Growing up as a young queerling, I got along much better with girls than I did with boys, by and large, and by choice would surround myself with girls instead of boys at every opportunity. While that statement falls a little short of ‘news’, ‘different’, or even ‘interesting’, I will say it is a least a little of the latter that as a queer adult, in San Francisco, that the exact opposite is now true.
I have two female friends, one who lives in DC, the other I see about once every two months at best. Otherwise, with the exception of work, I go, literally, for weeks without speaking or interacting with an actual female. Instead, my social life, such as it is, is full to bursting with queer men. Thank god at least one of them is black. Also, I know a Filipino.
I remember during my training at CUAV, looking around my training group and seeing one other male, and about 12 females. “This place,” I recall thinking “totally runs on pussy power.” Which, culturally, as caregivers/emotional supporters, etc. makes a sort of unfortunate sense, and living in a society where males are reared to be somewhat emotionally constipated, women typically are better at communicating, in general.
So you’d think they’d feel at home on the world wide interweb, what with women and the web both operating via a series of tubes. (Sorry. That’s me, hopefully, at my most misogynistic). And the fact that, at least in theory, there is an element of privacy and anonymity that could appeal to women who, let’s face it, aren’t always safe in our society.
That anonymity cuts both ways, and for one blogger Kathy Sierra, that anonymity has allowed (at least one) very, very sick fuckhead to harrass, intimidate, and threaten Sierra into an almost seemingly catatonic state. I seriously don’t get it. Why are some men so freakin’ threatened by a woman achieving a modicum of fame/power/influence on the Web (or anywhere)? Why does it seem, even before the situation went nuclear with the latest death-threat/sexual mutililation moron, that women are sometimes less than welcome on the Web?
As always, Violet Blue sums it up nicely:
“Sierra’s haters — and the man behind the hate, in my friend’s case — are doing this not because they’re immature. They’re doing it because they want women out of their worlds. Every female tech and sex writer I have contact with knows this — every girl whose work has been Dugg, Slashdotted or commented on in a forum that allows trolls to fester. When someone goes this far, to make death imagery and maintain a 24/7 hate blog, we’re not talking about a lack of social skills, we’re talking about a desire to destroy. These are the same kind of acts of sexual hatred that Patrick Califia wrote about in his essay about the sex-murder of transgender teen Gwen Araujo in “Sex With the Imperfect Stranger”:
“This strategy relies on widespread social acceptance of the belief that this is what straight men are supposed to do when their heterosexual identities are threatened. They are supposed to murder in defense of their masculinity. Because if one of them doesn’t do this, if he does not violently repudiate the possibility that he found it pleasurable to have sexual contact with someone who was not born female, then he must be queer himself.”
In these situations, Califia tells us, “The victim in such cases is usually deliberately sought out by the attackers, hunted down and intimidated, battered or slaughtered. Violence against sexual minority people is a sport.”
When you’re female in Blogistan, you expose yourself to a whole new kind of hate, and often your male colleagues (or your community) have no idea what it feels like.
But we belong here, too.”
