While we've discussed the fantastic comments one can receive if you're an opinionated, female blogger before, this past week was a rather interesting one. Last week, I wrote an open letter to Perez Hilton, asking him to stop ragging on Rumer Willis' face. What I found interesting was that some people thought that Perez Hilton was in the right, because Rumer "is not exactly the prettiest girl out there" and that "he will just keep ridiculing her until she fixes what she can". The attitude that there is something to "fix" on Rumer's face is the attitude that gets me. Fix? Is her face broken?
However, there were some people who not only thought that Perez Hilton was an honorable of a man as Jesus Christ, but that Rumer Willis should, like, totes get her face fixed. This same commenter incorrectly entered the CAPTCHA code in our commenting system, and were told that the comment had to be approved before being published. Apparently, because of this, I am a "cunt".
I'm not just any ole cunt; I'm a "cowardly fucking cunt":
BITCH! OF COURSE YOU WANT "BLOG APPROVAL" YOU COWARDLY FUCKING CUNT, YOU WON'T PRINT WHAT PEOPLE REALLY THINK CUNT FACE SLUT WHORE. NOW GO FUCK YOURSELF. YOU WISH U HAD A BLOG AS GOOD AS PEREZ'S.
Thank you, "NOTPCNOTPC@YAHOO.COM" for that insight. Trying to block Spam comments from being published on this blog does make me a "cowardly fucking cunt...cunt face slut whore" who should definitely go fuck myself. I'm glad we see eye-to-eye on this issue.
What concerns me about this comment is that when we discuss online trolls, we tend to generalize and say that they are more than likely a group of male, 42-year-old virgins who play WoW (no offense WoW folks) and live in their mother's basement. Sadly, this is not true. For the most part, anyway. While I haven't done a world wide Internet Troll Poll to find out who these people are, I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that they're people like you and me. (Just dumber.)
They're our younger brothers, or dimwit boyfriends and socially unaware younger sisters. They are the people in our family who make racist jokes, hate gay people and think all fat people are stupid.
Stupidity, misogyny and racism are not all confined to Mothers Basements in the Midwest. These assholes are people we know. There is no Secret Troll Society in the backwoods of god knows where, like I'm sure we would all like to think.
This is why I find these comments annoying. Not because they hurt me wittle feelings or make me feel bad about myself - but because it just creeps me out that they comments were made by everyday people who are over-empowered by the anonymity of the internet.
Cate Sevilla is a freelance writer in London and regular contributor to Dollymix.
