Out of everyone commenting, only two have shown any sort of disrespect, which serves to prove another point: Everyone on Substack is so awesome that anonymity is NOT required here. WOW.
Thank you, everyone, for making this place AMAZING.
It's always intriguing to me to read about "early adopters" in the 1990s. I used to regard myself as an early Internet adopter because of my participation in online communications in the late 1970s. This would be heavily derided and lampooned by those who came even earlier. Of course, they were innovators and from today's perspective it seems that I was, as well.
To give the general readers a sense of this earlier scope, there is an important novel, Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card that reflects how profile anonymity figured in globally important discussions. Published in 1985, the book mentions Ender Wiggin and his sister Valentine Wiggin who posed as "Locke" and "Demosthenes" in online discussions about how the world should respond to the invasion of the insectoid alien species that nearly wiped out mankind. So, we really did have an Internet before there was a world wide web, before blogs, before YouTube. I know, shut up old man.
But it was not only gender that the Wiggin children wanted to conceal in taking up prominent identities in the same way that "Publius" was used by the authors of the Federalist papers who were, in fact, proposing overt treason and the overthrow of the government of the Articles of Confederation, but also age. You see, Ender Wiggin is a boy of age 6 at the beginning of the novel and all of 13 years old as the novel concludes with the destruction of the alien enemy species' home world by human military systems under Ender's control. His younger sister Valentine and he conceive of the need to influence world events while they are children and they believe that their ideas won't be taken seriously because of their youth. But their ideas are really good and important, and age has nothing to do with it.
I worked on an aspect of anonymity for online discussions way back when. Anonymous remailers were important because it was essential to discuss certain topics without any danger of being identified. Survivors of rape and survivors of childhood violence needed to be able to participate in online discussions (email list services, USEnet newsgroups, yes, go ahead and make fun of the old man for knowing about technologies before Twitter, idgaf) without suffering retribution at the hands of the same people who had harmed them.
So when an officious person such as Nikki Haley demands that nobody is allowed to get on the Internet without her being able to know for sure who that person is, she is going against all of decency and humanity. She is demanding that people who are in danger be identified by their abusers and attackers and subject to ongoing and repeated violence, because Nikki Haley is against freeom, against humanity, is indecent, and wants to enslave mankind. So do most of her identifiable political opponents in the current milieu, so please don't misunderstand me in supposing I am against her in particular. I don't vote because voting is an idiotic way to take choices and I don't support the usurpation government of the constitution because it was written by demon worshippers, kthx.
Anonymity is possible technologically therefore it will prevail. Attempts to prevent it, like the Great Firewall of China, will only impose costs of time and complexity. As coders have long said, another layer of indirection will be found that renders the control of the authoritarians irrelevant.
Yes, I am being self-effacing as an old guy because it is currently unfashionable to be a nearly dead white male, and I'm making fun of those stereotypes. Also because age and infirmity is just as likely to be used against me as youth and inexperience are against the Ender and Valentine Wiggins of today. It's an interesting time we live in. But if I were unable to laugh at myself, I'd be pretty miserable in it. -smile-
I don't think that the male/female divide is the only issue in which anonymity makes a difference. I think there are dozens of ways in which we react to people based upon their percieved status.
Suppose there was an argument going on between 'Tiger' and 'Lion'... ie two anonymous internet aliases. And Tiger and Lion were going back and forth about some issue of politics. I suggest that that entire conversation would look very different, to the participants and to the audience (who were all chipping in) if instead of 'Tiger and Lion' the participants had been known as "Ben Shapiro and Robert Reich' or 'Joe Biden and Donald Trump' or even 'Robert Redford and Tom Hanks' etc etc.
We have all been trained (and I would argue properly trained) from infancy to treat different people differently. We can say 'give me that toy!' to a friend we were playing with... but not our mother. At least, not without consequences :)
And it works both ways. Seriously both ways. Females who are known and females (and celebrities, etc) expect you to act differently.. and act differently.
As far as the use of 'Sir' I would suggest that it isn't as significant as it seems. The English language lacks a neutral equivalent. It is not nearly as gendered as French (and don't get me started on German) but if anyone were to take a fiction book and try to rewrite it to make it completley gender anonymous they would find, for most stories, that the end result would be ugly, almost unreadable, English. And in French or German... impossible. You cannot say 'The' in either language without gender, or 'red', or 'little'.
As we discussed before, I think it would be fascinating to try to work up a list of 'clues' for female vs male speech (average! speech). And to run an experiment where people look at a long form discussion and try to guess the gender of the participants after removing all overt clues. (And not one where we have fudged it by including people who are non-traditional).
So, this was eye-opening just now and completely speaks to what you're saying.
A childhood bestie of mine who is an admin in one of the anon groups I used to be in says to me, "The way you felt as a woman under cloak of anonymity in the rooms is the same way I feel about it as a gay man."
This guy is a white straight-acting prepper gun-toting rural Southern gay man.
There are literally thousands of gender marked words in English. There are perhaps five or ten for homosexual and similar numbers for other sexual issues. You can easily and without thought carry on consersations all day every day without ever using a sex-preference marker unless the subject is about that. You would have to struggle to speak for five minutes without using a gender marked word, and probably several.
>> if anyone were to take a fiction book and try to rewrite it to make it completely gender anonymous they would find, for most stories, that the end result would be ugly, almost unreadable, English.
You'd think so, and yet...
