We Should Be Making Fun of Misogynists

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.