Women in the Trolling Tradition

4 min read

Aphra Behn, the Suffragettes, Lysistrata, and the female court jesters history forgot. Women in the trolling tradition from antiquity to modernity.

Research for “The Fires of History: How Trolls Saved the World”

This file summarizes the Book 1 material from the comprehensive cross-book research document on women in the esoteric and trolling traditions.

Figures for Book 1

Chapter 7 (Voltaire, Swift, and the Satirists)

  • Aphra Behn (1640-1689): First woman to earn a living writing in English (Smithsonian). Possibly a spy (Smithsonian). Bawdy plays that satirized patriarchal hypocrisy. Virginia Woolf: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn” (Wikipedia).

Chapter 8 (The Trolling-to-Revolution Pipeline)

  • The Suffragettes (1903-1918): Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, Emily Davison. Escalation from heckling to window-smashing to arson to bombing (Wikipedia). 250 attacks in six months. Burned “VOTES FOR WOMEN” into golf course grass. Emily Davison: arrested 9 times, force-fed 49 times (Wikipedia). The Cat and Mouse Act as PR disaster for the government.

Chapter 4 (The Socratic Method Was Just Trolling)

  • Lysistrata (411 BC): Aristophanes’ comedy about women withholding sex to end a war. Inspired real-world sex strikes (Liberia 2003, Kenya 2009, Colombia 2011) (Wikipedia). Template for trolling patriarchal power by taking its own logic seriously.

Chapter 2 (A Taxonomy of Trolls)

  • Jane Foole (fl. 1530s-1550s): Tudor female court jester. Served Catherine Parr and Mary I (and possibly Anne Boleyn). Thought to appear in a c. 1545 royal family portrait alongside Will Somers (Wikipedia).
  • Mathurine de Vallois (fl. late 16th-early 17th c.): Most famous female jester in European history. Served French courts across three reigns. Wore Amazon warrior costume. Stopped an assassination attempt on Henry IV (Wikipedia).

Chapter 9 (Art as Trolling)

  • Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927): “Mama of Dada.” May have created Duchamp’s Fountain. Invented the readymade before Duchamp (Artsy). Duchamp letter to sister: “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture” (The Art Newspaper).
  • Yoko Ono (1933-present): “High Priestess of the Happening.” Grapefruit (1964): pioneering conceptual art book. Cut Piece (1964): proto-feminist performance art (Wikipedia). Career established before meeting Lennon. Cultural scapegoating as gendered erasure.
  • Mina Loy (1882-1966): Feminist Manifesto (1914) written inside the Futurist movement. Key Dada figure. Married Arthur Cravan (who disappeared) (Britannica). Trolled the Futurists from inside by turning their radicalism against their misogyny.

Chapter 10 (Comedy Is Just Trolling with a Mic)

  • Dorothy Parker (1893-1967): Algonquin Round Table. “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.” Katharine Hepburn: “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Calvin Coolidge died: “How can they tell?” Hollywood blacklist. Left estate to Martin Luther King Jr.; after his assassination it passed to the NAACP (Wikipedia).

Chapter 15 (Trolling as Resistance)

  • The Guerrilla Girls (1985-present): Anonymous feminist art collective. Gorilla masks. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” (5% of artists, 85% of nudes) (Wikipedia). “We discovered that the art world takes feminists more seriously when they use humor and wear a gorilla disguise.”
  • Pussy Riot (2011-present): 40-second punk prayer in Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. “Mother of God, Drive Putin Away.” Two years in prison (Wikipedia). Samutsevich: their performance “violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating.”
  • FEMEN / Inna Shevchenko: “Sextremism.” Topless protest as provocation. Cut down a 4-metre cross with a chainsaw (Wikipedia). Abducted by Belarus authorities. Controversial: criticized for femonationalism and Islamophobia.

Chapter 17 (Trolling Gone Wrong)

  • Valerie Solanas (1936-1988): SCUM Manifesto (1967). Shot Andy Warhol (1968) (Wikipedia). Cautionary tale: the line between provocation and violence. “Dead serious” or satire? The ambiguity is the point.
  • Yoko Ono (also here): The victim of trolling gone wrong – 50+ years of scapegoating for “breaking up the Beatles.”

Genesis P-Orridge crossover

  • Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020): Industrial music as trolling (Ch. 9). TOPY as democratized occultism (Ch. 15). Pandrogyne project as identity trolling (Wikipedia). The bridge between esoteric tradition and internet culture.

Key Thesis Points for Book 1

  1. Women have always been trolls – from Lysistrata to Pussy Riot, the tradition is 2,400+ years old
  2. The erasure of women trolls is itself the establishment’s response – the most effective way to suppress a troll is to pretend she didn’t exist
  3. The establishment’s disproportionate response proves the trolling worked – two years in prison for a 40-second performance; Hollywood blacklist for book reviews; force-feeding for breaking windows
  4. Women’s trolling mechanisms are distinctive: using the establishment’s own logic against it (Lysistrata, suffragettes), performing vulnerability as power (Ono’s Cut Piece), accuracy as weapon (Guerrilla Girls), compression as tool (Parker)

The full research document contains complete entries with all quotes, ironic commentary, and a bibliography of 47 sources.

Source URLs