Of course, as a matter of historical accuracy, we are obliged to turn to your response to my first Valve post, where, as I recall, you characterized my writing as a “particularly mephitic exhalation.”

Mephitic
1. Esp. of a gas or vapour: offensive to the smell, foul-smelling; noxious, poisonous, pestilential. Also fig. Now arch. and literary.

***

But that was then, this is now. Thank you for your kind compliment; I am very flattered that you (and Nanette in the previous post) spent some days forming your opinion of what was posted here.

I must admit, I’ve been turning this one over for a couple of days, and I quite like it. Well put. While I have sometimes thought you foolish, I have never thought you poisonous.

Heather, thank you for writing in.

Most feminist blogs have a mixture of male and female readers and commenters, so nothing happening there is the fault of women qua women.

You may not have experienced nastiness, name-calling, bullying, and other such harassment from a man, but many women do experience that or worse on a daily basis. That is one of the reasons the feminist blogosphere exists.

I am certain that feminist bloggers do not care what a man thinks, as a man, when he clicks on a feminist blog and reads the proceedings. They would really want to avoid thinking of a feminist blog as a sort of performance intended to win the approval of sympathetic males.

Your characterization of the sorts of nastiness that can take over the blogosphere (anywhere, not just on a feminist blog), and the way it has affected your participation, makes a lot of sense to me. I am, however, uncomfortable with the way your comment characterizes each gender.

But then I started reading some feminists blogs and I thought I had stepped into an entirely different world. A topic was written about and women flocked to discuss the topic and for the most part, what I saw I liked. Shortly thereafter, I started seeing the same sort of flaming going on in the feminists blogs that I saw in the “mommy blogs” and it was discouraging to me– the name calling, the bashing, the anger, the ganging up on those who presented a different point of view and I did not dare offer up a comment for fear of being on the receiving end of that sort of attack because this is new to me, after all, and I am bound to write the wrong thing and insult someone. I do not have an army of people to step up and support me should I blunder, and so it is easier to remain on the sidelines, quietly observing.

This is what I believe with my heart, however: as women, we can be our own worst enemies sometimes. Every time I see someone point their finger in the direction of a man and hear them say that the patriarchy is to blame, what I am thinking is that we as women do not support each other the way we should be supporting each other and this is what men see when they click open these blogs. Why should we demand respect from men when we do not demand it from each other, that is what I want to know? I have seen such degrading remarks made about women BY women, and never, ever have I experienced this sort of name-calling from a man towards myself. It has been my experience that women attack me more viciously than any man ever has.

I agree that this is a good post, not least because it proves that reasoned, civil argument can also be strongly-worded, biting, and uncompromising. The dichotomy between polite, unoffensive prose and full-throated attack is completely spurious.