Sexism and trolling

I wrote a piece yesterday reacting to what struck me as a completely bogus op-ed in the Wall Street Journal hypothesizing that women at Harvard Law School (“HLS”) don’t perform as well as men because Harvard has lower admission standards for women. I am not going to link to that crackpot article again because I don’t want to give the author any more page views than I already have. It occurred to me after I wrote the piece that by responding to the WSJ article, I was feeding into exactly what the author wanted: attention. I reacted to a patently outrageous statement he made, thereby bringing traffic to his site. The author, my friends, is a classic troll.

For those of you who are new to the Internets, a “troll,” according to Wikipedia, is “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” The author of the WSJ post is undeniably a troll. And so are his many readers who flocked to my blog to tell me that I am stupid and wrong and a woman and stupid and wrong. Oh yes, the trolls were out in full force yesterday. So let’s talk trolling, shall we?

I woke up this morning, read through several insulting comments I received on my blog, perused an article written by a woman I’ve never met impugning my analytical skills (yet offering zero analysis of what I had said in my piece), and felt deflated. It wasn’t that the trolls had convinced me that I was, in fact, stupid, but it was just the fact that there are so many people out there whose first reaction to a piece that they don’t agree with is to launch ad hominem attacks on its author. Rather than engaging with my piece on its level, these people chose to attack me – my intellect, my work ethic, my understanding of statistics, my imagined political agenda – and that’s disappointing. I don’t know why I expect better from strangers on the internet, but I do, perhaps because I wouldn’t dream of going on someone’s personal blog and calling them an idiot because I didn’t agree with something they said. I also would never presume to know about someone’s personal experience if I hadn’t lived it myself.

Not only did these commenters jump on me, but they did it in a particularly gendered way, which is heaped in several layers of irony, given that I had written a post about my experiences as a woman at Harvard Law School, and the principal reaction from the trolls seemed to be: a) sexism doesn’t exist, b) you’re clearly hysterical for even suggesting that it does, and c) you need to accept that women are dumber than men, and any disagreement with that proposition signals that you’re a dumb broad who needs to be shut up. Here are some actual comments I received (not all of them appear on the blog because I started trashing comments that were insulting to me):

“You have a lot of passion, which is commendable, but passion without control and diligence is blind.”

“I was unsure about the WSJ piece before reading your response, but now I’m much more confident admissions standards are lower for women.”

“Sadly, Ms. Green’s response does little to bolster anyone’s opinion of the analytical skills possessed by at least one female HLS grad.”

“You are countering all logic with hyper-emotional political correctness (and when that political correctness fails to win an argument, you are countering it with the old ‘not sure how that’s relevant’). Good grief.”

“Perhaps there would be more female cum laudes and Supreme Court clerks if HLS made more of an effort to screen out students such as yourself who look good on paper but aren’t willing to put in the proverbial 110%?”

These comments all fall into one of the three buckets I mentioned above, but can basically be summarized as: “YOU’RE HYSTERICAL.”

Regarding the first comment, in particular, which contends that I have “passion without control and diligence,” my clever friend Seth responded with the following: “He/she may have a good point. I mean, how have you really demonstrated control and diligence? Merely by high achievements in high school leading to an offer from a college with a low acceptance rate, excelling there and on a difficult standardized test where you most likely were >2 sd above the mean, and then completing three rigorous years at a world-renowned law school which prompted this whole conversation? I mean, I think it’s gonna take a *-*little*-* more than 20+ years of academic excellence to really rate a high score on what, i’m sure, is a very well validated and unbiased instrument to assess control and diligence that the commentator/commentatrix (it’s a word, shut-up) is using.”

Ha!

I really don’t feel the need to justify myself or my choices to these people. They’re trolls. They live under dark Internet bridges and dance for joy when people like me come down to play with them, and I’m not doing it. But, as a human being with emotions, it is a bit of a shock to the system to read one insult after another from complete strangers. But what can you do? Some people are asshats and will always be asshats, and there’s nothing I can say or do to change that. C’est la vie.

I will say, though, that the older I get, and the more bull-crap like this that I encounter on the Internet, the more of a feminist I become. I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment where I never thought much about my gender or how it related to my performance in school or my career options. Both of my parents are successful, educated people and they never made a big deal out of my gender. They just believed in me, encouraged me, and pushed me to do my best. And I did. It wasn’t until adulthood, when I started encountering jerks like the author of the WSJ piece and his minions, that I realized that gender discrimination actually is a problem that I should be concerned with, because there are so many people who genuinely believe that women are less capable or less intelligent than men. Honestly, I never thought that people thought this way until they started coming out of the woodworks to let me know how stupid they think I am. The realization that there are people who think I’m dumb, no matter how many prestigious schools I attend or degrees I rack up, was shocking at first, but now I’ve come to accept it as reality. As I’ve engaged more and more with the Internet over the years, blogging and posting on social media, I’ve been subjected to more and more attacks on my intellect by virtue of my gender (remember this?). It’s eye-opening, to say the least.

I suspect that a man who goes out of his way to travel to someone’s personal blog to post uninformed personal attacks on the author is broadcasting more about himself and his own insecurities than he is about the author. Someone who is secure in his own intellect does not feel the need to denigrate someone else’s intelligence. The tired lament that men are somehow subjugated by women’s success – or women’s desire for success – is pitiful, really. What kind of man whines that he is being disadvantaged by women wanting to do better? Pathetic! So I suppose we should all feel sorry for these guys and send them positive, healing vibes through the Internet tubes… But in the meantime, I’m going to keep trashing their comments.

Suck it, trolls.