Being Amber Rhea

How did I not see this post earlier? Oh, probably because I don’t often read Pandagon, since in general I don’t like that blog due to some shit that went down mostly last summer, and… well, never mind. I came across this post today and I’m glad I did. Filed under “reference.” Would’ve shown up in daily del.icio.us posting but that was broken again due to a 500 server not found error. :P Guess my blog was down for a while this afternoon.

Anyhow…

Let’s assume just for the sake of argument that you’re right. You aren’t. But just as a gedankenexperiment, let’s pretend you are, and that the women who are talking about the massive deadweight silence from men about the harassment they experience, and who are getting all upset and speaking in terms of “war zones” and “hate crimes” and such are just being emotional, hysterical even, and — like the people who forward that bogus email about the guy with the ropes and duct tape in his trunk in the mall parking lot — just need to be set straight with a calm, measured dose of logic and fact-checking.

In most situations, that’s a fine impulse. There really is no reason to get upset about LSD in blue star tattoos, and Bill Gates really isn’t paying people who forward a chain email.

But this situation is qualitatively different. When the topic at hand is men not taking an issue seriously, suggesting that the issue might not really be all that serious is not being dispassionate. It is, in fact, taking a side. And the people on the side you’re taking, incidentally, include the gropers, the rapists, the sexual-favor-demanding bosses.

In short, if you’re interested in quibbling with the data or suggesting alternate interpretations of what Kos really meant when he called Kathy Sierra a lying “crying blogger,” and your goal is not to be a flaming asshole, shut the fuck up.

It took serious restraint not to quote the entire post. So go read it. Seriously.

Oh, but Kos says this kind of thing is no big deal, and just grow a pair already, jeeeeeez.

File under “This is not what free speech means.” That file’s getting pretty thick these days.

[Via Renegade Evolution]

There have been a lot of conversations lately about online bullying… and I have plenty I want to say about the subject. But I think I’ll break this into several blog posts, rather than one big one.

It goes without saying that the perpetrators of online bullying - a term I don’t like, because “bullying” doesn’t even come close to accurately describing death threats - are cowardly and insecure. You know, just like the “bullies” were back in school - and some people never really grow up, do they? For all the talk of “No one can make anyone feel a certain way” and “Don’t let them bother you” and so on, the truth is, none of us lives in a bubble. Other people’s actions and words do affect us, and even if those words or actions are motivated by fear, insecurity, etc., ultimately it has fuck-all to do with whether or not they hurt us.

I don’t know what’s to be done about this… and I wish I had some answers. But I don’t know if there are any answers. Not any hard-and-fast ones, to be sure.

(It annoys me when people write in the second person, but I’m about to do it anyway.) The most frustrating thing, to me, is not being able to defend yourself. Not because you’re not able to stand up for yourself, articulate your points, use your brain, etc… but because the other party refuses to take your defense seriously, no matter what you do or say. That’s how it was for me throughout much of school. It didn’t matter that I was smart and my attackers were scared, stupid fools. They had power - not because I “gave” it to them, but because it didn’t matter what I did; I wasn’t taken seriously. In retrospect, I don’t think much of anything could’ve gotten through to them short of an actual ass-kicking or some other sort of physical humiliation, but I wasn’t physically capable of that.

I was a kid. I was at school. I didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t allowed to stand up for myself, and no one stood up for me. That’s the kind of thing that drives people to extreme acts.

Only I didn’t have the guts for extreme acts, either. I was scared.

And sure, with “online bullying,” things are different… to a point. We’re adults, not kids (even if plenty of blogosphere denizens seem to be in a state of arrested development circa 7th grade). We can choose who to ignore or acknowledge, whose words matter and whose are just noise. But even so, when there’s enough noise, it can drown out anything else, and cause real harm. So, what to do then?

I’ll write about it some more in another post.