#250 - The Ferrett - Dealing With Angry Comments (Go to the bottom of this page to hear the podcast)
"How Do You Deal With All These Angry Comments?” Fetlife Journal Entry by: The Ferrett
"I just saw your latest entry," goes the text. "Holy shit, how do you deal with all of these idiots leaving snarky comments?"
So I thought I'd share my official Tips For Handling FetLife Comment-Storms:
Tip #1: Be A Dude. As with so many other things in Western culture, if you can manage to be a dude, and preferably perceived as a cis one, then your comments will immediately become 70% easier to deal with. People sure do love hammering on women on the Internet, so if you're perceived as a girl, you'll have some more work to do.
Now. This isn't to say that you'll receive no comments as a duderino. In fact, I can hear the menfolks saying, "MEN HAVE IT SO MUCH HARDER ON THE INTERNET! I MYSELF - "
Which is kinda part of the problem. Men have it so easy, they don't understand how easy they have it. It's kinda like birth control; women have been dealing with toxic side effects of the Pill and IUDs and other methods for years, and it's just considered something women should deal with. But when they finally devised a chemical pill that temporarily shut down men's ability to impregnate a woman, the side effects were considered too horrendous to inflict upon a guy.
We just sort of expect that a) women will deal with pain, and b) that men won't pay enough attention to realize how inconvenienced women are. And so it goes with the Internet.
Now, that's not to say that men will receive no pushback! I mean, I clearly do. And if you've not received angry commenters descending into your feed to call you names, well, it can be Not Fun. And if you have a middlingly large audience, like FetLife can provide at its top tiers, that pileup can be significant.
But honestly? Compare the vitriol I get to any equally angry woman of my audience, and I get less.
So if you can, be a dude. It helps.
Tip #2: Have Assholes Shatter Your Give-A-Shit Meter In High School.*Again, this is difficult to achieve, and I tell the full tale here, but the short version is this:
When I was an awkward virgin in high school, I continually got mocked by jocks because I clearly had never, and would never, gotten with a girl. They'd notice me talking to any girl I had a slight attraction on and hammer down on that.
Then one day, I got blackout drunk and a girl made out with me! This was not, happily, sexual assault, but something I deeply desired - and in my drunkenness, I consented to having her put twenty-something hickies on my neck. Which I didn't notice until I got to school.
But hey, I thought, those jocks will finally respect me! They thought I'd never kiss a girl! And clearly I did! So the hickies would be the sign where they gave me high-fives and congratulated -
Nope. Now they'd decided to mock me for other reasons.
And I realized: there was no way to win the respect of bullies. If you jumped through every hoop they gave you, they'd just give you new hoops.
And so I stopped trying to impress people who I didn't want to impress. I started working on impressing people I genuinely liked - not the sniggering buffoons who'd gang up on an insecure kid.
The ultimate effect of that is that I really don't give a shit about the opinion of someone I don't respect. If their page is covered with anti-SJW rants, I mean, clearly we don't see eye-to-eye, so if they're all like, "This essay was dumb," then we obviously didn't have a lot to talk about anyway.
Much like being born a male, I'm not entirely sure how you have your give-a-shit meter broken, but if you can manage it I highly recommend it.
Tip #3: You Will Never Get Universal Love.You know Shakespeare? Greatest writer in all of history, right? Mandated teaching in every class, invented a billion words, has immortal dramas. He polls about as well as any writer can poll.
And there are English scholars, infamously well-read and erudite ones, who think Shakespeare is a talentless hack. Why can't we read Marlowe or Beaumont instead?
Point is, complaints are inevitable. And you'll see people breaking down because they had twenty-five nice comments and the twenty-sixth is critical, and they react like they were owed universal acclaim for writing about poontang.
The only way you will ever have universally positive responses is to have a small audience. The larger your readership gets, the more likely it is that you'll have a crew of folks who hated what you said.
And yet you see folks destroying themselves, editing comments, breaking down because someone doesn't find their words palatable. But you can't be to everyone's tastes, and even if you were, you'd be selling out.
I get lots of angry comments. I only get worried when the people I respect get angry at me. As for everyone else, I go, "Is this the sort of person I was writing this essay for in the first place?"
If they aren't, then I shrug. I didn't write it for them. They didn't like it.
So it goes.
Tip #4: It's The Words, Not You.Language is an imperfect telepathy. It is trivially easy to write something that says the opposite of what you meant to say.
And when you screw up and write words that people misinterpret, that's not their fault.
