Amateur Hour at the Internet Troll Open Mike Night

I have been working on a blog post for some time that took some serious gestation because it's about things that took me a long time to think out. Not all blog entries are like that. Sometimes I get distracted by temporary, but immediate concerns that are not only worth considering, but are frivolous enough that I can punch the keys and have this thing done in an hour. This is one of those times.

I followed a guy who was in the recommended section of Twitter after I followed another guy, and things seemed nice enough at first until this escalated.

This isn't everything I could grab, but apart from me as an autistic man calling this dude out on his ableist bullshit, the stupidest thing is this isn't even why he yelled at me at first. I'm a hardened veteran of the flame wars. I served in the trenches of many of these. My skin is thicker than most autistic people starting out in their first baptism of online fire. The sad thing is this dude started to diss me not just on the basis of me defending the disabled, but because my avatar was allegedly ugly. No, really. This guy's argument was that dumb. And he didn't even bring that amateur hour trash talk to the table until I attempted to discuss with him whether Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon counted as Gen X directors. An issue I'll add, has little or anything to do with how ugly my Twitter avatar may or may not be.

As you can see, his opinion of me just devolved from there. I was willing to let it go if he didn't escalate it, but he continued to call me a faggot without bringing anything else emotionally scarring and hurtful to the table. The stakes of this flame war were lower than Limbo Night at Van Helsing's place. I may need to give some personal history for context, but essentially, this dude is the epitome of amateur hour when it comes to trolls I've met online. I've seen people post image macros suggesting that "Aspies need curing with electroshock therapy!" that people spent hours in Photoshop creating this Fallout-style retro PSA graphic to hurt people's feelings with. I've been stalked online for four years once by a guy who threatened to letter bomb my house. In the words of Walter from The Big Lebowski, "This is not a worthy adversary." - in the ranks of Disney villains, this guy wouldn't even be in one of the Disney Animated Canon villains people know and love, fear and respect. The guy who threatened to letter bomb my house is like the Judge Frollo from Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame of internet trolling, while this dude's the really vain guy who kisses himself in the mirror in Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame II. I shouldn't really have to explain why Judge Frollo and the guy who threatened to letter bomb my house were way more intimidating. If you're gonna be a creepy asshole you're really gonna have to sell it, with charisma and a sense of conviction about why you decided to torment one's victims. This guy was just a guy spewing ableist and homophobic slurs at me in a sad, pathetic attempt to get a rise out of me. So I did what I do to most people like him who do this online. I bring up the fact that I might not be gay, but I have kissed a dude, and the experience was still more enjoyable than interacting with him. I did this not just to try and throw some Roger Ebert The Brown Bunny feud wit in there, but knowing this guy somehow assumes that asserting one's opponent in a debate is gay is the worst insult he has, throwing the fact that I've kissed a boy on the table is gonna leave him lying awake at night weirded out by this information. Even though I blocked him afterwards, I left him that nugget of doubt that his homophobic slurs had any effect, or that being gay was something insulting at all. And with this last response, I blocked him:

It makes me sad that modern internet trolls of the younger generation just don't put the effort in anymore. Internet creeps of yore used to pursue and humiliate a victim for months or even years. They were cyberbullies of myth and legend, a quality of dickhole so dedicated to their evil that they transcended mere douchebag and became a genital wart, just above the dick hole, on an uncircumcised penis so when the foreskin rubbed against it it got even more infected and gross. This quality of villainy still exists online, still bulling gay teens and not gay teens alike into what they hope will end in suicide, but a lot of these young ruffians of the internets just don't have that commitment to quality hatred. And I lament the decline in quality my own grandchildren will suffer through in future generations if trash talk fades from clever wordplay into lazy slurs.

