Michaela Okland has a video on her YouTube channel called “Imitating Creepy Men but with Helium.” 

The video is exactly what the title suggests, and it all fits with the online brand that Okland has built for herself over the years. She’s the creator of the smash-hit Twitter and Instagram accounts SheRatesDogs – which aggregates malicious, incoherent, and downright disturbing messages that women get from men. 

What began as a simple parody account grew into a rallying cry for women in an era where the digital age has empowered people more and more to discuss gender and dating issues online. 

Michela Okland: I’m friends with Matt Nelson, who runs the WeRateDogs account – and I was looking at my phone one day, and I was like, “It would be really funny if the dogs were [crappy] guys, and they got a negative rating out of ten.” I thought that it would be a fun thing for a day, and then it turned into its own thing. I’ve kind of moved away from that original parody idea since then. 

Nonahood News: How exactly do you feel that it’s changed? 

MO: I used to just do a rating in every tweet like the WeRatesDogs does, a negative 12 out of 10 –  something like that. Now I share less specific things; things about the trans community or LGBTQ stuff, political things or whatever. It’s more loosely used for different purposes now than just a super-specific parody. Although it has always been what it is now. 

NHN: What did it feel like when the account took off? 

MO: I think I had 80,000 followers on my personal account when I first tweeted about it, and it got 50,000 [followers] in the first weekend and 100,000 [followers] in the first month. It grew way faster than my account. 

It’s kind of crazy because I didn’t expect to be doing it that much, and when it blew up quickly, I was like, “Okay, I guess this is what I’m doing now.” I thought I would do it for two days. 

NHN: And you had a big online following before the She Rates Dogs took off, right? 

MO: Yeah. 

NHN: How did this happen? 

MO: That’s just from my comedy – jokes and stuff – every time a tweet goes viral, you’ll get hundreds to thousands of new followers. Doing it over and over again gets you a following. 

NHN: Do you think that Twitter is fair in the sense that the funniest voices stand out and become popular? 

MO: Usually, unless there are TweetDecker accounts that take other jokes from other people. There’s definitely a bunch of different subsections of Twitter – there’s going to be sports, and news, and comedy. Or Stan Twitter, fans and things like that. 

But I think, for the most part, Twitter has a nice layout for getting new people on your feed – which Instagram doesn’t have because of the Retweet function. You’re able to be seen by greater groups of people. 

NHN: Is there a strategy as to how you manage the account day-to-day? 

MO: I’m not the most structured person [laughs], I’m not the best at doing this specifically. I try to post at least once a day, ideally three to five times. I also have an Instagram for it. There are thousands of submissions a day, I’ll maybe get through a hundred of them and pick a couple. 

NHN: Some who scroll through Instagram and Twitter accounts might begin to think, “Why are men like this?” Have you ever formulated a theory? 

MO: I think that it’s because they can be. It isn’t really called out that much. Girls are always called crazy, and even if guys are crazy, it doesn’t matter, or it isn’t acknowledged. Before [the internet] and before the Me Too movement, it may not have been as understood. Or common knowledge even. 

I think it is the way we present relationships or the power dynamics of genders in any kind of media – TV show, movie, whatever you’re watching. And then a lack of talking about it. 

NHN: It’s hard for me to get a sense of if it is malice, insecurity, or just an inability to talk to women. 

MO: I think sometimes it can be any of those things. That’s why I don’t post revealing information, my life would be horrible if I just ruined five lives a day, and that was what I did for a living. I don’t know what kind of maturity level [the guy] is at, what age they are, what has happened in their life before then. Maybe it was a crazy day, and they thought that they could say something anonymously to a girl they don’t know on Tinder. 

NHN: If somebody’s friend acted like this over an app or if someone wanted to raise their child to keep in mind to be respectful to women, how would you recommend they go about that? 

MO: I know that having family members who are women has helped a lot of women, but there are also people who have daughters or sisters, and that doesn’t seem to change the way they treat women. I think [starting] from an early age, pointing out in a TV show, a commercial, or a magazine cover where a woman is [being] objectified. So it doesn’t become normal for them.

I think that we’re careful about what our children consume, but there are these things that we aren’t careful about that we should be. But, I wouldn’t recommend my account for a child.