Back when I met my partner in 2004, in the days before Facebook was known to the general public, in the days of Friendster, MySpace, and Livejournal, he told me about the messageboard called Honeypump. At the time, I was working in a very boring office job with nothing to do for most of the day. I did so much online shopping during that time, I memorised my credit card number.
I registered on the Honeypump messageboard with the avatar 'Appletree' and it's the only name I've ever used. There are probably more than a few people out in there in the world who only know me as Appletree. A handful of people on the board, most of whom were based in Boston or had a Boston connection, used their real names, but most people used handles. Sometimes people would change names and you'd have to figure out who they were.
Some of the people on the board knew each other, some were strangers to nearly everyone, and some people started off as strangers but started to meet other board members in real life. I had just broken up with my boyfriend of three years and before that had gotten divorced -- in both cases I'd found myself needing to find a new friend group. So the timing was great -- I met a bunch of very nice people from the messageboard and they became my 'real life' social circle.
At the same time, the board was chock full of drama. Some of the drama originated from theoretical or political arguments, and some of it arose from real scenarios of conflicts that spilled over onto the internet. And I wasn't immune to either of these scenarios. As it was still the early days of the internet, and most of us were on the young side (though, in my early 30s, I was old enough to know better), so I think there was a learning curve in terms of healthy ways to conduct ourselves in this nameless, faceless space. But the drama made it a great way to stave off loneliness and to kill time in a cubicle.
When I moved to Brooklyn, I found a local messageboard called 'Williamsboard,' and that became my new online hangout. As I'd done in Boston, I went to board hangouts and became friends with some of the posters. I'll admit that it got a bit addictive at that time for me. I wasn't in a great place emotionally, and I felt overwhelmed by my school work and the financial pressures of living in New York. So I spent a lot of time on the board when I should have been doing assignments. But when I got myself on the 'top 20 posters list', I felt a weird sense of pride. Looking back, I see how messed up my priorities were and how bad it was for my mental health to escape into a world of jokes and pithy quips as a means to escaping a life where I didn't feel I was measuring up.
Honeypump ended, and another board called Lemmingtrail replaced it. Lemmingtrail went down, and that was replaced with another board, and again, and again. Each time, less and less people followed. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat had long replaced the internet messageboard. And I think by then, most of the messageboard veterans didn't have much use for that sort of thing anymore.
I found myself, nearly 15 years on, still posting. Sure, not with the same zeal or need as in the early days, but I remained a consistent 'regular poster' on the latest iteration of the board, which by now consisted of about half people I knew in 'real life' and a handful of people I only knew from the board. It's a funny grey area to be around people in an online space for over a decade. You aren't friends. You don't even know their real names. But they know things about you, and you know things about them. In this latest version of the board, because it was so small, I found myself sharing a lot of personal feelings and getting good advice. I hope I was able to contribute helpfully to others needing someone to talk to. But I also posted about my home renovations, clothes, shitting, exercising, and dumb stock photos I came across at work. It was a lovely outlet to have during the day when I needed a breather from my job.
All along, none of the boards I posted to were particularly diverse. I'd guess about 70 to 80% dudes, all cis gender. Only a very few of us were queer. Only a couple of people were not white. Nearly everyone had gone to college. In other words, a hot bed of privilege, myself included.
As a woman, I obviously move through a male-dominated world. If I didn't come to terms with that, as most women do, I'd be roaming the streets, ranting and raving like a lunatic, because it can make you crazy sometimes. I think the most frustrating part of being a woman is that when you do finally find the courage to speak out and ask men to be more compassionate people, they usually respond by being less so. I am 46 years old and I have seen this play out more times than I can count. I'd say it's human nature, and maybe it is, but it's definitely a male quality. And I don't #notallmen me because I firmly believe that any 'decent' man will act horribly under certain circumstances.
This is a very long-winded way of describing what made me quit, despite the pangs of sadness I feel over the decision. And I want to write about it here because this is my space, where I have complete control. I want to write about it because the conversation is still happening without me. And I want to write about it because writing is how I make sense of things.
One of the threads on the board was about movies we'd seen -- old or new -- for people to post their opinions of films they'd just watched. Someone posted that they'd seen 'Hannah Gadsby: Nanette', a Netflix special that came out back in June 2018. It got a huge amount of attention for Gadsby's groundbreaking social commentary. I'll just copy and paste the synopsis of the show here: "Gadsby uses the piece to deconstruct the nature of comedy and asks the "straight white male" to undergo the same tension that marginalized people go through every day. She does this by explaining her experience as a lesbian and gender non-conforming woman. She explains that some are brought up to hate themselves, while others are brought up with the licence to hate others. Her realisation is that the self-deprecating humour common to standup comedy is doubly painful for marginalised people, because it is joining the chorus of people who insult and belittle them already. This leads her to conclude that she can no longer do standup comedy, and structures the piece around claiming she is giving up comedy. She has since stated that she is not doing so after all due to the surprising response to her show."
When it came out, I remember being impressed at how important the show was to so many people I knew or followed online. Gadsby had articulated something essential.
I was really excited to watch it! I put it on one Friday night after a long week and, predictably, fell asleep. I kept meaning to go back and watch the part I missed (ie, most of it). My partner, who didn't fall asleep, wasn't that impressed. "I don't get how it was so revolutionary," he said, "It was all stuff that was like, duh, of course -- I thought everyone knew that." I told him no, I don't think most people do.
