Letters to the Editor
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It's not one or the other.
your version of respect mean that a man kisses your ass.
-- Ben Dover
And I kiss his ass right back. It's wonderful. We love each other, and we do things for each other, and we make compromises for each other, and it works very well.
It's not a binary world, BD, where you're either the ass-kissing doormat, or the uncompromising king. Being nice to someone, valuing their opinion, trusting that they are an intelligent human being, finding middle ground does not automatically make you a doormat.
Secure people don't need to dominate everyone and everything around them. Secure people can make compromises, do something for someone else, even respect someone else or think someone else is great, without feeling like their power and independence is threatened.
It sounds to me like you think letting someone into your world, into your mind, developing feelings of attachment or dependence for someone is giving up your independence and makes you a sniveling doormat. Well, it doesn't. You can have a healthy balance. Otherwise, you're all alone, and that's really sad. You have this girlfriend, but it sounds to me like you're still all alone.
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Love
Love is that condition where another person's happiness is essential to your own..
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good point
Posted by alajarogers:
Photoshopped pictures of a woman being suffocated with panties and wishes for someone to slit a woman's throat and ejaculate down her neck are not brutally rude. They are psychopathic. The part that is missing in the psychopath is not the part that understands how the victim feels -- they understand well. They just don't *care*.
To take it a step further, someone who creates those photos and posts and sends those emails probably DOES care. They do it because they know that the impact of those words and pictures will be to intimidate and terrify. They do it in order to get that response.
The difference between somebody like that and, say, our favorite poster "Man" is that "Man" doesn't quite cross the line into direct threats of violence. But his hatred of women and need to bully them comes from the same sociopathic mindset.
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It seems that the chorus of reasonableness
has scared them both away. Boo. I was having fun. :(
Btw, that NYT article about apartments -- hilarious.
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Profile of Man:
Let me guess...you grew up in a household with extremely rigid gender roles. Your father was controlling and volatile. You probably witnessed him beat the crap out of your mother on many an occasion. She stayed with him, or maybe she left, and moved on to another man who did the same thing. Either way, what you learned from this is that men get what they want from demanding and punishing and throwing temper tantrums. Dad (or boyfriend[s]) was probably the most violent when he was drinking, which was often. Eventually you started to despise your mother, the same way your father seemed to. You lost respect for her. You saw her as contributing to her own hellish condition, "making" dad angry, doing things to piss him off when she should have known better, putting up with his behavior, always going back to him. You were angry with her for for not protecting herself, or maybe for not protecting you, or maybe just for going back to him over and over again. This is how you learned about relationships, and about men, and about women.
At some point, you became traumatized. Maybe you saw something horrible. Maybe Dad would knock you around too, or at least call you names. You never knew what would set him off, and walked around in a state of constant vigilance. You started to believe, deep down in your soul, that you were bad, worthless, like he treated you. And your soul responded by throwing up a defense mechanism. You overcompensated by believing - or at least trying to believe - that you were better than other people. Certainly better than women, and maybe better than other people too, like people who looked different from you, people who were poorer than you, people who lived in other countries. You developed a sense of entitlement and a haughty demeanor. In order to justify this overblown perception of yourself, you started to lie. You'd talk yourself up, bragging, describing yourself as the best at everything you did, trumpeting your accomplishments, sometimes just making shit up if it might impress people. You became so good at the lies that you started to believe them yourself.
The problem was, that while all this happened you failed to develop emotionally. You remained a child, as your father did before you, and never grew past the stage where a temper tantrum seemed the best way to get what you wanted. You never outgrew the narcissism of early childhood. And one day, you woke up and found yourself on the internet...a place where you could freely brag and bully and trumpet your haughtiness all over the place, without any consequences whatsoever. And so you did.
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Ben Dover v. LeCastor = endless love
Talk about two people who deserve each other.
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You may have a point there
I bet it would be quite a show.
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re:Profile of Man:
HAHAHAHA.... so so dead on. Watch out anonymous - he will put your small self "in place".
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Food for thought, Salon?
Hi Salon,
Not that any actual humans are reading after 20+ pages of troll spew, but what happened to Kathy Sierra is an interesting example for Salon to consider meditating on. Salon, as everyone knows, has a serious case of the misogynist trolls. If it's a post pertaining to women, there will be many dozens of pages of hateful diatribes frantically typed by mentally borderline men, attacking women in ways usually irrelevantly pertaining to their sexual marketability (as judged by whacked-out lonely trolls, I feel compelled to qualify). Salon does nothing to stop it, ever, and it drowns out the discourse day after day.
Will women authors and bloggers on Salon and other boards start opting out like Kathy Sierra to avoid random, off-topic hate speech about their gender? I know I sure would. I think the future of internet discourse has a big stake in how sites like Salon choose to deal with this problem.