The amount of email I received today for my column When A Man Hates A Woman was torrential. Almost all of them were supportive. A good number of people just wanted to tell me, yes, you belong here too. Some wrote to tell me their stories, and a few told me they really appreciated my even-handed perspective of the subject and one said “I found your article one of the most instructive on the Sierra attack and counter attack. You belong. Keep writing.” I was especially glad to get emails that directly acknowledged the man behind the still-running hate site — who, if you clicked through to the NYT piece you’d see is a man named MNS (no links to his name will lead here, thanks). Some of you might remember I took that NYT article to task on my blog when it published, and replied to the writer’s responses here as well.
Imagine my surprise when I Googled MNS and saw in these blog comments that he’s an Apple employee — and he’s now located in the Bay Area.
I am an Apple customer. I am an iTunes artist. Am I concerned that this sick dude has access to my personal data? You bet I am.
Wouldn’t you be?
Sooooo…. Lock and load. About the other responses to my column: This afternoon my friend Chriso emailed me with the subject line, “Mind. Totally. Boggled.” He was trying to figure out how my column was being seen as dangerous propaganda — I looked over the angrilicious hate-flavored email and saw a pattern: each of the writers were pissed about the transgender issue — specifically, in each email the writers were set off that I was taking at face-value that a transgender woman is, well, a woman. What a thing to react angrily to, especially in the context of this column, eh? The thing is, (to me) no portrayal of violence against sexual minorities is so acute or clear as when a man kills a woman after sex. And these are indeed women — one emailer insisted on using the pronoun ‘he’ in reference to Gwen throughout, insisting that she was just a troubled gay boy who ran with the wrong crowd. This, to me, is dangerous thinking. And though the events are different, the issues are the same. Chriso has a very eloquent response to the dangerous propaganda accusation here. This is a particularly beautiful snip:
Now one could argue that Violet truly is trying to spread information and ideas to “harm” a certain person or group. Maybe this comment isn’t totally off base. What she’s doing is trying to point out the insidiousness of this violent misogyny and declare that it is no longer acceptable and the parties responsible should not have the right to perpetuate it, hide behind anonymity or have major publications gently slap them on the wrist for it and then send them 8 zillion tons of free traffic. So sure, call it propaganda if you will. But don’t try to put a negative slant on it, because this is the kind of information that needs to be spread far and wide. It needs to damage the reputations of the perpetrators to the point where no one lends credence to their work, turns their backs on them and deletes them from their fucking bookmarks.
It’s 2007 people. The notion that a man is still threatened by a woman in the same field as him is beyond pathetic.
My last thoughts on the Sierra issue are complex. I had a difficult time writing the column not because of the intensity of the case, but because I was worried about joining a witch hunt — Sierra’s post was very emotional and she named a lot of names, without clear substantiation that I, or anyone else, could reasonably cite (imho). I was worried about stating fact. Unlike the MNS issue (hello, case not closed over here), there was no NYT article citing the author of the hate. That’s why trolls are tricky — but that’s also why the police are here to do their jobs. With my piece, I couldn’t just jump on any bandwagon of implied accusation — what if it *wasn’t* someone she named, as confusingly as she did? Some statements, upon examination, were basically, ‘it might be x, or someone imitating x, who said this about another woman’. And in Blogistan people were seeing linked names next to vitriol and panic in the post, and reacting like crazy — making me want to stress that we bloggers need to be very clear in situations like this about what is fact and what is feeling. Even though, I know, it’s hard to think in times of panic. Personally, I was put off by the helplessness of the post, begging me to ask the question — do we women really need to be seen as victims, threatening to run away in order to get people to stand up and support us?
And no, I didn’t know when I wrote it that there was another story on Sierra running the same day as my column — though that wouldn’t have changed anything. And no — I didn’t like the piece. Into the sewer, indeed. Oh, how utopia has fallen! n00b.
