According to our recent poll, people find Twitter and Facebook to be the most annoying among all online resources. I know exactly where they are coming from but reently I have had an opportunity to discover a far nastier online space: Reddit.
According to Wikipedia,
The median U.S. Reddit user is male, 35-44 years of age, has some college education, and is making a middle-range income of $25,000 – $49,000 USD. The analysis also shows that the top audience interests of the site are development tools, scripting languages, and C and C++, suggesting a computer savvy demographic and culture.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to meet this college-educated, computer-savvy part of the Reddit culture. What I have noticed is that my posts often get quoted by extremely vile sexists on Reddit, which then leads to thousands of sexist freaks descending on my blog. These people are so intellectually challenged that they never even manage to write any posts of their own in response to my articles that seem to offend them. All they do is screech, “Now see what this stupid feminist is saying [link to Clarissa’s Blog.] Isn’t she stupid? And a feminist? Which means she is stupid. A stupid feminist. And her blog is a stupid feminist blog.” Then, they start coming here, trying to leave this type of comments by the dozen.
It now seems to me that all of the Internet-rejects who have no capacity of running their own Facebook page or Twitter account (let alone a blog) have flocked to Reddit to spou venom against those of us who do have something of our own to say.
I’m glad someone else agrees with me on Reddit!
My younger sister uses Reddit, and that’s how she met this group of people that she met through the site that she calls her “Redditers”. She took me to one of these “game nights” they schedule, and I ended up feeling like I was going to swallow my tongue with all the effort it took me not to speak up against the sexist disablist nonsense that was spilling forth, such as “The reason most good artists are men is because women find contentment without art by creating new children, so men create art to compensate for the inability to make new humans” (Takes two to tango, doesn’t it?) and using “That’s so autistic” as an insult, since apparently someone clued them in to how hurtful using “retarded” is (And apparently missed the point of why it was so hurtful in the first place)
My sister, unfortunately, is enamoured with one of them, and is now asking me for tips to “bag a nerd”. I think she can do much better.
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I have the same experiences with Reddit. I’ve had such lovely morons like TrollKing put up one of his trademark “Feminist says [stupid dumb feminist thing]!!” posts linking to posts where I was doing nothing but defend men and scold the women who were treating them unfairly. They’re ridiculous and not worth the time it takes to click through on my blog’s stats page.
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Not only can they not write, they also can’t read. 😦 The Wikipedia article says most of them has “some” college education. Are these all dropouts or something?
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I have no idea about Reddit, but I am somewhat surprised that you are surprised to find an average “male, 35-44 years of age, …some college education, …making a middle-range income of $25,000 – $49,000 USD… and interested in development tools, scripting languages, and C and C++” to be sexist…
As a 35-44 male capable of using C++, I hope I will not be considered too biased if I say that significant percentage of programming geeks have below average social skills and are predisposed to fit the world and the relationships, which they do not understand too well, into some kind of a simplistic script. Or code, if you wish. 🙂 And sexist script is simple enough and widespread enough, so they go for it.
IF I do X THEN
girls will like me
IF girls do not like me THEN
they are bitches
FEMINISTS = BITCHES
etc
🙂 🙂
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Hah. I haven’t thought about it this way. I thought mostly along the lines of somebody being young, educated, professional – you don’t expect such people to be so anti-feminist. But I see your point now.
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Oops, shame on me, I forgot a semicolon after every line 🙂
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“if I say that significant percentage of programming geeks have below average social skills and are predisposed to fit the world and the relationships, which they do not understand too well, into some kind of a simplistic script”
Actually, not my experience at all. All the developers I know are married, have social skills, and are easy to get along with.
Maybe I just hit the coworker jackpot though, who knows?
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I divorced a programmer once, so I’m biased. 🙂 He was a lot more highly paid, though. 🙂
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I’ve never heard of reddit, so I voted for twitter. I probably don’t even want to find out what reddit is.
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No, you really don’t. 🙂
Twitter brought us the pearls of wisdom from the Overt Dictionary, so it’s not completely useless. 🙂
I agree that it’s a stupid medium, of course.
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Oh, man.
You should see how they react to Gaming-related Feminist sites like the Borderhouse Blog.
It is not pretty.
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There are gaming-related feminist sites?? Links! Please, give me the links!
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http://borderhouseblog.com/
http://geekfeminism.org
There are a lot more, just take a peek at their blogrolls.
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Hm. I think my comment is stuck in Moderation.
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It went to spam for some reason. But I rescued it. 🙂
Thank you for the links!!
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I still believe the MRA movement can grow up. Every now and again you will see a post on r/mensrights that says something like this:
“Dear r/mensrights, I am a feminist who agrees with a lot of what you say. I think men have legitimate complaints about societies gender roles and that these are worth fixing. But why do you have to hate feminists so much? We know that sexism hurts everyone, and we don’t believe this is a competition. Can’t we have a truce?”
And then r/mensrights proceeds to explain how a truce is impossible because feminists are to evil to cooperate with. The MRA movement appears to be reluctant to embrace feminism, even there are a sizable number of feminists who sympathize with their grievances.
However, there is evidence that feminism could branch out to embrace men’s issues, even if the MRA movement refuses to reciprocate. NSWATM is the most obvious example, I see links to it spreading around the feminist blogosphere. There are also “renegade” feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers who have challenged feminist culture for not embracing men’s issues.
Ultimately, I think the feminist MR movement will attract more sane people than the misogynistic MR movement. Perhaps then we can finally have a mature discussion. But until then, I am thankful that you take men’s issues seriously even when MRA’s treat you poorly.
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