Blocking The Bitchboys
Who?
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
Most people are pleasant and fun to interact with online. It’s true. The internet has created worlds of connection we wouldn’t have access to otherwise and the majority of the time, I love it. The minority of the time, I am insulted, degraded, and disgustingly alarmed by a group of people who don’t deserve WiFi. I’m talking about the bitchboys of the internet, those bolstered by anonymity and Mountain Dew to spew ridiculous theory and rhetoric at all the women they’ll never sleep with. The individuals I hope to reach with my work are typically quite happy to hear what I have to say, but others who feel threatened by it love to transmute their own big feelings and big failures into dismissive, dangerously misogynistic comments on the internet. I want to help one group of people, and in doing so I often attract the attention of another. Hey, it’s a living!
I am on social media. It is a necessary part of my work. More often than I’d like, I see followers of mine dedicate half a day to going 20 rounds in the comments with one of these absolute wastes of blood. It chafes me because the only thing they’ll accomplish is helping someone they’d never talk to in real life get off on how irritated they are, and how much they’re willing to put up a fight. These internet men (I like calling them that, makes me imagine they’re made of Legos) are literally satiating themselves with how angry they can make us. But the truth is we couldn’t change their minds about respecting women and behaving like human beings if we had a whole semester to do it. Babe, what are you going to accomplish with a character limit?