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So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you’ll wait for me
Hold me like you’ll never let me go
‘Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane
Don’t know when I’ll be back again
Oh, babe, I hate to go

Yeah, it’s day three again, hump day for me on these trips, as loyal reader (s?) know. This is where Virginia starts noticing that she’s away from her beloved Oxbridge, and gets terribly lonely and homesick. And occasionally, a tad self-pitying rolleyes

But it hasn’t been a bad trip, for the most part. Duty called and I got to go to the Zion National Park region in Southern Utah. It was wickedly hot there, and I’m afraid duty may have called me there, but it didn’t leave me enough time to go out to the actual monument. Still, it was amazingly beautiful enough, and when it cooled down, I went for a spectacular evening run past a cactus garden the local hospital had installed, along a wide but oddly deserted road up a hill, where I watched the sun set and the enormous full moon make its appearance.

Cooling down in the hotel afterwards, I ran up Oxbridge and whimpered at him until he had to go to work (musicians keep odd hours, odder than mine even). I then popped onto Gaia to take solace in my virtual world I have grown to love.

I probably should have stuck to fishing, but I wandered back to the feminism thread again. I should say that after I wrote “Why Virginia Should Stay Off the Internet”, I wrote a friend whose Gaia posts I have grown to admire, and is quite frankly a bit of a scrapper. I asked her what kept her going, and why she would expose herself to the slings and arrows of outrageous trolls.

Her answer was quite simple. It’s not for the trolls. It’s for the intelligent people who read the forums. It’s for the young girls who read a thread on feminism, and see troll after troll saying that women who want nothing more than decent treatment in the workplace are frustrated *****s. It’s so they know it’s okay to want to have a career, it’s okay if she likes sports, and if some boy gropes her or harasses her, she doesn’t have to be quiet. So, I returned to the thread, quoted studies from respectable institutions in hand (hey, might as well use some of those Organizational Behavior classes I took years ago).

But to be honest, it’s emotionally draining. And I have found out the dark side of the honesty Gaian anonymity inspires. I have seen troll comments on that thread that frankly frighten me, and I’m no longer a teenager. Stuff such as a post by a fellow who claims to be an employer in which he describes how he invariably has to fire women within a month because “they b***h and moan”, another in which a boy complained that feminists would call the police if he punched them, another which complained that “feminist” mothers looked at him suspiciously when he would hang about playgrounds photographing their children, and obscene attack after obscene attack (“I call feminists sexist b****s”, “You need to get over your p**** envy”, etc).

Perhaps it’s more frustrating when you talk to someone who seems intelligent, but they seem angry at you for some reason. I really, really try to be nice to everyone, even the trolls. I try to stay open to their ideas, and present my take on similar facts. But often, I feel as if I have donned a “Man-Hating Feminazi” avatar in the eyes of some. They keep reacting, not to what I say, but what they think such creature (if one exists) would say.

I have been having a frustrating conversation with a single mother, the very sort of person who really, really needs pay equity. Yet, for some reason, her posts back at me have been filled with anger. The last time she wrote me, she said “Prove to me that women are the only ones discriminated against. Oh wait, you can’t”. I was stunned. I had spent the better part of an hour dredging up Census statistics on women’s poverty and pay scales. I had hoped to hear perspectives on this from someone out there actually trying to make it as a single income parent on a woman’s payscale. Yet she reacted, quite angrily, to something I had never even said. As I said, it was clear she was reacting to someone she already disliked.

*sigh* I am such a milquetoast. These things seem so paltry, even as I write them down. I mean, should I care what someone I never met in person thinks? And yet, I do care. Just as I consider my Gaian friends true friends, I consider online personal attacks real personal attacks. I guess I just don’t have the requisite internet thick skin.

I think I will finish a few of the conversations in the thread that I started, and leave off my suffragism for a while. I feel ashamed about this, and I feel like I’m letting down the women who’ve written me with thanks for my posts. But I need a mental break. And to be honest, I come here online to meet nice people and spend time with Oxbridge when I’m on the road and can’t be with him. I’d hate for Gaia to be a place where I have to tell people off on a daily basis. I get enough of that at work (see “Bossy V’)

No Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly I,

V.