In response to a post describing the recent hacking of several portions of “Women’s Space/The Margins” Heart got a truly reprehensible comment.
“Heart, this is horrible. I’m sorry that this is happening to you. These people want nothing to do but to hurt you and your cause. I feel for you.
In fact, I want to feel you now. I’d like to tie you down, take a knife, and slit your throat. I’d penetrate you over and over in all orifices, and create some of my own to stick myself in.” – Hearts post on this email
Now, under no circumstances is a comment like that funny, constructive or anything less than vile. The same can be said for the hacking of the message boards themselves. Are we clear? It was bad. I don’t support it. It was vile. I would offer condolences or something but frankly there is no reason to believe that Heart would care so I won’t.
Additionally… I am not sure what the poster was thinking (if he / she even was*) but a comment like that does not hurt or weaken someone like Heart even if that was the goal. Comments like that are the lifeblood of victim feminism. You’re simply creating a martyr and confirming all their paranoia.
You can see it in the reactions. This is exactly the sort of thing people like Heart build their paranoia from. If a individual woman does something hateful anyone who generalizes from her to all women is constructing a “strawman” argument. We must, they insist, treat women as individuals. From a male any isolated incident of hate is instantly take as proof of how an entire gender thinks and acts.
Over time they build up an infinite supply of support for any outrageous thing they wish to accuse all men of by simply waiting till some single man says something vile and then generalizing. It’s sad really – and when it gets fed by this type of stupidity it no doubt spikes up into dementia.
To the trolls: Not only are comments like this stupid and vile, but far from hurting those you consider your enemies they simply strengthen them in there delusions. You lose on all counts, moron.
To everyone on the Internet: It is simply irresponsible to use the same password on a number of different websites. When one is hacked (and in the end, everything will be hacked) you will be very, very vulnerable everywhere else. Personally, I sue Roboform. I generate a random password for each website and then let Roboform save it for me.
* – I say he / she because I am taking a page from the extremist political activists that make up the support base for Hearts presidency bid. Frankly I would expect many of them to be the kind of 9/11 “truther” that thinks “Loose Change” is insightful and Michael Moore makes sense. These people often claim that 9/11 was a “false flag” attack… this could be something like that. Really! Unless Bush did it for Enron or something.
[...] “someone like that” – I did not say “this is what women think of men”, a common tactic of the paranoid. No [...]