Suck It Up

To me, it seemed there was an inordinate amount of whining about flamers, trolls, etc. at Blogher. And I think this is why the fellers believe the girls aren't up for the "food fight inherent in blogging."

While I'm all about striving to have civil, respectful discussions, I agree with a comment Mojo made at the lunchtime session --anger can be used to our benefit.

Comments

[Pepper]

Funny. This weekend I got my first troll (who said Latoyia Figueroa deserved what she got ... grrr ...). And it was fun hollering his lousy butt right into the ground!

[Tish G]

Hey! It was great finally meeting you!

But I think you're wrong :-)

I think it was more of a communal sharing of our frustration about flaming. I know that I have expected flaming from years of posting on the NYTimes film forum. If you'd sat in on the Identity Blogger's BOF session, where most of us who were there write about ourselves, you would have heard the "if you can't take the heat, don't post it" comment made by me.

The thing about flaming is that alot of it ends up personal and off-topic. Sometimes the people who flame you (as happened to me on Alas, A Blog) cannot aruge the political point without getting personal. Some don't even know how to read a well-construted argument on a topic and immediately go for the defaul--which, in my case ends up being a comment to the effect of "you're presenting a straw man arugment." When I read that, it is an immediate indication that the person was unable to follow what I am saying and, because of that, has to use a first-year philosophy student's condescending statment and that further comments will deteriorate into something personal.

The more insulting comment was made by Jay Rosen at the end of the session when he said we all sounded terrified. I did not get that at all. Just because we are sitting around and asking for strategies to deal with flamers and trolls, or asking questions about copyright laws, or how to protect ourselves, DOES NOT MEAN WE ARE TERRORIZED! I think Jay was trying to make some stupid freakin' political paralell that was only serving his warped viewpoint and did not convey what ws really going on.

I could just smack him.

But, also, Rox, who said that blogging had to be a "food fight"....isn't that then playing into the idea that blogging is just for teenagers?

Maybe that's the problem--men just do not understand how women communicate, and read their own particular hyper-political crap into what we're really saying.

[Tish G]

Hey! It was great finally meeting you!

But I think you're wrong :-)

I think it was more of a communal sharing of our frustration about flaming. I know that I have expected flaming from years of posting on the NYTimes film forum. If you'd sat in on the Identity Blogger's BOF session, where most of us who were there write about ourselves, you would have heard the "if you can't take the heat, don't post it" comment made by me.

The thing about flaming is that alot of it ends up personal and off-topic. Sometimes the people who flame you (as happened to me on Alas, A Blog) cannot aruge the political point without getting personal. Some don't even know how to read a well-construted argument on a topic and immediately go for the defaul--which, in my case ends up being a comment to the effect of "you're presenting a straw man arugment." When I read that, it is an immediate indication that the person was unable to follow what I am saying and, because of that, has to use a first-year philosophy student's condescending statment and that further comments will deteriorate into something personal.

The more insulting comment was made by Jay Rosen at the end of the session when he said we all sounded terrified. I did not get that at all. Just because we are sitting around and asking for strategies to deal with flamers and trolls, or asking questions about copyright laws, or how to protect ourselves, DOES NOT MEAN WE ARE TERRORIZED! I think Jay was trying to make some stupid freakin' political paralell that was only serving his warped viewpoint and did not convey what ws really going on.

I could just smack him.

But, also, Rox, who said that blogging had to be a "food fight"....isn't that then playing into the idea that blogging is just for teenagers?

Maybe that's the problem--men just do not understand how women communicate, and read their own particular hyper-political crap into what we're really saying.

[eli]

Do you think that women who adapt more easily to male communication patterns are more successful in a male dominated culture?

[Sheelzebub]

I love it when trolls go nuclear on my blog. It makes my side look good when they do it.

[Amanda]

I think the problem is that we've defined aggressiveness as a male trait and women who write like that get criticized a lot more for it. But if you write in a more "feminine" style, you get scoffed at and told you can't play rough. So the problem is not whether or not women are masculine enough--it's just that we're women and either strategy will get you smacked down. Believe you and me--I'm very "male" in my writing if you deem aggressiveness a masculine trait and the whining that goes on because I won't be a good girl is pathetic.

Roxanne, I can see your point, but I would say that women attract a lot more flamers and trolls than men and they are of a much uglier sort, such as the guy that was posting my address and pretending to be me on other sites and insulting people.

