Amy mentioned a This American Life podcast she had heard about an Internet troll who was particularly vicious to Lindy West, digging up information about her dead father, creating a Twitter account with his picture, and using it to harass her. So, I took notice when a related column by Ms. West in the Guardian came across my news feed. The short version is that she wrote a column telling how much that incident had hurt. The troll wrote her an email saying he was sorry and had made a donation in her dad’s name to a cancer foundation. When GamerGate got rolling, she wondered if she could gain insight from him about why men troll women online, and it turned into the This American Life episode.
In the Guardian column, she says:
We talked for two-and-a-half hours. He was shockingly self-aware. He told me that he didn’t hate me because of rape jokes – the timing was just a coincidence – he hated me because, to put it simply, I don’t hate myself. Hearing him explain his choices in his own words, in his own voice, was heartbreaking and fascinating. He said that, at the time, he felt fat, unloved, “passionless” and purposeless. For some reason, he found it “easy” to take that out on women online.
I asked why. What made women easy targets? Why was it so satisfying to hurt us? Why didn’t he automatically see us as human beings? For all his self-reflection, that’s the one thing he never managed to articulate – how anger at one woman translated into hatred of women in general. Why, when men hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.
Maybe I’m off base, but I think the dynamic providing an explanation of sorts is described in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The protagonist is a human, Mike, who was raised by Martians. One of the things he doesn’t understand, doesn’t “grok,” is laughter. Then, one day at the zoo, it all becomes clear to him:
When he had first seen a zoo, Mike had been much upset; Jill had been forced to order him to wait and grok, as be had been about to take immediate action to free all the animals. He had conceded presently, under her arguments – that most of these animals could not stay alive free in the climate and environment where he proposed to turn them loose, that a zoo was a nest … of a sort. He had followed this first experience with many hours of withdrawal, after which he never again threatened to remove all the bars and glass and grills. He explained to Jill that the bars were to keep peopIe out at least as much as to keep the animals in, which he had failed to grok at first. After that Mike never missed a zoo wherever they went.
But today even the unmitigated misanthropy of the camels could not shake Mike’s moodiness; he looked at them without smiling. Nor did the monkeys and apes cheer him up. They stood for quite a while in front of a cage containing a large family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom and swarm aimlessly around the cage, while Jill surreptitiously tossed them peanuts despite “No Feeding” signs.
She tossed one to a medium sized monkey; before he could eat it a much larger male was on him and not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating, then left. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; be squatted at the scene of the crime, pounded his knuckles against the concrete floor, and chattered his helpless rage. Mike watched it solemnly. Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed to the side of the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a drubbing worse than the one he had suffered – after which he seemed quite relaxed. The third monk crawled away, still whimpering, and found shelter in the arm of a female who had a still smaller one, a baby, on her back. The other monkeys paid no attention to any of it.
Mike threw back his head and laughed – went on laughing, loudly and uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, tears came from his eyes; he started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing.
. . .
I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much … because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”Jill looked puzzled. “Maybe I’m the one who isn’t people. I don’t understand.”
“Ah, but you are people, little she ape. You grok it so automatically that you don’t have to think about it. Because you grew up with people. But I didn’t. I’ve been like a puppy raised apart from other dogs, who couldn’t be like his masters and had never learned how to be a dog. So I had to be taught. Brother Mahmoud taught me, Jubal taught me, lots of people taught me … and you taught me most of all. Today I got my diploma – and I laughed. That poor little monkey.”
“Which one, dear? I thought that big one was just mean … and the one I flipped the peanut to turned out to be just as mean. There certainly wasn’t anything funny.”
“Jill, Jill my darling! Too much Martian has rubbed off on you. Of course it wasn’t funny – it was tragic. That’s why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I’ve seen and heard and read about in the time I’ve been with my own people, and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing.”
I used to subscribe to Heinlein’s theory of laughter — that it was a response to an observed wrongness (e.g. the pratfall). After having kids and watching them, that’s an incomplete observation about humor. There is also laughter that springs from nothing more than joy. But that’s an aside — the troll picking on women looks a lot to me like the smaller male who got robbed and beaten by the bigger male taking out his frustrations on the smaller monkey. There tends to be a pecking order and, to mix my metaphors, shit rolls down hill. That women are generally perceived by these trolls as being lower in the pecking order highlights the structural inequities between the genders. Some of this is biological — the average woman is physically smaller than the average man; but the majority is probably cultural — the average woman is conditioned not to fight back as much as the average man. (After all, humans are tool using apes — humans have been endlessly innovative at developing tools to harm one another, regardless of relative size and strength.)
Maybe it’s more complicated than that – but I’d say the “why” is primarily misdirected anger. From the Simpsons:
Anger is what makes America great. But you must find a proper outlet for your rage. Fire a weapon at your television screen. Pick a fight with someone weaker than you. Or, write a threatening letter to a celebrity. So when you go out for a drive, remember to leave your murderous anger where it belongs — at home.
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