To build a realistic barrage of cyberbullying that Her Highness receives, I've spent the past hour intentionally looking at articles about Internet flaming. I reread the article I wrote about last year on Emily Gould and Keith Gessen, this post I archived from Curt Schilling's blog about the obscene tweets he got after congratulating his daughter on Twitter, dozens of articles about people like Anita Sarkeesian and prominent female writers receiving hate mail and crap. You can't even make this shit up. I literally feel nauseous from having read this stuff for an hour.
Last year, I briefly touched on the UCSB shooting. This incident hit closer to home for me--one of the victims was my brother's high school classmate. What I didn't write about then was the misogynistic motives behind that shooting. This article gives an inside look at the online community the shooter used to hang around. It is fucking appalling. I want to say that I don't know anyone who spews out the same vitriol about girls being sluts, bemoaning their lack of getting laid because of "shallow" girls, but how do I know if these people I interact with put on a face in public and then unleash all this venom on the Internet? One comment on that article gave me pause:
"these people are sick. on the other hand i'm a straight guy and i can't say i've never felt some of those emotions before. feeling like no one attracted to you and people think you're a creep sucks. and asking someone out sucks too because then they have the power because you're the one who likes them."
Since coming to med school, I've had more close guy friends than I've ever had in my life. And I've definitely heard iterations of this from them. I would like to think my friends are good people who wouldn't flame others online, who may complain about dating culture but not because they think women are hos for not sleeping with them. It takes a disturbed person to resort to mass murder in order to validate some "manifesto." But the lines of reasoning behind it are not unique to the murderous. More than likely, there are people around you who have ugly thoughts--perhaps less hateful, more diluted version--and hopefully, they are not the type of people who will choose to manifest this hatred beyond the confines of their brains.
Edit//
I've been reading articles about the church shooting, Charleston, SC. It's all relevant to this. The news stations are already tossing out "mental condition" and "mental illness" in regards to the shooter, but there are others without murderous intent who harbor the same vein of thoughts as the shooter. In light of the Black Lives Matter movement from this past year, you can't deny that there is an insidious bigotry that is pervasive throughout the country.
I don't know if this is the most appropriate way to reflect on this, but I've thought about what if I were in a similar situation. What if America's fear of China as a superpower suddenly climaxes into a massive sweep of xenophobia, and I start seeing stories in the news about attacks against Asians again and again? Would I feel safe in this country? The plight of blacks and Asians in America are not analogous in historical and socioeconomic context, but it's a starting point for me to understand what the current climate is right now. And really, it's quite disheartening.
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