11 Clever Comebacks From Women With A Sharp Sense of Humor

The numbers will probably make you put your phone down and stare at the wall for a moment. Women are 27 times more likely than men to be harassed online. Twenty. Seven. Times. Globally, nearly 1 in 4 women report experiencing online harassment, and in some surveys, that figure climbs as high as 73%.

Which means that for a significant portion of women, logging onto the internet isn't as much a leisure activity as it is a contact sport. But the women in this list didn't just survive the contact sport. They won it, publicly, with style, and we have documented every single victory for your reading pleasure.

And then there is the specific, deeply unglamorous phenomenon of the unsolicited [undressed]. Nobody asked. Nobody hinted. Nobody left a single breadcrumb of encouragement that could be reasonably interpreted as an invitation. And yet, here it is, in the inbox, completely unprompted. Studies show that anywhere from almost half to over 70% of women have received an unwanted explicit image at some point.

This statistic will surprise exactly zero women and hopefully a significant number of men. The working theory among researchers as to why this keeps happening is, generously, a catastrophic failure of empathy and social calibration. The working theory among the women in this list is slightly less generous and considerably funnier.

Dating apps were supposed to make things easier. Simpler. A neat, efficient way to meet people without the logistical chaos of real life. What they have actually produced, according to a major psychological meta-analysis, is higher rates of depression, anxiety, and lowered self-esteem compared to people who don't use them at all.

This is largely because wading through an inbox full of "hey" messages and unsolicited enthusiasm is, it turns out, not great for the soul. The women in this list have absorbed it quietly. They are taking the power back, one devastatingly accurate response at a time, and turning the inbox from a source of dread into what is frankly some of the most entertaining content on the internet. Therapy is helpful but this is better.

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