Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

How Women Are Treated On The Internet, Example #4,398,122

So, yesterday I wrote a thing about the Hugos and the Sad/Rabid Puppies horseshit, and that got linked around a bit as this blog fortunately sometimes does.

One person linked to it on Facebook, a reader of mine who is a woman, and she tagged me directly, which is all good. And then an exchange happened — well, an “exchange” is a very polite way to refer to this abusive intrusion by some ambulatory pubic fire.

Now, I’m not saying this exchange is an example specifically of the Sad and Rabid Puppies — he seems to be a supporter of it, and I’ve seen this kind of thing before from some of those supporters, nominees, and also from the connected joy-buzzer parade of Gamer.Gate.

What I will say, though, is that this is a pretty good example of what women get online. Women and also persons of color, too — it’s thick with heinous fuckery.

What follows is a part of that exchange. It went on for a while with me and him after this snippet. Nothing productive came out of it, really, and it ended up being not worth the time arguing (though it is worth noting that he was a thousand times more polite to me and tried to excuse his behavior to her because she told him to fuck off — which, by the way, came well after he started with the misogynistic slut-shamey rape-culturey bullshit).

The woman consented to me publishing this snippet, though I’ve removed her name and image (and his, too — regardless of how much as I’d like to run him over the public cheese grater I don’t think that does anybody much good). What follows is, I dunno if it’s triggery, but it sure is shitty.

The red square is the human turd-bucket, though that will become quite clear.

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I don’t have much call to action here, really — women already know this stuff goes on, and it’s not like I’m sharing something new. But men are sometimes surprised at this, and so it seems important to highlight once in a while that the Internet can get venomous really fast. While it’s not our job to ride in like SAVIOR MENFOLK to thwart the internet’s many ogres, at the same time, it’s important to be be aware of this stuff and support the good people online. Help make safe spaces here. Moderate the septic shitflingers out of existence. Report abuse. And also ask our social media providers to offer better ways to report and signal abuse online. It’s up to us to curate a better social media feed for everyone, and demand better.