I have seen a bit of hate for her here and there, and I know there are places on Tumblr where it circulates, although mostly I follow people who know how to respect people as human beings even when they disagree with them or are upset by things they’ve said or done.
But just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The Internet is a huge place, and we have become very good at putting many sorts of filters between ourselves and the kind of content we don’t want to see.
Apparently she has been catching some hate on Twitter, too, and I guess there has just been a new incident, instigated by a troll who spammed her with explicit S/J fanart. For which I can’t blame her if she’s feeling cranky. But I haven’t really gone to look up the details of what happened.
The thing is, it’s easy to forget the volume of communications we’re talking about, here. Sherlock is now one of the most-watched shows in the world. We’re talking millions of people who have some portion of their attention trained on this team of actors and creators. If even a fraction of 1% of 1,000,000 people decide to go online and be asshats, we’re still talking about Amanda and the others receiving potentially hundreds of hateful, even intimidating and threatening communications.
And while they might receive 10,000 contacts per day full of love and respect and support, when they’re also receiving perhaps 100 contacts full of vitriol or, god forbid, threats of physical violence…that weighs on the psyche when it keeps happening. It’s not something you can just keep ignoring, especially when out of 100 contacts, you have to wonder if there’s at least one person who really is unstable and angry enough to maybe actually do something about it. Out of so many people, it takes very few really bad reactions for this kind of thing to reach a scary place.
I think that maybe we’ve gotten used to thinking of celebrity as something that people like actors are just ‘supposed to deal with.’ But there’s no such thing. Being in the public eye of millions of people is something that I don’t think there’s any way to simply adapt to. And it can become an issue of safety, too, and when millions of people around the world know who you are and have Opinions about you, how do you protect yourself?
And as we in fandom know, so many of us women, and/or othered by race or sexuality or gender or other factors, it all becomes that much harder and more intense when you don’t have the relative protection of being a white man. That’s not something I’m saying flippantly. Both the media and the public become so much more virulent when they sense the weakness of marginalization.
Frankly I think that she’s extremely courageous and tough to still be active online, when this sort of reaction from, well, ‘fans’ (I use quotation marks because I don’t see how someone can really be a fan if they’ve got that much hate in them) has driven so many other actors and creators off the internet in other cases. Truthfully, whether you like her or her character or not, support her opinions about fandom or not, I hope things don’t get too out of control, or I will really become concerned for Amanda’s welfare.