In the Middle of Online Arguments

The surge of online bullying isn’t something that is exactly new for the year 2016. In fact, if anything it’s been around since the advent of the internet, and before that bullying had a place in everyone’s life. Either as a witness, as the bullied, or as the bully. But, with the age of social media, it’s much easier to see what effect words can have on a person. What some have called emotional abuse, and how this can change them and their entire life.

In the several years since I really began having constant online access there have been quite a few times I have been the subject to online bullying, or as some have begun to call it, online abuse. Some of it was anonymous abuse, mocking a picture of a fat woman in the store because she didn’t look her best that day and Reddit loves to make fun of those who are overweight.

Some has been targeted abuse for my views on sex positivity, my views on feminism, and my views on gender equality. Oddly enough, I have been targeted by both feminists and anti-feminists for these ideas. At times the sustained abuse was enough that I did eventually have to get the police involved, because after a while death and rape threats can no longer be ignored. No matter how much you want to ignore them.

In the end, I’ve been all over the map, trying to understand what, if anything, drives people to ignore the basic rules of human decency to lay into another person. What I’ve come away with is that each and every person feels they are “punching up” when in fact they are almost always “punching down.”

If you aren’t familiar with these terms, punching up means engaging with a joke, or sometimes something rude, against someone you feel is in a higher position than you in society. Whether by privilege or power, if you make a joke or are cruel to them at their expense, you aren’t doing any real damage, due to the fact that they are in a better position and you are, in a way, taking out an enemy.

Obviously, punching down means the opposite, that you are in fact targeting someone who has less power than you. That you are taking on someone who cannot defend themselves, that you are even possibly oppressing them in a way. It means, in general, that you are hurting them.

No matter the group I was around, be it feminists, anti-feminists, democrats, republicans, independents, atheists, theologians… each person feels they are in the right and the minority. Each person acts as though their joke is the only one, and therefore they can’t possibly be doing any damage to a singular person. They are, in fact, taking on “the man” to use an old phrase. They’re fighting against the power that oppresses them.

Yet what is clear as an outsider, this is sometimes (more times than I’d like to admit) not the case. I’ll take instances from my own view points, as this is an editorial. Feminists that I had known had “punched up” by taking issue with certain transwomen, outing them to their employers, family, and friends. Their take on it had been that these women (and I see transwomen as women) were trying to take femininity away from women.

But lets take another issue I had seen, one that is a bit more grey. A well known, and absolutely awful human being, had said some very terrible things. And several activists and feminists I had known had taken quite an exception to him. I think that protesting what he says is an admirable trait, as educating the public is the best defence against ignorance. However, many more felt the need to give out his address, contact the police (though he had technically not broken any laws), and many other things that pushed it from protesting someone who was a rather awful person, to being an awful person in return.

Now to move away from feminists I knew to the anti-feminists I knew. As I was of the mind that the best way to make friends and spread the word about the truth of feminism was to talk to everyone, even people that may not like me at first. These people would eventually come to talk to me, some even came to respect me. However, their behaviours were no better than the feminists and “social justice warriors” that they claimed they were fighting against.

Now, if you’ve been living under a rock and have never heard the term social justice warrior, or SJW for short, it’s a term meant for the shallow way that some people fight for social justice causes in a rather outraged, but empty way on the internet. This has become a rather safe catch-all for any sort of liberal at times, and in a lot of ways lost meaning. But for this editorial I’ll continue to use it as it works for the stories and examples.

I don’t think I have to say there are a lot of idiots on the internet. I can’t understand most text speak these days, and the last time I tried to talk to someone who was in a blather about One Direction I think I lost about twenty IQ points. There have been some groups of people I have taken exception with, such as Stormfront, but that’s an actual organisation. Not a singular person.

However, some of the more adamant, and angry, anti-feminists and anti-SJW crowd will happily take one person and run their face across the internet, their private information, their lifestyle, meanwhile “punching up” because who cares? It’s just an SJW right? They pick the weak one from the herd (say the fat one who is crying about some issue), and have a field day because it’s an easy take down.

More than once I saw this happen. With random people I had never heard of, tweeting or saying some thing on their Facebook, and the next thing I know there is a fevered reach to tear them a new asshole because they are “the man”. They are the face of feminism and “SJWs” everywhere. Mind you most of the time these are women, just as many time the opposite camp they are men, but the outcome is the same.

It’s a random person who has had the right to privacy destroyed. All because someone has decided to fight a cause on the back of someone who has no face come tomorrow when a new target has been found.

This is the oddest outcome of all the infighting amongst the feminist, anti-feminist, republican, democratic, and now independent crowd. That instead of fighting the larger establishment that they should be fighting they separate and weed out the weakest of targets, much like animals do in the wild.

Is this because humans are, in essence, essentially lazy or frightened? Lazy because taking on the bigger enemy is an actual issue that you can’t do online through Twitter? Or frightened because fighting the big guy means you might actually get punched back?

It seems a bit of both. Those who are angry at feminists that exclude transpeople resist, and yes, actively ignore those who are sex positive feminists that are trying to change that subculture. Some feminists are angry at the establishment for trying to take away reproductive rights and restrict rights on women’s bodies actively ignore men who are trying to help fight for those rights, as well as men’s rights because of the phrase “men’s rights” that happens to be placed next to it.

The main point I ultimately realised was that they are all bullies in their own way. Seeking out the weakest of the weak because they are the easiest targets. They claim they are the minority. The oppressed. And yet they go out of their way to oppress and hurt the individual who can’t fight back. Who can fight back against a hashtag that is aimed squarely at them? Who can fight back against their address being leaked out? Their job being threatened? Their entire livelihood being threatened because of a select few that think they are the kind of activists that have the right to destroy a life? Not an establishment, but a singular life.

And to me, as just an aside, what is worse are those who watch it happen and don’t speak out against it. Who see those they agree with doing something wrong and don’t stand up and point out the blatant hypocrisy. When you have friends, loved ones, or even just people that you know who are acting in a manner than you would find vile if it were directed at you or someone you loved, and you say nothing, then you are just as much the bully as they are. Only you’re the bully that is smirking instead of the one doing the cutting.

No one has that right. No matter what they are fighting for. No one has the right to single out one individual and step on their rights to mock, to hurt, to bully. Not for any so called movement.

Fighting against bullying by being a bully only creates the monster you claim you want to destroy.