All of this talk about how one should be patient and understanding with vicious jerks and aim at getting them to like you reminded me of this post I wrote a while ago.
The post had many comments when it was published but then Blogger crashed and ate them all up.
echidne-of-the-snakes has recently written on the subject of trolls too in “More Speech As A Response To Misogynist Speech” on 13.10.11. I liked the most the end of her post:
The mature reaction is to ignore woman-haters and their comments. I have been told this many, many times.
…
It’s not just an inconvenience, either. If your neighbor walked around with staring eyes muttering about his hatred of women you might feel the need to do something, to suggest that he gets help, to talk to his family and so on. But the mature reaction on the Internet is to ignore all that.This troubles me.
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It troubles me, too. This is why I’m not going to participate in this supposedly “mature” thing to do.
I hear that American girls are told “just ignore the bullies” at school. In this sense, I am very happy to be from a culture where that was unthinkable.
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I was also told to just ignore the bullies. I did, and it worked, mostly, but it did have the effect of interfering with any social interaction I might have had. I just sat quietly and everyone came to ignore me, not just the bullies.
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* I am very happy to be from a culture where that was unthinkable. *
Aren’t the girls in FSU told “he likes you, thus pulling braids” and told to ignore too?
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“He likes you”, yes. But I have never in my life seen a situation where a boy in our countries would beat up or bully a girl without being beat up much harder by her in return.
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I only ignored the bullies because I didn’t care what they said. I still don’t care–except when a) it isn’t me they’re bullying or b) it’s on the internet. I’m sure I might have cared if I was getting beat up or something, but it was just talk between them and they weren’t my friends anyway.
It was also extremely difficult to spread a minor rumor at my high school, so that might have helped my philosophy along.
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It’s metaphysics, again. The goal of women is supposed to be to be “liked” and to earn that masochistically. The goal of males is to have authority and to address that need for authority directly. If you behave as if your motivations were male, I’m afraid you have an identity disorder and need to visit a shrink.
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In my culture, the accepted patterns of behavior are the exact opposite of what you describe. 🙂 So I’m being very true to my roots. 🙂
The aggressive, macho type of femininity enjoys such an overwhelming success with men in North America that it makes one wonder. . .
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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