Hey yall, the comments on this piece are going to be vicious.
Theyre gonna say Im an idiot, that I have brain damage, that this article is drivel and pap. No matter what I write! Youll wonder, if you read the commentary, how I can even take such razor-sharp insults. At the same time, you might be amused: someone might opine that my writing is to good writing as McRibs are to barbecue. Then maybe someone else will gallantly jump to my defense and say hed be willing to rape me anyway, even though Im an idiot.
Poor me. It wont matter what I write about or what insight I bring to it -- Ill always be, alas, an idiot, and often not even a rapeable one. Instead, Im someone who got the job because she must be married to the boss, someone who cant write her way out of a paper bag.
The paradox of working hard to be a writerI spent 12 years on an English Ph.D. and have worked 15 years writing columns, while also learning formal proofreading, fact-checking and the grammar and spelling of American Englishis that, in the usual way, you get degrees and jobs because youre smart, only to be told, once youre doing the job youre trained for, that you need to go back to remedial school. Or the hospital. Or the morgue. Because youre such an idiot.
Because I dont write often about gender, I am not monotonously called a slut or a whore, though you never know when that old chestnut will enter the commentary on an article (which could be about Syria or shoes or beta carotene). As long as an article is written by a woman, then the slut-shaming is just onas it has been for the novelist Deborah Copaken Kogan, who this week recounted her game, bemused and sometimes exasperated path through the slings and arrows of you-ignorant-slut-land in a tour de force called .
When the piece went live, Kogan was deluged with tales of sexism, mild and not mild, from the front. Among other things, women writers told of the comical lengths that publishers and marketers of their work go to to sell the authors as pinups. Leaving out anything political from this conversation: Arent you, wherever you are, and in whatever line, glad that your face, body and hair arent up for bruising debate every time you diagnose a patient or mount some drywall or file a brief? Arent you pleased that your job doesnt entail a chorus of Youre an idiot! every time you clock in?
Mostly I dont mind it, getting jumped by commenters day after day. Often I think its good for me, like growing up in a tough neighborhood. Sometimes Im even surprised at how thin-skinned new writers are, or writers who arent used to the rough-and-tumble world of online commentary. I cant take it, a prize-winning, top-selling poet told me recently. Id rather write for my mom only than get knocked around by the bullies who comment online.
I try to tell these sensitive writers that online commentary is its own form, with its own conceits, tight as a sonnet. Above the line we reporters and columnists write Mitch McConnell this, Microsoft thatand below the line commenters boo us. They tell us were the end of journalism; they tell us weve sold out; they throw tomatoes. Thats their job, like writing columns or articles or poetry is our job.
And in gaps in the vitriol, there are often flashes of extraordinary insight. I would say there are always those flashes. Amid the slung mud of the , there were dozens of great questions about why Id review an app thats only available for Apple, and whether the rave Id written constituted an ad for the app. These are questions Id genuinely love to address with readers, maybe in some shared space between the column and the comments. But the truth is, I get a little scared to go down there to comment-land. Its a rough scene, like a punk club, and I mightI willget hurt.
Is there a way to comment without trolling, bullying or gaslighting? Does the threat of rough commenters scare you away from writing? Does the sight of cruel comments at the end of the piece color your impression of the piece?
What do you think? Yes, I know you think Im an idiot. But what else?
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