that brightstar could be barred from posting to articles like this? It's obvious that he's a troll, with real issues about women. If he had his life together, he wouldn't bother the rest of us with his hateful letters.

I like Broadsheet, but articles like this are also appreciated. There is room on Salon for all sorts of opinions about men and women - but not for the hateful crap brightstar cranks out -- that stuff sounds more like what I hear on talk radio or on Yahoo.

goreedgo: the author calls white working class men America's most detested minority, not America's most oppressed minority. You're conflating unrelated terms. It's true; white working class men are largely reviled by those who are not also white working class men. Even those who court their vote and cultivate their loyalty despise them, even while they use them. And even the appearance of showing the slightest sympathy toward them meets with responses like yours, as if suggesting that there might be unpleasant experiences specific to the white male working class person is to somehow negate the unpleasant experiences specific to any other race, gender, class, or ethnic group.

Anyway. Feeling one's sexuality, one's desire, as an unwelcome burden, something vaguely icky that others don't really want to see or deal with and as something often best dealt with in a secretive, furtive manner isn't specific to white men, working class men, or men at all. It's really just about being in the position of consumer rather than consumed, of seeing yourself primarily as someone who wants the people they want much more than the people they want would ever want them. I'm a heterosexual white woman, and I spent my teens and early twenties severely overweight and very physically unattractive. I experienced my sexuality as something that no one would want to be burdened with, and I knew that that separated me from women who could assume that any heterosexual man would naturally want them. I've since become very physically attractive, and in my mid-thirties now know the difference firsthand. I think that's probably why I sympathize with men on this point, and why I experience their interest as flattering and not threatening. I was well into adulthood and very secure about myself before I knew what it was to experience a man's interest at first glance. I imagine if I had been a beautiful young girl, unable to articulate discomfort and surrounded by messages from media, family, friends, that told me I was the most desirable of all desirable objects and bore all responsibility for the desire every man in my sphere would naturally feel toward me and that my job was to foist them off at every turn, I'd spend the rest of my life feeling like a fish swimming with sharks, too.

I imagine that a person who is homosexual and not comfortably out and living in an environment where there is a significant homosexual community feels the same way, that their interest and desire is something unwanted by those they want, but in that case they may even experience their desire as something that could be physically dangerous for them, should it be picked up on by a violent person.

brightstar: You must be joking. Alternatively, you're just an idiot.

Remarks on a message board directed to an entity only identifiable as a made-up nickname generally cannot be prosecuted as libel.

Nor did anything she said to you even approach 'criminal'.

There is almost nothing that cannot be said legally, short of outright death threats, in this country.

(you and she may be posting from somewhere else, but this Salon publication message board is based in the USA, and subject to USA laws)

The best explanation is usually the simplest. So, what is more simple - that you receive negative or angry responses because large numbers of people on this board all mistakenly find you offensive, or just hate all men - or that you receive the large number of negative responses from a wide variety of posters simply because there is SOMETHING WRONG with the way YOU communicate?

Think about it.

I'm not a man, so I obviously don't know what it means to be a man :-). However, as I have watched my neices and nephews grow up, I have been fascinated by the fact that, as young children, all of my neices and nephews expressed a full range of emotions - sad, happy, angry, confused, delighted, frightened, etc etc, then once my nephews started school they showed less sadness, less delight and more anger. I recall vividly the day one nephew came home from school at age 6 with a broken arm from falling off a swing and described how he was in a great deal of pain but too scared to cry in front of the other boys. To me there's something profoundly wrong with a society in which little boys know that it's not ok to show that they are in pain, and I think this theme follows through into male adulthood. We are all born with the ability to express an extraordinary range of emotions and to arbitrarily assign these emotions based on whether you have xx or xy chromosomes seems so bizarre to me.

On another point, I think it's really important to be careful when throwing around debates like "if you had been raped you'd think x or y" . I have been raped, and one of the most profound and liberating parts of working through this was to stop identifying the particular man who had raped me with all men. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life thinking all men were wanting to do to me what one particular man had done, it's simply exhausting and life-limiting to be so vigilant and to live with such a fear of men. I know some fantastic men and some less fantastic men; I know some fantastic women and some less fantastic women. The "fantastics" are all people who laugh, cry, debate vigorously, know who they are and live joyfully and fully.