Hate Male

Fellow Irvine blogger Scott Kaufman has talked about possible rationales for the deletion of misogynistic comments on feminist blogs. I've been thinking about this issue again, since I've been receiving a particularly nasty batch of comments from particularly hateful readers who want to stage violent or sexual scenarios that involve my actual person.

As I've said, I suspect that male bloggers don't get these kinds of comments and that having their masculinity questioned is as ad hominem as their reader responses get. However, I know the "Don't Feed the Troll" rule well enough, so I won't reproduce the actual comments here to demonstrate my point. Trust me, they are bad.

Of course, my first reaction tends to be the impulse of the police officer at the scene of a murder: it must have been someone who knew the victim well. So I find myself going through the rolls of former students, ex-boyfriends, and disgruntled neighbors to generate lists of possible suspects and compare prose styles with the evidence in my inbox.

Rationally I know that this is a faulty approach. Google Analytics has shown me that most people reach the entries on this blog through keywords typed into search engines. Top terms like "exhibitionism," "porno," and "virtual rape" commonly bring visitors to my site. Such computer users must be disappointed to realize that I am treating voyeuristic subject matter with an ironic or critical distance. I would guess that arrival on a feminist site results in an urge to retaliate, although unfortunately just giving some samples of the luring metadata in this posting may lure even more of these misogynistic readers.