The Mistaken Gendering of DVDs

So my brother does this thing where he occasionally, about once a month, comes into my room, rifles through my DVDs, and upon picking out some particularly "girly" ones like my Forever Marilyn 7-Disc Blu-Ray box set of Marilyn Monroe films, or the egregiously pink amaray case that Can't Stop The Music (The Village People Movie, for those not in the know) and the pink and glitter bedecked cover of my Clueless Blu-Ray copy, I've noticed he cherry picks these, ignoring the far darker subject matter of Cannibal Holocaust, Salo, and my entire grindhouse DVD section including Zombie Flesh Eaters and the like, just so that he can make cheap jokes about how "gaaaayyyy!" my DVD and Blu Ray collection is. I have long suffered under my film studies graduate brother's regressive agenda when it comes to the gendering of DVDs without them needing to be. Case in point, the fact that I have an anime DVD and Blu Ray collection from the get go is a big fat target for him to just shout "GAAAAAAY" at me without any real insight into how Ouran High School Host Club is somehow for a female or homosexual man audience only. I really hate how my brother outright dismisses entire subsections of media because they either look too girly or too "gay" for him. I should remind you, reader, that out of me and him I'm the only one who was willing to put his lips to the test to find out if he was gay for certain, whilst he seems to be very overtly of the "trolling makes homophobia funny!" camp. Oh how he justifies his regressive ideals through the guise of trolling. I've seen this argument many times and in the real world of the internet (bear with me here) such an argument usually gets laughed at or results in somebody cracking out the banhammer.

In any case, the mere suggestion that DVDs are gendered objects is something worth looking into since I've seen commentary from both my brother and his friends that there even exist "Manly DVD Shelves" as opposed to girly of "GAAAAY" ones. Allow me to elaborate on this. What comes to mind for most men when they engender a film with overtly masculine qualities? 300, the oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Charles Bronson, that MMA movie Warrior, things like The Raid: Redemption and Dredd, Drive despite Ryan Gosling having a sex symbol status with women, these are fairly testosterone filled works of cinema, you start to think. Surely no hint of oestrogen could even touch these digital video disks and remain un-impregnated by their sheer virility? This is the kind of mentality my brother and some of his friends have when it comes to their DVDs. But the thing is... I own a lot of DVDs of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, Jean Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies. I probably own more of these than my brother or his friends do. But due to the particularly pink packaging of certain films like Can't Stop The Music and Clueless, one can cherry pick these out of a shelf of otherwise gritty and muscle heavy audiovisual material and assert that the masculinity of the DVD shelf owner is somehow lacking in some weird imaginary way that guys who haven't really experienced the Tumblr Social Justice flame wars for themselves tend to do because they either don't know any better or are legitimately homophobic.

Now the supposed "Chick Flick" or "Romantic Comedy" has been stigmatised as a genre "men don't watch". This... kinda needs to die. Along with the idea that all of these kinds of films are terrible. When Harry Met Sally, gold standard romantic comedy right there. (500) Days Of Summer, one of the best romantic comedies of the last ten years by far. Yet somehow these films irritate men in some way (and often irritate women in completely unrelated ways which I'm not quite as qualified to comment on) and are regarded as the dross of cinema where nothing with testicles can enter without being emasculated. As I mentioned earlier, anime, particularly anime made in the last ten years, has a very, very stigmatised reputation as being "less than it was" in the 1990s where gore-fests like Ninja Scroll and Berserk were the order of the day. Worse still, I feel really uncomfortable about suggestions that something like Free! which is intended for a fujoshi audience of women who like to watch hot dudes splash around in water are somehow an affront to the standards of anime's halcyon days when manly men were men and women were... still as badly written a lot of the time as they used to be in the more fanservicey shows.

It's this really weird mentality of manly media that I don't understand when it comes to complaints about how anime's turned into an all out girly man mode. A lot of the anime that gets made now definitely draws in a female audience, which is a good thing, I assure you. You realise what happens when there's only dudes in a fandom, right? You get stagnation. Also you get a sausage festival. Just sayin'.