My recent posts on #TheTriggering drew more than a few Triggerers to We Hunted the Mammoth, and to the comments here. I let most of the comments the Triggerers posted through moderation, in part just to show how ridiculous they were. But there were some others I didn’t let through, for an assortment of reasons.
But I do think it’s worth talking about some of the horrendous stuff that online abuse campaigns like #TheTriggering stir up.
Here’s one from a rather foul-mouthed fellow; I had to censor it so much that it now reads like an obscene mad-lib.
Howdy all of you fläming [homophobic slur, plural]. Welcome to #TheTriggering. Hope all of you [different homophobic slur, plural] take the [still another homophobic slur] [naughty body part] out of your mouths long enough to gasp in outrage!
Oh, you wish.
There are only two genders! There are no real lesbians!
Wait, what? You mean we paid good money for supposedly genuine lesbians, but were given cheap lesbian knockoffs instead?
Down with gye matriarchy! Equal rights for all means women should have their prison sentences increased 2-4x to equal their crimes out to men!
Well, there is a bit of a sentencing disparity, but men convicted of crimes don’t get sentences that are double (much less four times) those received by women with similar criminal backgrounds convicted of similar crimes.
I’m not even going to ask what “gye matriarchy” is.
But this comment, for all of its nastiness, is nothing compared to the lovely missive I got from someone calling himself Travis, possibly a reference to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, a creepy, violent, and thankfully fictional fellow obsessed with, er, cleansing the world of those he sees as degenerates.
“Travis” begins by reporting that
I’m always getting triggered – not by conventional trolls but by things like attractive girls that get tattoos, the sight of obese people, the homeless, homosexual waiters, public housing projects, pictures of destitute Arab Muslims storming into Europe… I’ve just never thought of it as being ‘triggered’ – I’ve always used the words ‘disgusted’ or ‘enraged’.
Yeah, that’s not what being “triggered” means. What you’re describing is your own bigotry, and your rather creepily possessive attitude towards women’s bodies.
[I]n Iran in the early 1980’s the Revolutionary Guards would brutalize women for not covering themselves. I’m no more for this attitude towards fashion than I am for Hitler’s attitude towards the Jews, but the methodology worked and we should find it inspiring.
What the hell, dude. Really?
However, we have our careers and the law to worry about in a world where our peers have accepted the degenerate liberal zeitgeist that Hoellebecq has so aptly lamented, so attacking the SJWs on the internet anonymously is a great way to blow off steam.
Well, posting ridiculous offensive crap on Twitter is certainly a better alternative than, you know, brutalizing women for what they’re wearing, but that bit about blowing off steam? I don’t buy it.
I used to believe that “blowing off steam” was a real thing. That is, that one could purge oneself of anger and hatred and so forth by letting it out in a “safe” way. Obviously. the idea of “catharsis” is a pretty ancient one. But I’m not sure any more that it’s an actual thing.
And I definitely don’t think it’s a thing when it comes to campaigns of online abuse like #GamerGate or #TheTriggering. Far from purging anger and hatred, it seems to amplify it. Things like #TheTriggering cause participants to wallow in their screwed-up emotions, not to free themselves of them. They end up more angry and hateful, not less.
And despite the claim that these guys are just “trolling,” it seems pretty clear that their anger and hatred are all too real. Do either of the Triggerers I’ve quoted today literally believe every offensive word they wrote? I don’t know, though Travis’ mention of Michel Houellebecq, a reactionary, racist novelist who’s become something of an icon on the so-called alt right, suggests that he’s steeped in this kind of hate.
Even if “blowing off steam” did work as advertised, online abuse — or even the sort of “trolling” that somehow ends up looking and functioning exactly the same as”real” abuse — is hardly a “safe” way to get those bad emotions out, because it is in itself (obviously) a form of abuse. It’s not like punching a punching bag, because in this case the punching bags are real people. Online abuse is intended to hurt people, and it does, even if the abuser claims to be “just trolling.”
#TheTriggering may have been more risible than most of the harassment campaigns we’ve seen of late; it even came with its own trigger warning, in the form of the hashtag itself. But there’s nothing cathartic about it. It’s just a giant exercise in public douchebaggery.
