I’ve recently seen a lot of articles about cyber-bullying and sexual harassment online and how it takes its toll on female victims in particular. I’ll be honest; I scoffed at most of them.
I’ve been online since Lynx was the new cool thing, and in that time I’ve fended off more jerks than I have door-to-door salesmen. At first, I was taken aback by the shockingly unsubtle male attention I attracted just for being female and having a pulse. After about the 1000th basement-dweller slobbered on me or said, “u r a bitch” I just sort of stopped being able to get worked up about it.
I wrote in a scathing comment on an article about “rape” in Second Life that chicks should just man up and stop crying about it. Put the guy on ignore or mute or whatever, and just pretend he’s not even there. The anonymity of the Internet gives a legion of would-be tough guys a way to bully those who cannot retaliate, but it also gives you the means to erase them from your online experience.
Imagine my surprise when I found myself a victim of just such bullying. And I could not turn it off.
I was happily playing a game online with about twelve other people. We were using software called Ventrilo for voice-chat to talk and coordinate things. It’s not only convenient, but also nifty to be able to just talk to your buddies all over the country as you play. The game started going poorly and one of the men, a truculent and rather argumentative fellow, began to get irate. I made a silly joke to try to lighten the mood and he attacked me verbally with an intensity I have not previously experienced, online or off. Several people protested and he started screaming at them, too. That was when we realized that the friend who owns the Ventrilo server—and thus the administrative privileges—was not online. This jerk realized it, too, and was taunting us that we could not kick him out.
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