On Doxxing

Doxxing: a new word for a new social phenomenon.  I was just reading an interesting article about it.

My students are always amazed when I tell them of the "old days" (when I was their age), before the age of personal computers and the internet.  They simply cannot conceive that there was a time when people communicated by hand-written letters or expensive long-distance phone calls, when "self-publishing" involved mimeograph machines.

Who imagined back in the seventies that one day anyone could "publish" anything globally, instantaneously, and... anonymously?  

Because of this, it has always been hard for me to wrap my head around the way people take "anonymity" for granted nowadays.  I'm very ambivalent about it.  I'm not sure if it's a positive social element.  In fact, I've often sensed that, at least as it has been practiced on the internet recently, it can be downright pernicious.  The freedom to say anything one damn well pleases without the risk of social disapprobation brings out the most careless and cowardly behavior.  It divorces actions from consequences.  (And yeah, I'm including myself here.)

I believe public discourse probably functions better when opinions are attached to real people.

What would happen to the "manosphere" if everyone was simultaneously and forcibly "doxxed" as I have been?  How would they react if they had their names, their addresses and phone numbers, their work and sexual histories revealed and disseminated to the most hostile imaginable audience?  Would these tough-talking guys just slink back into the woodwork, or would their "movement" finally evolve into a reality-based force for change? We'll probably never know, but I find it amusing to speculate.

I once had a conversation with the writer Joanne Greenburg, who published her first and most successful book, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, under the pseudonym "Hannah Green" in order to protect her parents' privacy.  She told me that she regretted it, and that pseudonyms generally caused more trouble than they were worth.

If I were to do it over again, I must say that I would not have used a pseudonym.  Of course, that means I might have been a mite more circumspect about the personal information I revealed!  But on the other hand, maybe not.  Truth is, I'm just getting too old to be very self-protective of my "image" or to present myself as anything other than what I am.  Call me crazy, ugly, fat, old, barren (!) -- I really don't care, you're probably right, it just doesn't matter.  See, I have pretty much lost all my vanity.  There's a great deal of freedom, as well as time-honored patriarchal tradition, in becoming a shameless crone operating on the margins of polite society.  That freedom is, perhaps, the greatest consolation of age.  And it has ever been thus. 

Roosh

February 9, 2014 at 5:14 pm

*Standing ovation*
This post now comes up #4 in a search for her name.  The sad thing is I bet she is above-average looking compared to the other posters on manboobz.

Hmm...  "above average in appearance"... Am I damned by faint praise here?
 
Ruin my reputation?  I don't have a "reputation" to ruin.  In fact, I am so completely inconsequential, so utterly without influence or public recognition, that even if you littered the internet with slander about me, no one would care one bit.  I've been employed at the same institution for fifteen years, and the admin there already know I'm a mixed bag of nuts.  And contrary to what Forney may believe, critical thinkers do "consider the source".  Anyone whose opinion I care about is unlikely to give much weight to online attacks from noxious trolls. 

The real mystery is why Matt Forney et al care what I say.  After all, in their world, I have long outlived whatever usefulness I once served as a woman, and now hardly count as a human being at all.  I reckon I'm about as much a threat to Matt Forney as a mosquito. A mosquito with bad knees, a full-time job, and a mortgage.  Who lives on the opposite coast.

So life proceeds apace at Casa La Strega.  After a flurry of hits on my blog (though I suspect no one hung around long enough to read anything, unfortunately), and a handful of inane, anonymous comments, nothing much is different.  I awake each morning and find there are no flying monkeys circling my roof, after all. I go to school and plod, more or less cheerfully, through my daily grind, I make plans for Valentine's Day with my sweetie, I chuckle at the characterization of myself as "a dangerous narcissist" as I clean up dog poop, drive my neighbor's kids to school, pay utility bills.