EDITED TO ADD: And here is the relevant Clickhole article, “Huge Relief: This Student Thought He Was Being Bullied For Years But The Other Kid Was Just Joking Around.”
(Clickhole is a spinoff of The Onion, so this is essentially the relevant Onion article.)
In psychology it’s been shown that “blowing off steam” actually causes someone to become more aggressive, not less. So yeah, they’re just violent, scary douchbags.
Was that a very sheltered person posting from the early 2000s who isn’t familiar with any lesbians except these?
http://www.chartsinfrance.net/covers/aHR0cHM6Ly9pLnNjZG4uY28vaW1hZ2UvMjViNTVmMDUxMjk1OTVjNmRiYzgxOTNmMWQzZGJkMzY1NDNiNzdmOA==.jpg
I’ve started to wonder if the concept of “trolling” involves a bit of cognitive dissonance. If they simultaneously believe that they aren’t being wholly serious, that it’s all “in fun” while subconsciously holding the beliefs they spout.
(Something something reckoning between the mask and the person underneath)
It’s like the old idea that “if you repeat something enough times, it becomes true.” I honestly believe there are some within “trolling” culture that started just to to be edgy and “hilarious,” but ended up white nationalists from repeating it until it became a part of them. They just never had the self awareness to stop calling it trolling.
Or, perhaps, they do understand, and they use it as a convenient excuse to sidestep any criticism. “If we call it trolling”, they will think, “it can’t be seen as serious, as we can act however we like!”
“I’m no more for this attitude towards fashion than I am for Hitler’s attitude towards the Jews”
So chances are that you are exactly for this attitude towards fashion right?
Ugh, the old, “It’s just trolls on the internet, it doesn’t mean anything, they’re just saying it to piss you off they don’t really believe it,” tripe.
You know what no one in the history of the world has ever said? “I am a mentally stable, emotionally secure, happy person who loves his mother and has a great, respectful relationship with women, minorities, trans and gay people in my life. And yet, even though I respect and care about the rights of people that are different than me, for some strange reason I just get a kick out of spewing nasty, bigoted vitriol at them over the internet. I’m not a bigot, I just LOVE acting like one! For fun! It’s just my “me” time. The rest of the time, I’m a totally great, caring guy!”
Yeah, no. You know why good people don’t like to say abhorrent things for the express purpose of hurting people? Because they’re NOT ASSHOLES. People who aren’t assholes DON’T ACT LIKE ASSHOLES. People who act like assholes ARE assholes, because that’s what makes them assholes. It’s not a complicated equation.
When the internet has become a steaming heap of bile and bigotry, it’s because a very large portion of our society secretly believes in that bile and bigotry, and they just needed the internet as an excuse to let it out. When a huge amount of the discourse of the internet is rage-filled vileness, it’s because a huge amount of the people in our society have a LOT of anger, and like to turn it against people more vulnerable than themselves to make them feel better.
The whole, “Who cares, trolls will be trolls LOL” attitude is just an excuse to not confront the fucked up underbelly of our society.
I forgot to include the relevant Clickhole article:
http://www.clickhole.com/article/huge-relief-student-thought-he-was-being-bullied-y-3979
Edit: Also, Hippielady, do you know of any useful articles on the subject, or researchers to check out?
I wonder if “Travis” is Travis_Touchdown the #Gater from Cheezburger, aka the reason why I don’t even look at that shitty site anymore. I know it’s a common username, especially among the neo-Nazi circuit, but it really wouldn’t surprise me.
“There are only two genders! There are no real lesbians!”
Précis of this view: there is only one gender (the male) and there are no real lesbians for a reason. The reason there are no real lesbians is that there are no real women: women are fake people. There are no real lesbians because there are no real female anythings.
It’s all the same quacking from Aristotle on down.
(There. ‘Splained that.)
Yup. That steam isn’t being blown off, it’s being used to power the turbines in the right-wing hate machine.
Good thing these guys are largely impotent, and fewer than they like to think.
