So it turns out that yelling about people you hate all day every day on the internet isn’t really very good for you.
As an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week notes,
The research has been clear for decades: Venting is bad for us. …
In studies, people report that they feel better after venting. But researchers find they actually become angrier and more aggressive. People who vent anonymously may become the angriest and most aggressive.
In fact, “venting” is really the wrong word for it. Anger doesn’t build up in our body like some sort of gas, that we can relieve with a series of loud and smelly anger-farts on Twitter or in the comment section of a newspaper article we disagree with.
The “venting” theory has been with us a long time, the WSJ piece notes, and it seems to make sense on an intuitive level.
Venting has an ancient history. Aristotle believed in catharsis—the purging of emotions. More recently, Sigmund Freud talked about the hydraulic model, saying that if someone holds anger inside without letting it out, it will build to dangerous levels, much the way steam in a pressure cooker will build if it is not vented.
But anger isn’t a gas. Those who’ve studied the issue suggest that “venting” — whether in person or anonymously on the internet — causes us to become more obsessed with what is angering us, not less. Instead of purging our anger, we end up stewing in our own juices — to switch the metaphor from gas to liquid.
I certainly see plenty of evidence of this amongst the people I write about on this blog and on the internet at large. Those who “vent” their anger the most vociferously don’t get less angry over time, as you would expect if they were actually “venting” something toxic inside of them. Instead, many of them just get angrier and angrier.
We might consider the sad (and very, very angry) career of a certain former A Voice for Men bigwig, who went from being the only member of the AVFM collective who seemed to have any degree of self-awareness to someone who spends his days lashing out at feminists and former allies in what has become a neverending Twitter meltdown.
We might consider the assorted YouTube yellers who’ve become perpetual rage machines; no matter how many rants they upload to YouTube on the purported evils of Anita Sarkeesian or Anita Sarkeesian or even Anita Sarkeesian, their rage is never ever “vented.”
I mean, look at this guy:
That’s no way to live.
The problem isn’t just the anger; it’s the obsession. One of the main reasons that “venting” keeps you angry is that it leads you to ruminate longer about the things that infuriate you the most, when it would be much more healthy for you to stop thinking about these things at all.
Now, obviously, I spend a decent portion of my days reading about, writing about, and sometimes even arguing with, some pretty hateful shitheads. I think it’s important to write about these people. But I try not to let them dominate my life and my thoughts to the exclusion of everything else, and I try not to let my anger at them overcome me.
I don’t read the comments on my YouTube videos. (Well, not regularly.) I avoid tit-for-tat Twitter battles with sea-lions and dogpilers. (Well, most of the time.) I clear my head watching dumb TV and playing Alphabear and doing various other things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ridiculous and infuriating misogynists of the internet.
And I hope the rest of you are doing that too.
Well, I know a lot of you are, if the wonderfully digressive comments you all leave on this blog make clear. Because talking about games and recipes and posting cat pics and other brain bleach really does keep us all a bit healthier.
Which reminds me: I haven’t posted any open threads in a while. I’ll go do that now.
In the meantime, here’s ten hours of a snow shovel that sounds like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
H/T — r/GamerGhazi
We should really post more pics of Spikey Van Dykey. :>
I really don’t understand the “If you dislike objectification, then you must never be attracted to anybody!” strawman. Even if they don’t understand that objectification and attraction are different things, they must understand that feminists are humans, right? And therefore sexual beings (except for asexual ones, of course)?
And if they don’t, how does that mesh with the “All feminists are lesbians” and “All feminists are just angry because nobody will have sex with them” nonsense memes?
(Also, hadn’t AndreTheFireant been posting for a couple of weeks, completely normally with no hint of trolliness? Where the hell did this “Patriarchy and privilege and whatever” – good crap, that might be one of the dumbassiest sentences ever posted here – bullshit come from? And yes, “Dumbassiest” is a word now.)
