Clue by Four, STAT!

Another of those wackos…

Okay, I work with an online safe­ty orga­ni­za­tion. We help peo­ple who are being harassed online. I’m glad to do it. If noth­ing else, these peo­ple know that they aren’t alone.

BUT—I do get tired of the nut­cas­es. Peo­ple who want to whine about harass­ment every sin­gle time some­body dis­agrees with them on usenet, or a web-based forum, or on a mail­ing list. Or peo­ple who put out stuff that any­body with enough work­ing synaps­es to chew gum should know WILL attract a whole lot of propo­si­tions, some of them word­ed crude­ly, and then get pis­sy because, ohmigod, they got some propositions!

I’m polyamorous and pagan. There’s noth­ing sexy on my web site, and there nev­er has been. Any­body read­ing what I have writ­ten there about polyamory would pret­ty quick­ly twig to the fact that not only am I not cur­rent­ly look­ing for lovers, but that if I were look­ing for any­body, it would­n’t be a casu­al fuck.

And I get wan­na­fuck mes­sages any­way, from the clue­less won­ders who assume that all bi, poly pagans are, of course, com­plete­ly licen­tious and unable to resist hav­ing sex with absolute­ly any and all crea­tures who come into our orbit. I gen­er­al­ly just delete them. They aren’t hon­est­ly worth the time it would take to respond to them.

So any­way, this chick puts up a web­site about the “sen­su­al ther­a­py” she offers. And then she adds per­son­al pages, linked from the main site, with her per­son­al ad. She’s seek­ing men, women, or cou­ples for poly rela­tion­ships. I think she said some­thing in there about BDSM, too. She offers a laun­dry list of ways to reach her—instant mes­sag­ing pro­grams, email, etc.

And then she gets all pis­sy about every wan­na­fuck she gets! And she makes anoth­er page on the site, where she lists every sin­gle unpleas­ant email/message she has got­ten in response to her bitchy replies to these peo­ple. And just for kicks, she throws in every mes­sage sent in response to her ad by some­one who did not, in her judg­ment, fit her cri­te­ria. And she talks about how all these peo­ple are dread­ful harassers and gives names, email address­es, ICQ and oth­er mes­sag­ing client iden­ti­fiers, phone num­bers sometimes—whatever she knows about these people.

And then she wants a link from our orga­ni­za­tion’s website!

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I’m not allowed to respond with a clue-by-four. But I’m hop­ing the orga­ni­za­tion’s pres­i­dent will.

I’m not just annoyed by her clue­less­ness and hypocrisy—I’m annoyed because every time some­body like her starts mak­ing lots of noise about “oh! help, help, I’m being stalked!” it makes it more like­ly that real harass­ment isn’t tak­en seri­ous­ly by some­one who encoun­tered an idiot like her. GAH!