by Meow Mix,") to pure contempt about her vulnerabilities ("Heather needs to get the f**k over her childhood trauma. Like dude, you’re 43 and you’ve spent half your life in therapy. You have a f**king sweet life.") 

She was routinely called "embarrassing," "pathetic," a bully, accused of loving one of her children more than the other, made fun of for being "out of place" at public appearances, and generally being "full of sh*t." 

"She is such a sad, miserable little person now. I feel bad for her, for her children and for her husband," one comment reads.

Armstrong's parenting was dissected in detail, with pages of comments about how one of her children wasn't fully toilet trained at three, how her child "always" had badly chapped lips and was potentially dehydrated, and how she was going to scar her kids for life. 

It was constant. Unrelenting. Everything from a typo to the texture of her skin ("it looks like she slept in a coffin") to her 'mean girl' mannerisms to her relationships were torn apart. For years. 

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A post shared by Heather B. Hamilton (@dooce)

While the forums might exist in their own corner of the internet, the reality is that what's discussed in them spreads. The commentary migrates to Twitter and to Facebook and to Instagram and to other blogs, where people are ready and willing to be outraged, and the result is irreversible reputational damage. 

At first, Armstrong tried to own the criticism. She started a website called Monetizing the Hate, where she shared the cruelest comments and drew in revenue from banner ads. 

But as so many women who share their lives online know, engaging with the hatred only makes it worse. 

In 2012, Armstrong announced she was separating from her husband. It took her some time to be able to write about it, because she knew there were people who would be angry, and once she did, the story was picked up widely by other media.

In an interview with Vice in 2019, Armstrong shared how the breakdown of her marriage and the constant hatred she was receiving online had taken its toll on her mental health. She had fallen into a treatment-resistant depression, even participating in a clinical trial that involved being put into a chemically induced coma for 15-minute intervals.

At that time, she was still writing on Dooce, but focusing primarily on her mental health.

"The hate was very, very scary and very, very hard to live through," she told Vice. "It gets inside your head and eats away at your brain. It became untenable."

The feature ends with a quote from Armstrong, that's meant to be somewhat uplifting: "The worst things that have been said about me have already been said."

***

Heather Armstrong was the object of persistent, insidious outrage in a way that seems to define life online, particularly for women. On one gossip website, there are over 1700 pages of snide, cutting commentary, and looking at the contents, it's almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to read those words about yourself.

But it's just criticism, right? And all public figures need to be prepared to take it. That's the price they pay for having a voice, and for making money off it. 

But there's a difference between being criticised and being treated with contempt. 

The latter always comes as a shock. 

The name-calling. 

The mocking. 

The condescension. 

The hostile humour. 

The disdain.

The relentlessness. 

The way small indiscretions are extrapolated to say something universal and unchanging about a person's character.  

There's a brand of hatred reserved for a certain type of woman on the internet. An imperfect one. A messy one. A loud one. And it seems that when you sense that hate for long enough, you begin to live with a shadow you can't shake. That shadow is the knowledge that somewhere on the internet (and often in your inbox, or your comments, or your mentions), people are saying the cruelest things about you that you can possibly imagine. Things you've quietly said to yourself in your most fragile moments. Things you haven't even dared to let yourself think. You don't want to look at your shadow, but it follows you everywhere. 

And you know that every single day, you're just a few clicks away from having your biggest vulnerabilities confirmed.

I've often wondered how people really, truly cope with that reality. How they live with a compromised reputation, and with the knowledge that there are people waiting to either wilfully misinterpret their behaviour or turn small indiscretions into sweeping generalisations about who they are.

Perhaps Heather Armstrong's story provides us with an answer: they don't all cope. Or, at the very least, relentless criticism makes coping with the other challenges of life harder.

In the 22 years since Armstrong started sharing her voice on Dooce, we still haven't found a blueprint for how to respectfully disagree online. We still don't know how to appropriately hold someone to account, or how to challenge a public figure in a way that's proportionate to the perceived wrong they've done.  

So what we end up with is an individual hit with the relentless contempt of faceless commentators, and crumbling under the impact. And afterwards, a familiar sense of bewilderment.

When, exactly, did we decide this was the price public people should pay? Because I would argue that very, very few humans - no matter how emotionally strong - can cope with being the object of contempt on the internet. Perhaps they appear to cope, but I'm not sure they really do. 

Then there's the question of who we're asking to pay this price. 

It's women. Overwhelmingly. A fact made more complicated by the fact that it's largely women driving the contempt. Women want to discuss what other women are doing wrong. It’s internalised misogyny, and it serves to police women’s behaviour and silence them. 

I'm not sure how many tragic stories we need to see play out before we have a reckoning about the way we communicate online. About what we're willing to put up with. 

No one is beyond criticism. But is a woman sharing her experience of motherhood on the internet a worthy target of our contempt? 

As Armstrong said four years ago, living alongside that kind of hatred is simply "untenable". 

For more from Clare Stephens, you can follow her on Instagram. She also hosts the podcast But Are You Happy, where high-profile guests discuss their vulnerabilities, regrets and failures. You can listen on Apple or Spotify. 

If you think you may be experiencing depression or another mental health problem, please contact your general practitioner. If you're based in Australia, 24-hour support is available through Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue on 1300 22 4636.