On Trolls…
If you’re new to the blogosphere, the term “troll” may be confusing, so here’s the Wikipedia definition:
An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.
It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that trolls exist to be destructive, not constructive.
So what’s the deal? Recently, I was on the receiving end of a comment to my post on Dr. Suzanne from a troll calling him/herself “helminth.” I suppose s/he based the name on the post, which concerned intestinal parasites (a helminth is a worm, typically a parasitic one). But it was the perfect name for this particular troll as s/he was both spineless and – like a parasite – attempting to be hurtful. In fact, Paul nuked the comment as soon as he saw it…as he put it:
“I don’t even want to entertain such nasty and mean spirited material. There’s no place for that here.
And no… I don’t think it dignified a response.”
As a (sometime) student of human nature, however, I found the hows and whys of it fascinating – which is why I’m ignoring Paul’s (more sensible) reaction and discussing it here. Evidently, “helminth” objected to my post, yet chose not to tackle any of the points I raised. Rather, s/he opted to attack me, personally. And it wasn’t any generic attack, either (such as calling me “stupid”) – rather, it was straight out of Misogyny 101:
“Well, if your pictures aren’t a photoshop edition (they’d better be) than you just make me sick! Do you think you look great? Say who? Are you a female at all? You look like a beefy, puffed, disgusting 55 years old bodybuilder.. Look at your hands! You think can change the nature and substitute a male? I believe that it is just about your husband who left you a while ago and you just couldn’t forgive him.. Or your father beat you in the childhood and all these loathsome heap of muscles…
Trust me, you’d better hide those pics of you if you want people to at least not to run out from your site..
the Bleccccch indeed!!!”
ROFLMAO!!!
Unfortunately, it’s as sad as it is funny. Predictable too… When a misogynist wants to attack a woman – the first thing that comes to mind is to either a) attack her sexual orientation; b) attack her physical appearance/desirability; or c) both. That ”helminth” imagined s/he could hurt me by fantasizing about my gender identification and rejection by men (and not just any men, either, but the most important men in my life – whom I know better than anyone else), says a lot more about “helminth” than it does about me.
“Helminth” is entitled to his/her opinion, of course, but I gotta say: it takes a pretty bloated ego to assume his/her preferences w/respect to female beauty represent universal truths that can (and should) be projected on others. It takes a pretty dim intellect, too, to prefer personal attacks to analysis and criticism. But then again, it’s implicit in the definition, I suppose: if trolls were intelligent, well-adjusted people, then they wouldn’t be trolls, now – would they?
I expect that – by posting this – I’m just encouraging “helminth” to slither back to the attack…but then again, what s/he is evidently too thick to realize, is that I’m in total control of the process. All comments are held in a moderation queue for approval, so whether “helminth” is allowed airtime on this blog is strictly subject to my (or Paul’s) whims. So if “helminth” wants to waste more time here, that’s his/her choice…but in the future, it’s not likely to be a rewarding one.
