The excellent Tiffany B. Brown posted a link to Violet Blue’s most recent SF Gate article which calls attention the insidious immaturity of troll comments when they attack women in online discussion. It’s not terribly surprising—while guys mostly insult each other’s intelligence, attacks on women play into our already distorted body/image issues, struggles with reductive moral stereotypes, etc—and of course the outpouring of supportive posts is borderline nauseous, though sincere. And there are the usual detractors arguing about playing up victimization, and the online folk “wisdom” of “don’t feed the trolls”.
Two comments (out of over 800!) caught my eye: One gentleman calling out the gay community for equal immaturity and vapidity in their attacks on each other. (Bless you, kind sir!) And one jackass firmly illustrating why there is rare discussion about this topic, who attacks the article on its journalistic merits rather than listen to the point that this discussion is *hard* to conceptualize, not to mention cover with the journalistic standards of your usual fetish-oriented sex column. His jackassery is worth quoting in part:
‘This column is almost shockingly bad. … Anyone with a fraction of the internet laurels heaped across [Violet Blue’s] byline shouldn’t pretend to be so flayed to the bone by online criticism. “Open Source Sex” is a poorly composed, slapdash and indifferently produced column, and that’s the real “Ugly Violet” here on display.’ — “burt”
Self-gratiating, “clever” wordplay dosen’t mean you’re better than other sexist bastards, even if your sexism plays out in outdated, unfounded notion that proper journalists should only have masculine, tough-as-leather “skin” and no professional reason to empathize with readers. And we should all have fedoras, too. …Jackass.
I applaud Violet for writing the article. In the long run, “don’t feed the trolls” only gets you past the immediate troll problem. It does nothing to address cultural issues allowing trollish ignorance to persist. And if you think it is a matter of just dealing with nasty comments, please take into consideration that the effect might be wider than that: I don’t publicly write about the details of my personal life, but I sincerely question if I don’t say anything out of natural reticence, some half-thought-out notion of professionalism, or simply wanting to avoid the inevitable attack of sexist insults I’m sure are said behind my back. I think it’s the latter, which leads me to question if women like me contribute to the issue by self-censoring.
