From the Mayor of Wokeville

TW: Online abuse and misogyny

By Marcail Parkinson (she/they)

“She’s thuuuuuuuuuuck.”

“Kiwis like Ms Parkinson need to be mocked & ridiculed. She is exactly what is wrong with modern-day NZ. Weak, insipid, shallow & bereft of critical thinking skills and all in the name of feelings.”

“What a dumb bitch.”

“Good to see VUWSA presidents have not become less cunty since my day.”

“Marcel just wants to be left alone to finish her degree in victimization, followed by a master’s in entitlement and maybe some research into unwarranted resentment. Little flower can't cope with adults yet.”

These are just a few of the messages I received in the months after April 2024, when Victoria University of Wellington postponed its planned Free Speech Debate. Though pitched as a discussion  on free expression, the  panel was glaringly lacking in diversity—and featured speakers who had a documented history of platforming racist and bigoted views. 

At the time, I was serving as VUWSA President. Alongside many others, I raised concerns about the event’s promotion, coordination and speaker lineup. Following discussions with university leadership, the event wasn’t cancelled, it was postponed and reformatted to include a more diverse lineup of speakers.

You might be thinking: Marcail, I’ve never heard of VUWSA before, and I definitely don’t know who you are, surely no one gave a shit about this.

Unfortunately, you'd be wrong.

My inboxes—email, DMs, social media—were suddenly flooded with hate. Every day brought more abuse, mostly from people enraged that I had (in their eyes) tried to ‘cancel’ a white man. For them, my request to diversify a panel was an unforgivable offense. I was labelled a “stupid woman” bent on silencing straight white men. One person told me to move to a country where women still couldn’t vote, if I was so determined to cancel free speech.

Honestly? At first, the anonymous trolls didn’t faze me. They were faceless usernames—probably some sad guy in his parents’ basement.

But then I started recognising names.

Fellow students I’d met with. Mutual friends. Then politicians—David Seymour among them—and the official ACT Party accounts.

This is when it got harder. When disinformation and misogyny come not from strangers, but from people I knew, and from those in positions of power. It’s hard not to feel powerless when the future Deputy Prime Minister posts on social media criticising you and encouraging a pile-on from their followers.

And this wasn’t my first time on the receiving end of online hate and abuse.

In 2019, I was a spokesperson for the School Strike for Climate. At 16, I was incredibly naïve to what it meant to speak publicly to the media as a young woman. During my first live TV interview, my singlet slipped slightly, exposing a bit of cleavage. By the time I got home, my message requests were filled with  unsolicited sexual messages. The next morning, the Facebook comments on the interview video were full of  men gleefully saying they were  “too distracted” by my top to hear anything I said. 

To them, I wasn’t a passionate 16-year-old climate activist. I was just a pair of tits. 

Of course, the abuse I experienced as a student leader doesn't compare to what many political figures endure.  But the patterns are the same. A 2022 study on political abuse found that while harassment affects people of all  genders, women are twice as likely to receive death threats. Even one is terrifying. And the cumulative effect can be devastating—eroding mental health, pushing women out of public life altogether.

This is how misogyny silences people. 

In Aotearoa, we still don’t have laws explicitly addressing  stalking or online  harassment (though a bill is in the works). This means that when threats escalate, there’s often no official resource. The burden falls—yet again—on the women targeted, left to manage the fall out alone. Women in leadership shouldn’t have to “toughen up” just to survive. The constant barrage of abuse and harassment is driving women out of politics , and forcing those who remain to become desensitised to deeply harmful rhetoric. 

So here’s my parting message: call out hate and misogyny when you see it. But more than that, stand with the people who step forward to lead. Have their backs. Fight for them. Fight with them. 

Quotes taken from X (formally Twitter)