Lady neuroscientist here! Not a psychologist, mind you, but I did come across an article a few years ago showing that blowing off steam does indeed make things worse, in the immediate aftermath of the steam-blowing. People who were allowed “catharsis” were meaner to others on the internet than those who weren’t.
In searching for the article (which I didn’t manage to locate), I found quite a few with evidence for both sides, so the effect is probably pretty situation-dependent.
Catharsis, anciently, was supposed to behave like an emotional cathartic, with a cathartic being basically a laxative. Also, when Aristotle talked about it, he seemed to be referring to that emotional release you get from getting worked up by a particularly gripping play, and then the climax of the play releases all that emotional energy, similar to how a cathartic releases your shit.
I realize that’s not how we often use the word today, but I think it’s helpful to remember its origins when encountering the behavior that we call by that term. These dudes are doing it wrong, but we still get steaming piles of shit from the process.
Here’s a very good article on the subject, which expands on some of these points with citations:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/08/11/catharsis/
I love Gye Matriarchy’s first album, but I feel like his work really went downhill after that.
Aha! Here’s the article I was talking about:
Brad J. Bushman
Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding
Pers Soc Psychol Bull June 2002 28: 724-731, doi:10.1177/0146167202289002
“However, we have our careers and the law to worry about in a world where our peers have accepted the degenerate liberal zeitgeist that Hoellebecq has so aptly lamented,”
Dude life is still pretty easy for a misogynistic racist, transphobic asshole, just ask Trump.
Honestly I’m most worried about the fact that he thinks he needs to worry about the law. He’s not just an asshole online I’d lay down good money he’s done something awful in real life too.
@Zatar
Online is part of the real world.
kupo:
Fair enough. I should have said in meatspace.
Oh, this guy doesn’t approve of that method. He just thinks it totally works and that we should create a similar system. That’s presumably what he means by “be inspired by.”
It’s just like how I don’t approve of that guy’s comment not getting through, but I think it worked for it to not have and would be inspired to also tell him to fuck off given the chance.
It took like 15 minutes to figure out how to write that down because my brain was sending back the neural equivalent of a syntax error the whole time.
I’ve noticed that as the number of internet trolls increases, the less people I see shouting at traffic.
Coincidence?
If I remember correctly, in order to identify an authentic lesbian, you need to remove the back panel and check the serial information stamped into the inner mechanism.
Or… wait… am I confusing humans with Rolex watches again? Dammit. Back to the flash card practice.
@Nobody Special
You’ve done a study?
I will never understand people who get so damn angry at the looks/weight/fashion choices of other people. It is not hurting you, it is not affecting you in any way. I literally do not understand at all. Why are they so angry? Where is all this anger coming from? It seems like they are fucking mad for no goddamn reason at all! Why would you be actually mad at some stranger just out living their lives, not bothering you. Just because you don’t personally approve of their fashion choices/appearance? Grow the fuck up.
It is not normal to get this angry over random strangers, no matter what they look like. No matter how they dress. It’s just not.
This is why their behavior is so frightening. They are very, very, very angry for absolutely no reason at all. Who knows what will set them off next? I can’t imagine being that fucking entitled and controlling of other people, much less ones you don’t even know and have never met before in your life. What gives you the fucking right? It’s sickening.
Didn’t mean to bold that much, but whatever. *shrug*
Well my brother has a degree in psych and he told me that if petty little things annoy you and make you irritated it’s symptomatic of being generally unhappy with your life. I mean I find the whole obsession with looks, fame, selfies, consumer culture/advertising, Kim Kardashian-worship etc mildly annoying but I don’t get angry about it, I just think it’s a bit sad that so many youngsters have such shallow, self-absorbed interests and goals/aspirations. True happiness comes from helping people and giving people pleasure, not being admired and envied. Maybe that’s why they’re miserable, because they don’t care about anyone but themselves.
AHAHAHA I AM NEITHER MALE OR FEMALE, THERE ARE WAY MORE THAN TWO GENDERS. FIGHT ME, DICKHEAD.
@ Zatar- I am convinced Donald Trump raped his ex-wife.