Misogynistic Trolls:
Fluffers for Modern AntiSemitism
I’ve been away from this column for awhile due to a mini-reunion of my graduating class, a cold, and a LOT of short fiction. Here, however, is what you can call a philippic, a diatribe, or considering I’ve been fighting antisemites online, a jeremiad.
I have been online since 1989 and have been active on a number of platforms. This has exposed me to a variety of people, flamewar artists, and trolls. Since October 7, the epidemic of trolls, whether antisemites subsidized ideologues, misogynists, or just plain nuts, has been the worst I have ever encountered.
Where are Tolkien’s Nine Walkers when I want backup to take on these trolls?
Granted, some are ignorant, but I suspect they are in the minority. Some are men, some are women, some of the least logical are gender fluid because if Hamas, Hezbollah, or Taliban had their way, they’d be thrown off roofs.
Some of the trolls are women, mostly of the Mean Girl or Social Justice ilk. They tend to be righteous, spiteful, and emotional. I don’t want to deal with them right now. For once in a misspent online career, I am going to answer the question so often demanded of me: “What about The Men?”
The answers are not good. The men are there, with authoritarian-sounding assertions, shoddy logic, false analogies, denunciations, and personal attacks. In the past week, antisemitic bloviators and wannabe abusers have called me an old bat, told “Imma gonna fuck your mouth,” told I have a crusty mouth, and threatened with having my cat killed. (I am catless.) They spin long diatribes, denounce, and use dubious sources – all male – as authorities. The purpose seems to be to shut up women in general, and women like me – overeducated, Second Wave, and at least as verball aggressive as they – in particular. After almost 40 years online, I don’t take well to STFU.
I could, of course, ignore them, be the Bigger Person, not trouble with trolls, etc. The problem is that when we are dealing with antisemites, we have millennia of experience in knowing that silence means death. So, often, does speaking up, but given the choice, I prefer to take my chances in the verbal arena. Please believe me when I say that these gentlemen are not Spartacus or Maximus, and I am not entertained.
I am, however, curious about why they feel entitled to speak this way. At first, I thought they got their abusive verbal patterns from bossy dads and wimpy moms, or from fealty to ayatollahs, Trumpers, or red-pill bros.
Before I go into how this type of male speech informs and further corrupts antisemitism, I want to go back to the root of arrogant men and their often bogus declarative sentences and denunciations. Recently, I read retired Cambridge classicist Mary Beard’s Women & Power: A Manifesto. She has given me the Greek word “muthos.” From it, modern English has created the word “myth.” Professor Beard has a much more literal translation: “muthos” refers to public speech acts and goes back as far as the Bronze Age to show how men have always claimed it as their prerogative.
Let’s go back to the Odyssey, in which Telemachus, son of Odysseus, tells his prudent, canny mother Penelope, who has objected to a song, “Go, then, within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for speech is man’s matter, and mine above all others—for it is I who am master here.”
Nerve of the boy, I’d say. Presumptuous, even. He badly needs a wise father to set him straight, and that’s what he gets, before he and Daddy Dearest murder all the slave women.
Let’s move forward in time to Corinthians 14:34: ads: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.” I am no scholar of Christian teaching, but I do know enough to know that the women who were supposed to remain silent and in subjection had once been regarded as deacons and quasi-apostles. And the author of this particular command was no friend to the Jews he abandoned.
About this time, I moved away from Professor Beard’s short, trenchant manifesto to a few quotations I remember. Take my favorite play, Hamlet, in which he erupts in a real eruption of sexual nausea at Ophelia. “You jig,” he tells the fool girl, “you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.” There isn’t an incel or a mullah on Earth capable of this level of meanness aimed at an innocent.
Sometimes, the fury is a matter of what commercial writers refer to as “rack space,” as in the women are taking up space in bookstores that male writers assume should be there. In an 1855 letter to his publisher, William Ticknor, Nathaniel Hawthorne famously grumbled: “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied with their trash.” One of the scribbling women was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Jealous? Never say so. It’s a matter of Lit’ry Quality, as is immediately evident to anyone who suffered through The Scarlet Letter in high school. Americanists will please forgive me. I’m attempting to make a point and doing it in a roundabout fashion.
The same contempt and nausea appear in Harvard-trained Henry James, another icon of the more modern set, as Professor Beard points out. In his polemic, The Politics of Women’s Speech and The Bostonians, James proclaims that “Under American women’s influence, language risks becoming a generalized mumble or jumble, a tongueless slobber of snarl or hine”:;it will sound like ‘the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog.” I don’t think that’s a complaint that “green girls from Vassar” as one very minor academic who resented female science fiction writers once wrote, are stealing shelf space that rightfully belonged to him. He condemns the “muthos,” the public speech of such women as the “thin nasal tones” of women’s public speech, about their “twangs, whiffles, snuffles, whines, and whinnies.”
A great deal of that sounds to me like the she-trolls, but I’m going to include their sentimentality about the Chil-Dren, the evils of war, and sheer mean girl spite as part of what joins them to the male trolls. Jean-Paul Sartre, I think, has nailed it:
“Never believe “, Sartre writes, “that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
I feel no need to meet this abusive deception with reasoned argument. It’s a waste of my time to counter weird numbers, attempts to project Hamas atrocities onto the IDF, and insane declarations that the flotilla performers are being turned by Mossad, the IDF, or Israeli science in general into centipedes.
Sorry, boyz, the IDF are not high-tech Dr. Mengeles nor were meant to be. Those are creatures of your own demented imagination. But the absolute assurance, like T.S. Eliot’s “young man carbuncular,” in the Waste Land,” as “A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,/ One of the low, on whom assurance sits/ As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire,” goes all the way back to that brat Telemachus, who misses his father and wants to secure his inheritance.
I have to say that today’s antisemites, who combine misogyny with self-assurance and some very poor writing, are outclassed by their predecessors. In fact, they have no class at all, and I am done with analyzing them. Let them turn up on line, however, and I may entertain myself.
But not right now. I have trolls to fight. I have an opera for which I am developing a scenario. I just finished one novelette and am assembling ideas for the next one.
And I have antisemites to identify and contend with because I really don’t feel like being bundled onto a freight train.