It's yours.
You said the wrong thing.
One of the reason I'm good at writing essays is that, through years of falling flat on my face, I have a reasonably good database as to "things people will get confused about." I know that if I write an essay about bad breakups that has an example of a man saying shitty things to a female, I'll inadvertently give people the impression that I only think men can do shitty things in a relationship - so I take the time to correct that. I know that if I write about men not having it as hard as women do when it comes to Internet abuse, some men will be unable to make the distinction between "Women have it harder" and "Men encounter no problems whatsoever," so I head that off at the pass.
Basically, a lot of angry comments boil down to "I MISREAD THIS THING YOU WROTE AND I AM VERY MAD ABOUT MY MISINTERPRETATION."
If the person seems reasonably intelligent, then I probably screwed up and I either edit the essay, or clarify in the comments, or write a follow-up essay. Or, you know, just apologize for flubbing things.
If the person seems pretty dense or biased, and I feel I was clear enough, well, go back to the ol' "Is this a person whose opinion I care about?" rule. Generally I don't. Foam on, clueless person.
Tip #5: ...Sometimes It's You, Though.Sometimes, however, you're perfectly clear and yet people you respect are getting mad at you for things you believe in.
Maybe you're being inadvertently shitty.
Look, it's impossible to write consistently about your own experience without stepping in it. I've said really dumb sexist things, really ignorant things about queer people, hurt my trans friends with asshole statements.
It sucks, but sometimes you learn about substandard behavior by stepping on toes.
And when that happens, you gotta listen, and maybe apologize.
And like I said: it's about the people you respect. If a horde of Joe Blows come in out of nowhere to harangue you, well, maybe you just got linked to by someone with a big audience. But if people who seem thoughtful and compassionate are telling you that you're not thinking properly...
Don't respond right away. Take some time to consider your stance. And if you decide to keep that stance, do it thoughtfully.
My thoughts have evolved a lot over the last twenty years because I've had a lot of good people who'll call me on my shit. That's painful. But it leads to positive growth, assuming you don't double down and assume that everyone who disagrees with you must be An Enemy.
Which leads to the next tip:
Tip #6: What People Assume About You Is What They'd Do If They Thought They Could Get Away With It.A lot of commentors assume that I will write on any topic that gets a billion hits, and accuse me of selling out for The Fame. Others assume that I'm writing because women will fuck you if you write the right words.
That sort of shit can feel really personal. They don't know you! You wanna go refute them.
But you know what?
These are sad people who would gladly sell themselves out for the fame, if they only knew what to write about. When they say, "You're just writing to get laid," what they're generally saying is, "I wish I could write to get laid, but I can't."
(That's usually laid over by a big ol' sour grapes relish of "I wouldn't sell out like YOU did," but honestly, they're generally not that good a writer.)
Everywhere in the comments you'll find dim people trying to put you down because they're convinced that the only way to be smart is to insult other people. You'll find folks who believe SJWs are evil and unreachable because THEY'RE unreachable.
You can do it with compassion, or with schadenfreude - but if you extrapolate what these people so desperately need to believe from the comments they leave, you'll often find they're desperately trying to fill a need in their lives.
And for me, anyway, when I see someone fronting so hard, I generally don't feel bad. They're not insulting me, not really - they're desperately trying to patch up some fatal flaw in their own lives by engaging in this asshole way, and hey, buddy, you do you.
Which brings me to my last tip:
Tip #7: Every Side Has Their Assholes.One of the things that drives me nuts about the SJW/conservative dialogue is that both sides, somehow, believe that their side never overreaches. I keep stumbling across anti-SJW screeds that seem to imply that only SJWs dogpile on folks, and only SJWs call names, and I've been here for eight years being called all sorts of names - often by the folks crying that their side is flawless.
Look. Both the SJW and the anti-SJW folks have folks who'll go malicious at the drop of a hat.
And that dropped hat is not a good look.
So what that means is, the block button is your friend. Don't wall out everyone who disagrees, but there are people who are gonna do their best to make your damn life miserable. Again, if you look at how they operate, they're desperately trying to trawl you to make up for some deficit in their lives - but there's no shame in walling off your interactions with them, or people who will act as their henchmen.
Block as you see fit. Shrug off the rest. And remember that hey, you're just putting words out onto the Internet, all anyone can judge you by is the words they've read from you - and if that's insufficient for people you'd like to get better reactions from, you need to get better words.
That's how you can survive.
Good luck.
Link: https://fetlife.com/users/338073
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