When A Woman Deletes A Man’s Comment Online
I’m not debating those who show up wedded to bigotry.
I spent a fair amount of time this weekend in mixed states of amusement, frustration, anger, and confusion as a grown man threw a fit in my online spaces. It had started on Facebook, with multiple comments left on my page, the same screenshots posted over and over. He then looked up my Twitter handle and railed against me there, trying to drag in a celebrity, his followers, and one of my employers. According to him, I was a fatwa-issuing Nazi (I’m not making this word choice up) of no journalistic integrity who was censoring the public. And the world needed to know.
Why had a man spent two days on a mission to tell the entire world that I was a journalism-destroying fascist? Because I deleted his comment on my personal Facebook page.
If this shocks you, you are likely not a semi-prominent woman on the internet, because this happens, to greater or lesser severity, about once a week.
I used to love debate. I believed in testing ideas and theories, and in the power of discourse. And I thought that debate, the back and forth of ideas, was instrumental to that. This love carried me through my Political Science degree. But I’ve found that there are two types of debate. There’s the debate of ideas represented in…
