Tiger Beatdown

You and me, we need a break today. I just deleted a 5,000-word blog post about the “Tina Fey Backlash” that was apparently caused by me writing a few blog posts all of which emphasized how I think Tina Fey is super funny and I love like 80% of her work. Because, who cares? There was a backlash! My name got mentioned in regard to it a few times! This is much like the time that I started the Taylor Swift Backlash like four months ahead of schedule, and got yelled at about it, in that it is essentially trivial and no-one will care about it in two weeks and my sense of it as a phenomenon is primarily informed by the fact that, in direct violation of my own Rules for Internet, I keep reading things what got my name in ’em. I know less about the volcano that just apparently exploded Iceland than I do about everyone’s various feelings on the Tina Fey Backlash, and, my God: A country is covered in DEADLY VOLCANIC ASH, apparently, the sort of thing that KILLED THE DINOSAURS, a country has BEEN EXPLODED BY VOLCANO, and I am sitting here like, “but seriously! I like that TV show! I don’t hate that TV show at all! It makes me sad that you think I hate that TV show, because I like that TV show! TV show!” Ugh. At this point, I want to start a backlash against MYSELF.

But. This weekend, Internet! My experience of this weekend was very uneven! It was so great sometimes, when I was not on the Internet! And then, other times, when I was on the Internet, I got what has to be the 57,000th e-mail about how someone hates me because I wrote that blog post about Andrea Dworkin a year ago. Like: I don’t know what this compulsion people have is all about, this thing where they are like, “so, I’m a stranger who didn’t like something you wrote. Want to hear about it?” Uh, no. No, thank you. This was maybe the most fun e-mail I’ve ever gotten about the Andrea Dworkin thing, however, in that it made much the same points that every other e-mail along these lines has made — Real feminists don’t fight with other feminists! Real feminists fight with MEN! — but was, apparently, written by a man. I don’t know anything else about him — surprisingly, I did not click through to his blog — but the “I’m a dude” message was kind of overt. (UPDATE: Oh, okay, fuck me, I clicked through. Sample line: “Being oppressed means people impact your life who you didn’t invite into it.” Huh.) So I guess I COULD be fighting with a man, right now, if I felt like it! Thanks to this e-mail, I can accomplish “fighting with another feminist” and “fighting with a man” SIMULTANEOUSLY!

But also, I don’t want to. I don’t want to fight with other feminists or with men or with anybody, right now; I am all fighted out, for the moment. The Internet, though: It just keeps coming! Like, here is another thing I read because it had my name in it: A hate blog, written specifically for and about Amanda Marcotte. Apparently, publishing a guest post  that is linked to by Amanda Marcotte gets you written up by all the prominent Amanda Marcotte Hate Blog journals and trade publications.

I’d never heard of Tiger Beatdown, but it’s apparently a fairly significant site in the feminist blogosphere.

Oh, how nice of you to say!

The proprietor of TB is Sady Doyle, who is obsessed with her comment section.

They’ll put that one on my tombstone. Right next to “cared more about TV shows than people dying in natural disasters or of awful diseases; is dead now, so let’s all go watch TV.”

She admits to editing and deleting comments with which she disagrees, and she recently wrote three posts totaling 6,000 words on a single commenter who pissed her off. Clearly, Sady is the picture of maturity and stability.

CLEARLY.

It’s not like there aren’t real problems in the world. Here’s some real problem, for you: I was in the subway, with the dude I’m dating, and some kids started hollering racial insults at him. Teenagers. They sounded young. And my boyfriend was cool about it; he just started walking away, not making eye contact, doing what I suppose one does in this situation, but I was the asshole who froze and almost looked back. So clearly, they were trying to get attention — they were calling AT him, trying to get him to look around — and my attention was what they needed to escalate the situation. So we kept walking, though, and it was all cool, and then I heard one of them say, “push ’em onto the tracks,” and sure enough, in about 0.5 seconds, one of the kids, a really huge one, got between me and the wall and the track — it was one of the passages that is really narrow, in Union Square, where the stairs come down — and sort of purposefully bumped me toward the tracks. I did stumble. I said “sorry,” because you say “sorry” to the guy who might also be the guy who was just talking with his friends about killing you and your boyfriend in public, because despite popular rumor I do have a tiny little fraction of common sense in my head and I know not to Start A Confrontation if it might result in you getting somebody killed, and the kid just looked down at me and said, “you BETTER be sorry.” I can’t even analyze the racial dynamics of the situation with any degree of accuracy, because the kids were also people of color, and I am a white person, and I just don’t fully understand any of this because I am so fucking privileged, because I am not the person who gets hollered at and called “Jackie Chan” by teenagers looking to feel tough, but, I mean: These kids, they probably weren’t actually murderers, right? They probably just wanted to scare us? Because I’m white and he’s not, or just because of him because how fucking self-absorbed is it to think that I had anything to do with it, or just because they wanted to scare the hell out of some people to prove that they occupied that space and could influence it, or whatever, what I know is, I got pushed toward some subway tracks this weekend. Somehow this seems way more serious than people on the Internet doing casual drive-by insultings of strangers, and somehow it seems like the same thing, and I don’t know any more, really, what it’s all about. I watched him board a train and I watched him leave town for the next six weeks and I went to a party and I thought I could drink more than I could and I fell down and I broke somebody’s glass and then I got in a cab and cried, because: This weekend, for fuck’s sake.

And, I don’t know, Internet. I love you. But I am really busy starting the Sady Doyle Backlash, right now. Does anyone have a Tumblr about it? Someone should have a Tumblr. Look: I started one already. Let me know if you want to contribute, I’ll add you on.