The Bullying Continues…

I made a mistake.  I am the site administrator for The Men of the Stacks calendar project.  I have been monitoring the site’s statistics with the help of a wonderful little WordPress plugin.  It gives me access to lots of good information like the number of page views we get each day.  It also tells me how people were led to our page.  I can see the URL of a site that has posted a link to the calendar.  I can then backtrack.  This is how I found out that people around the world are viewing our own website and posting their own articles about it to other websites; sites from Poland, Brazil, Australia, Portugal, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Morocco, Singapore, Japan and more.  This is a good thing.  It also leads me, however, to some very ugly things.

This morning, I followed a link to a forum hosted by The Knot.  It’s supposed to be a wedding planning site that offers tools and checklists, tips for attire, beauty and honeymoon destinations, and more.  It also has a community forum.  This is where things went wrong for me.  Very wrong.  The link I followed led to a thread about the calendar.  The thread’s discussion was initiated with a simple question:  “Have we seen/discussed?  http://menofthestacks.com/.”  The follow-up comments were not kind.  I can accept a certain amount of judgment with a project of this scale.  I expected there to be a fair amount of conservative, anti-gay slurs to be floated around.  I expected a certain amount of backlash.  After 37 years, I even expected there to be questions about my name.  I did not, however, expect to be attacked personally and I certainly didn’t expect my family to be brought into this.  Someone in the forum clarified that I was male and explained the origin of my name using the information listed in my about me page.  The response?  “Wow.  So he’s from a whole family of hipster douches?”

Yes, they did.

I was incensed and cooler heads do prevail, but I was not like Fonzie about this.  Not. At. All.  I couldn’t post a reply without signing up for the site so I did the rational thing.  I left it alone and forgot about.  Fifteen seconds later, I had an account and was posting a reply to the comment.  Definitely not like Fonzie.  I told the bully to say what he likes about my name, but that I would take issue with him if he brought my family into the mix.  I told him how I found his remark.  I challenged him to step up and talk to me directly.  I even gave him my phone number and told him to give me a call.  There is an option in the forum to report such abusers for personal attacks.  I did that as well and I told him so.  “Might as well pick up the phone and be an adult before you get booted.”

The follow-up responses were equally unkind.

· “Oh noez! Someone doesn’t like my opinion of them! I think I shall run away and cry now. Dude, what did you expect?”

· “BWAHAHAHA.If your family did their job and raised you not to be a twi[t],…well, it’s moot because you were obviously raised to be a twit.”

· “i think meeglet is confuised. she might have to be careful she doesn’t get booted for posting all of that personal information.”

· “she sounds like she’s making a threat.”

· “threat = fbi cybercrimes”

· “everybody post their phone number!”

·“there isn’t a waiting period for posting anymore, you can create a name and start being dumb on the internet right away.”

· “Welcome random person offended by our random opinions of you! Question, if a mentally ill homeless person yelled at you “your mother eats garbage!” would you give them your phone number and tell them to discuss it with you? Because in a way, this is the same.”

· “And truth be told, that picture of him on the website doesn’t do anything for me either. What, you’ve got a shoulder and you are in the shower? Yeah, that’s nice.”

· “Grow a bit of self respect and try not to popoff at everyone who dislikes something about you–in your case, your name.  Because, being a human being, some people will dislike you.  (I dont dislike you, I just think you’re a twit.  Once I get to know you, I’ll probably dislike you because you’re a twit).”

Did they really think I’d give out my active phone number?  Yes, they did.

My mistake was not in offering up my number; an old, inactive number of mine by the way.  My mistake was engaging in the first place.  If you don’t feed it, it won’t grow.  I fertilized the hell out of that thread; and now I sit here and stew about it.  Fortunately for me, I have an incomparable system of support.  A few of my friends are familiar with The Knot.  They are recently married and some of them have recently had children.  They all concur.  The “Knotties” are insane.  That made me feel a bit better.  Another thing that made feel better was something my girlfriend said to me as I was grumping about this on Facebook:  “Besides, the VILLAGE VOICE wants to interview YOU!!! About the project YOU spearheaded… who cares what some random dude on some random marriage website has to say… think his opinion is a bit less important than that of the Voice… just maybe?”

(Did I forget to mention that?  The Village Voice wants to do an interview with me tomorrow.  That makes me smile).  I think the most insightful thing she pointed out though was that the users on this thread missed the mark.  The calendar is not about showing off skin.  It’s not about self-aggrandizing, narcissistic self-absorption.  It’s about rattling stereotypes.  It is about neutering the use of the word “librarian” as a heuristic.  If I were to say to you, “Let’s play a word game.  I’m going to say a word, and you are going to spit out the first things that come to mind.  Ready?  ‘Librarian.’ Go!”  You would likely say things like, “books, reading, shushing, hairbuns, glasses,  stuffy, cardigans, Party Girl, Desk Set.”  You would likely not say things like, “men, programmers, writers, professors, web designers, community organizers, hardcore researchers and overall bad ass mother-f**ers.”  No.  You probably would not think those things.  This calendar is intended to break that first train of thought.  Although it is aimed specifically at rattling stereotypes of librarians, there is a personal, more lofty hope: this exercise will make you think twice about other, professional stereotypes.  For example, when you play that word game with the word “nurse,” I hope you will have some difficulty with your response.  The hope is that you will have some difficulty and realize that you are participating in a greater good at the same time.  Can you see that?

The thing that gave me the most pause, however, was another insight, also from my girlfriend.  “The project supports an anti-bullying campaign.  They’re bullying you, sweetie.  They don’t get it.”  Spot. On.  There were other psychoanalytic discussions that followed, but the important conclusion was this: Bullies bully, and they bully because they were bullied.  This is not an objective universality.  Not everyone who was bullied bullies other people,  but this was a sobering realization for me.  I was bullied for a very long time as I have described before.  Yet, I have never bullied anyone in my life.  Not only is it wrong from a moral standpoint.  It simply feels wrong from an emotional and spiritual standpoint.  Some people escape the cycle.  Some people do not.  Repeat: This is a sobering realization.

Writing this has helped me make my peace with the personal affrontery.  I’ve made my peace with the criticism and judgment with the help of the beloveds in my life, including my friends and calendar partners, and a couple of Crispin Natural Hard Apple Ciders.  (It’s fantastic on ice).  Writing this has also helped me realize something that hasn’t been discussed much.  The It Gets Better Project is aimed at helping support LGBT youths who experience bullying on an ongoing basis.  Today’s experience with being bullied has shown me that maybe adults still need a system of support regardless of their age, height, weight, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.  In fact, adults probably still need support precisely because of these differences, especially the bullies.  I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again.  Unlike Kurt Hummel who said, “One day you will all work for me,” I say, “You may not work for me; but if you do, I will not show you what it is like to bully.  I will show you what it is like to be kind.”

Just something to think about.  And now, time to put this to rest.  I have an interview to prepare for.