"Sneering, ill-informed, factually incorrect, spitting, ranters." Yup, that's us.

Since the middle of August, the No To Hooters in Bristol campaign has been going strong and refusing to give up, despite a full flowing tide of bile ricocheting our way from the invisible but vocal folk who think that the presence of a breastaurant in which the naïve staff are willingly complicit in their own exploitation is A Good Thing for a city that prides itself on diversity.

Since August 19, a petition to try and prevent Hooters opening has seen around 1,000 people sign up (Say Yes To Hooters has 12 to date)… including one or two people who mistakenly took signing the petition as an opportunity to tell us what a bunch of sad losers we were. The petition is still open if you haven’t added your name yet but would like to.

We’ve been called a heck of a lot of deeply unpleasant names in that time. To hear a list of those names, out of context, you might assume we were paedophiles or murderers. But no, we are women and men who believe women should not be treated as sex objects. If we were campaigning for racial equality, there is no way that we would have received the same torrent of hate from the media.

Back in April 2008, Bristol was first threatened with Hooters. Thankfully it never materialised owing to a lack of public interest. At the time, the Bristol Evening Post was quick to insist the city did not want such an establishment, and ran a long article that quoted the council’s then leader, Helen Holland, as saying: "I am absolutely appalled to hear that this sort of establishment still exists in 2008. I hope that the pressure of public opinion will mean that this totally outdated concept is rejected in Bristol. It goes against the image that the city wants to portray."

But it was all change when Bristol went out of remission and Hooters reared its pustular head again and the Evening Post boasted on August 17 that a “saucy restaurant chain” was heading to town. Adding: ‘The opening of the new restaurant is likely to be seen as at odds with the campaign to make the Harbourside more family friendly.” Hmm. The comments on the web forum were so offensive they have all been removed.

Feminists didn’t need to rely on anonymous web posters to insult them, though, because the Bristol Evening Post was gladly doing that all on its own. It started, on August 20, by calling the campaign “fatuous”.

This was followed by an astonishing and vitriolic attack by a columnist, in a piece that didn’t so much state why the female writer liked Hooters, but more indulged her perceived notion that some women were telling her what to think. In the space of 500 words, Bristol’s feminists were called: “the Mary Whitehouse brigade”, “sneering”, “ill-informed”, factually incorrect, “ranters”, “militant objectors”, “offensive”, “spitting”, “rude”, “bulldozers”, “patronising”, “emotional blackmailers” and she accused feminists of “playing dirty”. Blimey! And in such a tiny piece of writing. Sadly, the string of accusations the writer was so determined to get in afforded her little time to construct an argument or make much sense. And again, the web comments were so offensive they were eventually removed.

A whole string of articles (22) were bandied around in the Evening Post before the bloody place even opened – an unprecedented amount of coverage, which presumably (and, of course, this is just my opinion) was paid for by the Hooters PR machine, who have cleverly avoided (so far) taking out any traditional ads in the paper, apparently in favour of buying some exclusively positive coverage of their bar, and which also ridiculed the opposition. That’s what I call playing dirty.

The comments on most of those 22 pieces were removed due to the obscenity hurled at campaigners by anonymous cowards (many of whom post under multiple identities, and some of whom are doubtless employed by Hooters themselves). So let’s turn to another Evening Post columnist, this time an older male writer, who on September 11 wrote a little piece referring to the “hoo-hah” the place had caused among people who suffered “puritanical zealousness”. He presumed smugly that the campaigners were unaware of Bristol’s history of “raunchy clubs” (thank you, just as we are unaware of Bristol’s history as a slave port), and then went off on a bizarre ramble about a yo-yo he’d bought in the 1970s. Quite how that was relevant no one is sure.

All of this led up to a truly offensive piece on October 19 in which the EP’s political editor referred to us as “sour-faced feminists”, in a piece which even the EP had the good sense not to publish online, presumably knowing how childish they were being. If you find a copy of the paper in a cat litter tray near you, though, you’ll see it on page six – unless it’s already wrapped around a feline turd. Some of the insults thrown up at feminists by supporters of sexual exploitation have been documented elsewhere on this blog, so I’ll refer you there for those.

I would like to know what gives anonymous strangers the right to abuse people they have never met. Why should they be allowed to wish us dead, make tired assumptions about our supposed sexual orientation (lesbian), eating habits (lentils) and dress sense (dungarees), and call us joyless because we don’t believe that sitting in a pine-clad bar being served battery-farmed greasy chicken wings by a young woman in scant clothing, with a barrage of screens blaring at us, is entertainment? In the face of such relentless abuse, we have been nothing but polite (and I say ‘we’ because there are a hell of a lot of us, women and men, on this campaign), yet still be are accused of being bullies. How?! With the amount of personal abuse and absolute hatred that we have to hear every single day, how is it that WE are the bullies?

Unlike the anonymous posters on web forums and self-satisfied reporters on a local paper, we are standing up for something that we know to be important. We have thoroughly researched the subject and campaign peacefully. We don’t resort to death threats and playground taunts, we don’t resort to sexual harassment and intimidation. Yet we are expected to accept it when anonymous cowards, hiding behind their computer screens and an alias, wish us dead. How are WE the bullies?

Still, if we don’t like it, I guess we don’t have to go there. No?