Fast forward to this thread on the board. A single, brief post, stood out to me, which said, simply, "Nanette was so bad."
Ok, so, I had two separate-but-related reactions. First, one of my big pet peeves is when people say, "[X] Sucks", or "[X] is awful", thus dismissing it as if they are the arbiter of taste and it's so obvious that it needs no further explanation and implying that if you like [X], then you don't know what you're talking about, because it's awful. My pet peeve has been dismissed numerous times on the messageboard with the (condescending) explanation that if someone says something sucks, it's obviously their opinion (duh!). And, apparently, my opinion that actually it is precisely that it isn't presented as opinion, but FACT, is invalid. My being bothered by it sucks, if you will.
It's not that I saw Nanette and thought it was so amazing that I wouldn't have anyone cast aspersions on it. As I mentioned, I didn't see most of it. But I knew how important it was, and that simple statement of dismissal and disdain represented something really significant to me: extreme privilege.
Here, in Nanette we have a queer, gender non-conforming rape survivor creating art (yes, a standup special that turns the concept of standup comedy on its head and challenges the patriarchy is definitely art) engineered to challenge straight white male power, not just in comedy, but just generally, and here's a straight white male saying, ugh so bad. I think that needs to be examined. I think we need to stop and linger on that a minute. I think we need to unpack what that means.
For me, it's not a mere difference of opinion. I don't mind if this guy didn't like Nanette. You didn't like it? Fine. Articulate why. Engage with it. Treat it like it at least matters, if not to you, then someone. Because it should matter! But it shouldn't only matter to women and queers. It should matter to the straight white guys in our lives who want a better world for people who aren't straight white guys. I'd have more respect for a scathing critique of Nanette than a mere "so bad". "So bad" means, to me, "I am so comfortable in my privilege that I care more that the 'comedy' special wasn't funny than about the fact that this person risked their entire career, exposed their own trauma, told their truth, and spoke out against their oppression. It wasn't funny and so it was bad. End of story, nothing more to say."
I decided to comment and to try and unpack my response to his two word review, which was to immediately thing hmmm I guess he's not an ally. And that's about where I think most of the dudes on the board stopped reading. My point can be summed up like this:
Maybe if the performance you're critiquing was created by a marginalised person and is about their experience of oppression, how about considering not dismissing it so heartlessly? How about acknowledging that you didn't like it while maintaining its value? It's not hard. They think I am being pedantic but there actually is a big, big difference between "I didn't enjoy it" and "It was so bad."
And so the conversation still continues that when I said words to the effect of, "When I read what you wrote, I thought you aren't a good ally" that I was both accusing him of not being an ally and saying he was homophobic. I said neither of those things. I was sharing my reaction, which is to say, "Your saying that makes you sound, to me, like you aren't an ally." And P.S. You don't have to be a homophobe to be a shit ally.
An ally is "a person or organisation that cooperates with or helps another in a particular activity". If you're an ally to a marginalised group, you are, to some degree, helping them in their fight against oppression. If you aren't helping, then you aren't an ally, no matter how great your opinions are.
So here's what happened. Dudes read what I wrote, put words in there and intentions in there that I didn't have. Other dudes read the interpretations and superimposed them onto my words, and then their interpretations became my words, no matter how many times I instructed them back to what I actually said. My voice became drowned. Finally I said whatever, let's move on. I didn't want to put the kind of energy it takes to get a bunch of dudes on a messageboard to change their opinions about something because I'm not sure it's ever happened in the history of internet messageboards.
(As an aside, if your comment starts off with a disclaimer that you know you sound like an Male Rights Activist, maybe consider not sounding like a Male Rights Activist.)
So I accepted that most of these people were never going to get my actual point and would rather slap each other on the back than to ask me clarifying questions about my point of view with the aim of greater understanding and... yep... being better allies. They'd no intention or desire to be better allies. Only self-assurance that they're super cool guys with great opinions that I can take or leave and if I was bent out of shape, it was my fault. The irony is that I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of Nanette. I incorrectly assumed (very funny now, in retrospect) that the person would be like, "Jeez, I didn't realise that saying what I said made me sound like I wasn't an ally. Maybe I'll avoid saying things that make me sound like I'm not an ally, because I am an ally and I want to come off as one because I love my LGBTQ friends." Nah. As I've seen over and over and over again, when you ask a straight, cis white man to change their way of thinking, they dig their heels in nearly every time.
Pushing on, I continued to post about the funny stock photos at work and other similarly banal topics. I figured I could put the situation behind me. But then that's when I was confronted with another reality: I was being mocked. My posts, which had been wildly misinterpreted, were still on their minds. Because god forbid we should move on when a man has been called homophobic! And told he can't have OPINIONS! How can she just keep posting here when she's policed our speech in such a heartless fashion! We can't say anything is bad anymore without this woman telling us we're having opinions wrong!
With a heavy heart, I quit the board. I'm quite sad over it. I'm not sure I've ever quit such a long-formed habit in my life. Logging onto the board had been a daily ritual. I already miss it. But I had to decide that my relationship with men has changed. Putting myself in the firing line isn't worth it anymore. Being where I'm devalued isn't worth it anymore. I can't purposely place myself in a space where I'm not respected and where my thoughts are treated like ammunition to distort and throw back in my face. They acted like I was trying to police them, but it was me who was policed.
It's wild! To ask someone to just merely consider another point of view and then to be treated like this idea, so altruistic, is the actual problem. After everything that's happened in human history! It's actually fascinating. And depressing.