Funnily enough I’m currently trying to write something about body shaming etc. so there’s a tenuous enough connection for me to pretend that I’m working by dipping into this discussion (this site is worse than TVTropes for diverting me!)
A few points spring to mind.
The first is the different way that men and women view their own bodies. That’s seems partly internal and partly external.
You may be familiar with the experiment where people have to adjust a mirror image of themselves until it matches the reality. Men tend to make themselves slimmer than they really are and women make themselves fatter.
Secondly, whilst there’s an overall culture of looking down on overweight people, male and female, women clearly get it harder. An overweight man can proudly show off his beer belly and it’s a bit of a laugh. He may get some mild teasing from his mates but people will look beyond that. They’ll see it as just one, minor, aspect of his whole self. An overweight woman could never get away with that (there’s the possible exception is she’s genuinely funny and makes it part of her ‘act’ cf. Jo Brand etc.)
On overweight man may be a figure of derision but he’s unlikely to be a hate object. It might be seen as a personal failure on his part but it won’t have wider ramifications. There’s a great summary of this that I see around here. “People think women are being fat *at* them”.
Then there’s the body image thing. Women will make themselves ill trying to diet. They may even succumb to eating disorders.
Now people may bring up men and steroid abuse.
The difference is, there is a genuine external pressure on women to conform to particular body types. Slim is not only seen as attractive in a sexual sense; it’ll get you a higher paid better job. Plenty of fat men in the boardroom, suspect there’s not many fat women.
The pressure to have that bulked up body though that steroid users strive for; how many women actually desire that? A small percentage perhaps, but mainstream straight woman perspective seems to find that look actually *unattractive*. Unlike the real pressure on women to conform to a particular body type, the pressure on men is mainly in their own heads.
As to the ‘ripped’ look, there are enough magazines out their for men that suggest that is a desirable look and there are a lot of women who like that. Thing is, whilst a woman might drool about Brad Pitt in ‘Troy’ it’s unlikely she actually expects here real world partners to look like that, it’s just a fantasy. We are however producing a cadre of men who’s dating standard will settle for nothing less than someone who looks like a comic book cover; and that’s obviously unattainable in real life.
And whilst a woman might face a constant attack on her self esteem when she’s surrounded by ‘beach ready’ bodies in all media, the standard reaction when a man see’s a picture of some ripped guy is “Pff, what a puff”.
@Alan
Don’t forget Hollywood. Overweight dudes are a dime a dozen in every potential role, but overweight women? Ahahahah. You might find one at a time, typecast for life as “The funny fat friend whose entire personality is funny, fat and friend,” but that’s it.
Don’t forget these days there’s a lot of fat female side characters having a lot of sex and the entire joke is how weird and impossible it is that these fat women are getting a lot.
My own understanding of anger, as someone with depression, is that you can either deal with it and get it out of your system, or it goes sour. For me, sour anger ferments into the sort of depressive slump which effectively takes me out of play for weeks, maybe months at a stretch, trying to soak the wretched stuff out of my brain.
So these days, I’m trying a new strategy. I’ll write long screeds about things which are terrible in the world. Then I’ll delete them rather than posting them. I don’t read the comments on a lot of things. I’ve given myself permission to walk away from comment threads which are frustrating – I call it the SIWOTI fund – 5c per annoying comment, to a maximum of $2, then I close the window. The money will, at the end of the year, be used to buy booze (for cooking) and video games (for giving me something to do other than read annoying things on the internets). I’ve given myself permission to basically not get angry about things I can’t alter from where I am.
So far it seems to be working. I’m less stressed than I used to be, and the depressive episodes appear to be decreasing in strength. Given the external circumstances don’t appear to have changed any (I’m still in Australia and we still have a government where the fact they’re largely ineffective is, in fact, a positive point) I’m attributing it to the change in attitude.