[bitchphd]

Yeah, I agree with Amanda: I wonder if part of the problem might not be that trolls on feminist/women's blogs are a lot more likely to get a lot more personal, real quick. There's a difference between someone who trolls a site and argues with your politics and someone who trolls a site to call you a bad mother or a whore; and particularly for people who blog about personal things, the latter can seem a lot more personally threatening than someone who is just calling you a leftist feminazi.

Anyway, my way of dealing with trolls is simply to delete them. Problem solved.

[bitchphd]

Ooops, I feel I should add that I delete 'em not b/c I can't stand a fight--quite the opposite. It's b/c I can't pass one up, and I don't want to waste my time arguing with someone who is only interested in stirring me up.

[Roxanne]

Yep, I can understand the discomfort level when it gets personal. And I delete those, too.

[Amanda]

I do understand, though, about how the anger can be useful. Certain trolls I leave up so people can get good and pissed about how stupid the opposition can be.

[media girl]

I think that, just like there are a slew of politicians who are all about constraining women, controlling women, putting down women, there are trolls who get off on attacking women. Many have insecurities such that they cannot/will not "back down" to a woman, ever ever ever. And that means they always have to have the last word, and will eagerly get nasty if they feel they are not bowed to as The Authority.

Suck it up? I admit, my traffic spikes when a troll latches on. But trolls always suck up all the posting energy, too. Suddenly we're reacting to the fucktard. I hate that. And I hate how those engagements give me energy, because it's negative energy that bleeds into the rest of my life.

I won't back down to them, but I don't see any benefit in anger if it leads to ineloquence, angst and distraction from that which provoked the troll in the first place.

[Roxanne]

In all honesty, I've seen many trolls on men's blogs and it seems they can be just as nasty. But, maybe they're less personal on men's blogs? I'll be on the lookout to see if this is the case in the coming weeks.

[Lauren]

As far as personal goes, my son, my income, my college/future career, my parents, and my sexuality have been called into question NUMEROUS times. When you start insulting my five-year-old, the shit goes down. I've been pretty mean to trolls in return, and once I even took it off line.

I'm not scared of the trolling, if anything I'm perfectly willing to call bullshit. In the meantime IP bans work well enough.

[Amanda]

I usually don't mind them, and I'll ban someone for thread drifting or using racist/sexist/homophobic slurs. But the implied threat that they will come over to my house and harm me unnerved me, I have to admit.

That said, that's what they want. They want women to shut up and be afraid. And that's not going to happen.

[Amanda]

The question is--how do women have a discussion about our particular trolling and flaming issues that isn't simple whining? I think that discussing trolling and flaming is valuable if it encourages more women to blog. There is a genuine fear that stalking and/or threatening will become an issue and I do think it silences women who might be interesting writers. Trish and Lauren and Jessica and Feministing have been really helpful to me in the past as a support system when I had problems that unsettled me. Is this something that can be productively addressed?

[ilona]

One of the best conversations I've encountered in awhile.... and all hidden away in the comments here! Great ideas, and sound bytes and everything:)

"Maybe that's the problem--men just do not understand how women communicate, and read their own particular hyper-political crap into what we're really saying."

I thought this was especially intriguing. I wonder, do many women expect something really different than men, and do we communicate so differently? Somehow I always get caught in the middle of this. I don't mean to be nasty but I don't take the time (in RL either) to carefully step around the emotional mines. I just see people that tend to have different expectations, and I don't think it is strictly along gender lines... but I am a little dense on this subject -to be honest. Maybe we do buy into the food-fight thing a little too much- I'd never thought of it that way.

You know the comment I really loved here, tho? This one:
"When you start insulting my five-year-old, the shit goes down."

I loved that! Yeh! but I think food fights are fun.
I do think media girl has a point, too...

This was good stuff....

[Roxanne]

When I first started blogging I was much more sensitive to the flamers. And one guy even figured out where I worked and called me there.

Mostly, if the flamer/troll is ridiculously OTT --and many are-- I think it's entertaining.

[larkspur]

I don't think it's whining to acknowledge that for some of us, handling really aggressive trolls and flamers is difficult and upsetting. I mean, the point of BlogHer was about sharing information and tactics. I readily embrace the idea of sharing information with y'all as a sort of virtual boot camp.

Whining implies helpless complaining with the intent of inducing someone else to fix it for us. Now, I'm just as apt to drift into the WhineVerse as anyone else is, which is why I hope and expect that (1) I'll learn tactics by discussing it with you, and (2) when I DO whine, some of y'all will say stuff like, "Oh, Lark, honey...puh-leeze...look how you set yourself up for this by doing this or that or blah blah blah...."