I feel like I should really bring this up as well: There’s that movie that came out recently called The D.U.F.F., and the title is an acronym for “The Designated Ugly Fat Friend”, and you’d think they’d get someone like Rebel Wilson, Gabourey Sidibe, or any number of recently famous fat actresses to play that role.
Nope.
The “DUFF” in question is the girl in the overalls. They pick the most conventionally attractive actress they could find for the role.
Thin and white. And she’s supposed to be the “Fat and Ugly” friend? Compared to who?
Well, she’s designated, isn’t she? Obviously her (very shallow) circle of friends couldn’t find anyone else, all being Hollywood pretty, so she got saddled with the duty. /sarcasm
IMO, anger itself isn’t necessarily a bad emotion. It’s a matter of what the anger prompts you to do with it that determines the good or the bad. Using frustration as a jumping-off point to do something productive can be a good use of it; anger can be a powerful motivator.
That said, on a purely physiological level, anger kind of is bad, specifically for the person who is angry. It’s a stressor, and it contributes to a host of health problems like heart disease. So rage is a bad thing to rely on as any kind of long-term fuel source. It just burns you up. Being angry at injustice is a good way to get involved in movements to combat systemic discrimination, but letting anger carry you is a bad idea for a host of reasons. One for the health thing, and another because anger tends to be impulsive and reactionary, not good aspects to have when one is seeking to better the world. Passion, hope, comraderie, empathy, those kinds of emotions can be much healthier and longer-lasting for any kind of long-haul goal.
I think that one of the worst aspects of toxic masculinity is the belief that anger is one of the only emotions men should experience. It does no one any favors.
@Alan:
That wasn’t synchrotron radiation coming from your Schweppes (or if it was, then your submarine has been misengineered remarkably badly.) There are various sciencey things that produce blue glows, and it’s useful not to mistake them. Here’s a guide.
CHERENKOV RADIATION: The beautiful blue glow means you are gazing at a nuclear reactor through a thick medium, usually water. It also means that this nuclear reactor is without its usual layers of concrete and so you may well be about to die.
SYNCHROTRON RADIATION: The beautiful blue glow means you are seeing unbelievably fast particles pass en masse through an unbelievably large magnetic field. This means you are probably running an old Soviet-style particle accelerator. If not, you may want to check out why the unbelievably powerful magnetic field is there. Those things can be dangerous if (for example) you have a pacemaker or any piercings.
LUMINESCENCE: The beautiful blue glow means you’re looking at a substance, like quinine-infused tonic water, which converts invisible forms of light to visible forms of light. If you put it in absolute darkness it won’t glow. It also means you’re less likely to die of malaria, so win!
STING: The beautiful blue glow means that orcs are near; and it’s times like that, Frodo my lad, when you have to be extra-careful.
Mostly @Moocow
I only saw The Piano once, soon after it came out, but other than how amazing the 6-year-old was in her role, the thing that always stuck with me was the scene when the main male character suddenly shows up naked.
Gasp! Shock! Full frontal male nudity!
Of a character who wants to lie down next to the protagonist, because he finds her incredibly hot!
And he doesn’t have an erection.
Somehow or other, it’s not the lack of male nudity in movies that hits me, it’s that even in situations when they ought to be aroused, you almost never see an erection.
I mean, I can see why actors would probably prefer not to be shown erect, and you could argue there’s a bit of an equivalency to how while actresses often have to be naked, it’s rare for them to be asked to splay their legs for a full-on genital shot, outside of porn, of course. But there are circumstances when it’s weird, because the filmmakers seem to feel they’re being so shocking just by showing a naked man that they don’t go any further in the thought process.
I should probably mention that I have no interest in guys, so it’s not as though my reaction has to do with me not being titillated enough.
I admit the glitterabs gif made me feel a bit queasy. But I’m pretty sure a woman with that much glitter would have had the same effect.
@Paradoxical Intention
Oh, come on. She has hips. Clearly that makes her the fat one.