None of us should have any use for blanket hugs 'n' kisses and "there there, sweetie, they are SO MEAN" platitudes. But it's great to have someone out there who knows what it's like to feel instantaneous, crippling shame when something we write incites an uproar. We also need other people's war stories about how they dealt with a situation in which, for example, we've written something that was truly bogus and wrongity wrong wrong. 'Cause me? I'm inclined to consider ritual suicide. Does that seem right to you?

I will not be cast as a victim of a mean, hurly-burly virtual world. But I'm not going to pretend to have been somehow transformed into a Warrior Woman overnight.

And now for the standard disclaimer...the one that identifies me as uncertain in a girly sort of way; the one I hope to discard sooner rather than later. It goes like this: I do not intend to trash anyone by posting this comment, and if I missed the point of the post entirely, pretend I didn't say anything.

See? The whole fucking thing is so insidious.

(But the BlogHer livechat was FUN!)

[Ann Bartow]

I blog under my "real" name and identity. When I started blogging, I expected I'd only write about intellectual property law (my scholarly subject area), and it made sense for career reasons to do this in a personally identifiable way. However, I'm also a person with a lot of opinions on a lot of things, so I segued into other topics such as feminism and politics fairly rapidly.

I've only been blogging about nine months, but drawn a scary amount of hate mail and crank phone calls in addition to trollish comments. Things got so ugly, comments are now completely "off" and I seriously considered giving up blogging altogether.

Some commenters are just looking for attention, and they seem to prefer negative attention to being ignored. We had two in particular who were relentlessy posting several nasty comments every day to meet their own fucked up emotional needs, and though I miss the feedback that some commenters provided, I'm glad not to be facilitating my own abuse.

[flea]

Jeez, Ann. That sucks.

I don't have a lot of trolls; I don't know exactly why not, other than luck, or maybe my writing style causes them to wither up.

When I do get them, I deal with them the Dr. B way and just delete them. It's better than getting drawn into an energy wasting battle. I did get one this morning, though, and it was completely incoherent and weird, so I kept it up because it was funny. (In response to a movie review I wrote, she said I was "freaking out" and suggested I "calm the fuck down." She finished up the scolding by passing along a nugget of wisdom: "Nothing is perfect; Nobody is perfect." Mr. flea and I have been responding to each other with that line all morning.

"Do you want more coffee?"
"Nothing is perfect; Nobody is perfect."
"Is that a yes?")

People are just going to have to handle trolls in the way that they're most comfortable with. Some people like to keep them up because they don't want to be seen as "stifling dissent." I have no qualms about stifling dissent. I am a heartless dictator in my little microcosm of the internet.

[Sheelzebub]

Wow. No one has threatened me or tried to find me. I just get morons who post off-topic crap (which I take down because my blog ain't a bulliten board), SNERTS who post unoriginal insults, or total idiots who can't argue logically to save their lives. Oh, and a recent one who red baited all over the place, made a few cracks about me, and then got all injured innocence and whined about how he was *only* giving his two cents (boo-hooooo, meeeann Sheelzebub!) when I swiped him back. Problem with trolls is, they dish it out and cannot take it.

I haven't even gotten that much hate mail. I think I got like, two emails that disagreed with a post; one was a long ass run-on sentence, and the other was. . .I can't remember what the other one was. Oh, dear. They do all start to look alike after a while.

[Ann Bartow]

You both have great blogs, and I'm glad you don't get flamed a lot. The two worse offenders at Sivacracy.net appeared together in June, with a third who was more intermittent but seemed to be friendly with the gruesome twosome from some other context. After they appeared, and before comments were closed, I found out that when I linked to other feminist blogs, our trolls started tormenting THOSE bloggers, which really made me feel awful, like I was spreading a disease!
Ah well. I blog a little bit at Our Word (http://www.ourword.org/) and so far not trolls there, phew.
Anyway, thanks for the input and support.

[Roxanne]

Ann:

Typepad has a function that allows you to block certain IPs, email addresses, names and words. Your blogging software might also allow you to do that. That way, you could block the offenders and still include the better comments.

[Ann Bartow]

Thanks; we may move to some form of moderated comment at some point. BTW, this is a terrific blog, and congrats on the house!

[Sheelzebub]

Sometimes I wonder if creating a tactical force of troll smashers would be a good idea--just three or four people who would go round to blogs that were getting hassled by trolls and poke them with sticks.

No, no, immature. Appealing, but immature.

Do not poke the trolls with a stick. . .the mouth foaming is amusing, but it's naughty to get them to do it. . .do not poke the trolls with a stick. . .step awaaaaayyyy from the stick. . .

I know of a few people who got harrassed and threatened IRL; the cops got involved and the offender was charged, I believe.