@Rabid Rabbit
That’s an interesting observation. Pretty much the only movie that comes to mind where the erections are, well, not shown but certainly alluded to would be American Pie. Make of that what you will.
I wouldn’t say it’s the lack of male nudity per se, more the reaction from characters that bothers me (because it’s so often one of disgust)
Seinfeld has a great esample of it with the episode where Jerry dates a woman who’s almost always naked. The joke is “well, there’s good naked and bad naked”, but the punchline of the episode is where Jerry himself just decides to walk around naked as she does and her traction is “ew, what are you doing”. “That’s the bad naked”.
Basically the moral of that episode is that male nudity of any kind = “always the bad kind of naked”. That’s the kind of message that I’m not at all a fan of and I see it crop up a lot in media. (On that note, ‘the naked man’ episode from how I met your mother avoids this trope).
*Her reaction. Not traction.
@ EJ(TOO)
Yup, it’s Cherenkov radiation that it supposedly looks like. Obviously I’ve not been able to compare to the real thing; they get quite teasy about sneaking into places where you could see that (so I’ll have to resort to good old fashioned genetic engineering if I want my army of mutant super chimps). The cause is the quinine luminesce you mention.
I’ve heard quinine is also good for Orc bites.
@Moocow:
Hmmm, I think there’s another thing going on there.
I’ve come across men before who are of the opinion that going around naked, intruding their naked body into everyone else’s vision without invitation, is a perfectly acceptable way of attracting women. If questioned, they will say something like “Well, I’d be happy if a hot girl did it, so they should be happy that I’m doing it.”
(Similarly: men sending genital photographs to women, unasked-for.)
As such, the message that “male nudity is not sexy regardless of what you think of female nudity, put your fucking pants back on” is one that could stand to be driven in with a little more force. I’m not a hundred percent sure that we’ve won that particular battle.
@Alan:
Cherenkov radiation is a mix of blue and ultraviolet light, much like quinine fluorescence. It looks much the same through air, I imagine. However Cherenkov radiation is usually only visible through water, and since water is blue Cherenkov radiation normally comes out looking a deeper blue as a result. Also if you see Cherenkov radiation with your naked eye you are probably going to die very soon afterwards.
(Did I say luminescence earlier? I meant fluorescence.)
Here’s some Cherenkov radiation for you.
http://media4.giphy.com/media/RnmoEV9ylBoZO/200_s.gif
Note the beautiful colour.
Isn’t that just superstition, like with owls?
I know nothing about nuclear physics or astrophysics, but my favourite “Blue sciencey glow” is definitely scorpions. A-rave-chnids.
That’s a popular misconception. Owls also die if you expose them to sufficient gamma rays to cause visible Cherenkov radiation. Don’t do it though, because owls are fuzzy-wuzzy adorable.
Well, there was that one gamma-irradiated owl who grew five times his size, turned green, and got a job with the Avengers, but that was a one-in-a-million shot.
Luminescence is the umbrella term, so you’re correct anyway.
@EJ
Ah, that’s true, I forgot about that.
There’s a reason you never see erect penises in movies. As an Atlantic article about the movie Shame and the American ratings board succinctly put it,
The American ratings board, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), is bit mysterious about their guidelines. It’s well known that they’re generally more squirrelly about sex than violence, harsher on gay sex and find erections unacceptable. NC-17 movies are a marketing nightmare so movie distributors usually cut the film to get a R rating or simply release the film unrated. Shame, which stars Michael Fassender’s penis, was one of the few more recent ones with a NC-17 rating, while Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is a recent art house film that was released unrated.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/12/10-films-that-avoided-the-nc-17-rating-and-suffered-for-it/249408/#slide4
Then there’s Blue Valentine getting the NC-17 for depicting (and not even pornographically) Ryan Gosling’s character going down on Michelle Williams’ character. But a female character giving a simulated blow job to a male character is rated R.