I recall reading a book to my kids when they were little, called "The Grandma Mix-up." After reading in multiple times, it occurred to me to check my assumption about the sex of the main character, Pip. Looking carefully through the book, I could not find a single case where the character was referred to in a gender-specific way - and hadn't noticed it.
Now it's not a very long story - maybe 64 sparse pages (reading level 2) - but the author's ability to carry it off without it sounding odd was quite impressive.
And I did notice what you did here... but it wasn't easy. In a free flow conversation unless you are a genius at monitoring your word use you would have slipped up :)
Yeah... for one character. But you did mention the name of the book... which was already gendered. I would guess that there are also dozens of other gendered words in the book, if not hundreds.
Ok, so I read the book. Well, saw it on youtube. And it is incredibly gendered. Gendered in clothes etc etc. But it does, pretty well but still awkwardly, avoid the gender of exactly one character in the book. A lot of workarounds to make it work. And actually based on the rest of the book, they do gender the character, but it is subtle.
You make an excellent point re Tiger and Lion example.
Our subjective filters are activated by objective perceptions (lion and tiger, neutral, Trump and Biden, triggering) - these in turn are activated by by those internal filters, informed by many external distortions....round and round it goes.
Basically we're in a house of mirrors. Which reflections snag us, pull us in? Wherever we feel a need to defend, wherever we perceive an attack, we have an identity snag. Not a problem as long as you know it's not really 'you.'
The image isn't the thing its reflecting anymore than a map is the territory.
My point is that when we speak it is actually important to whom we are speaking. The relationship we are in may very well correctly determine not only what we should say, but how words will be heard.
Let me give a very sexist example. If I, as a male, am in a conversation with another male, and I say, "No, that's wrong..." the normal implication is that we are speaking about theory, and on that level I am disagreeing with his theory about what the underlying truth is. If I, as a male, say the same thing to a female, the normal response will be for her to hear it as a personal attack. So bluntly put. I didn't give any clues I wasn't trying to attack her personally. I would be more inclined either to shut up or to say, "Well, actualy, I was reading about it yesterday, and I believe that the correct dose (of that medicine that you are about to give of that medicine which could kill the patient if you get the dose wrong!) is 20 mcg, not mg."
IOW the implicit male assumption is we are talking theory and practice, for females personality and feelings.
Or, as GK Chesterton put it, "I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her grand green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer “Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade you would turn me out of the house.”
Actually, I don't think I missed your point. Though appreciative the elucidation. Apologies that I ran with it in another direction.
I've just been mulling a bit about identity, especially in a time of collapse - and how the outer and inner are reflective of each other, how they inform each other and the role manipulation has played in that. The massive distortions in which we've come to know ourselves, each other and the world.
My comment was moving your point beyond the identifying qualifiers we have been taught, are part of the world, that we have adjusted to, and also are part of the larger manipulation.
I have been writing under my given name since I first started commenting online sometime around 2004-5. I saw early how unaccountable some anons could be, and I just decided, I am going to be accountable for everything I say. I've structured my life such that I could say what I want, with no power of anyone to cancel me.
Just lately though, I have been questioning that. Woke TDS is a mental illness, pernicious and mainstream. Even among some friends lately, IRL, expressing not sufficiently liberal opinions has lead to some deeply disturbing conversations, otherwise normal people turning full authoritarian in the blink of the proverbial eye, projecting their fear and hatred of Trump onto me.
Making plans locally I am suddenly mindful when I have never cared, how different the local landscape is, than the community I have become familiar with on Substack particularly. I find myself censoring myself like never before, the more I engage IRL.
It is a volatile time. Anon is suddenly more attractive.
More like self-preservation. I am not censoring myself online. By censoring IRL, I mean merely not trying to provoke mentally ill outbursts in my fellows. But that will ultimately depend on the context, and when it comes down to it, I am not particularly shy about speaking direct and clear to the point of ruthlessness.
If you live in a Blue State, as I do in WA, you definitely have to self censor, to avoid a conversation going off the rails. I have been self censoring less and less as to the effects of the jabs, because the information is now readily available to anyone not so silo’ed that they refuse to look. Still, there is so much pushback. Recently, a younger colleague actually said to me, “please don’t tell me that, because I got two before I realized they were bad and now I am scared.” Well, if you want, I can also tell you what to take to mitigate the damages. But no, that is too much work and she was not interested. I also have very strong feelings about the trans issue due to having my youngest two adult children lost in this Halloween delusion. I refuse to play the pronoun game. I try not to engage on this topic, unless asked, and then just say, “don’t get me started—this is personal to me and you don’t want to hear what I have to say.” That usually shuts them up. This is also why I now merely “Like” on FB and don’t post any more. It is too public (as is NextDoor), and I value my privacy IRL.
MN is trying to out-compete California, for the title of the most pathologically self righteous liberal state, or at least the greater metro area.
No one locally has any idea what I write about. That is fine with me, though I would be sure to find some support, "rocking the boat" is not welcome generally.. I have some plans to build a business here, so I won't be able to hide it, I just need to work out how to navigate that.
As a female attorney, I relate strongly with your thesis. I have been fortunate that I married a wonderful young man I met before I ever went to law school when I was a teaching assistant in the graduate school of English. He is ten years younger but at least my intellectual equal, if not even smarter than I. We both ended up in law school, one after another, following humanities educations (MA for me and BA for him). We married thirty three years ago and discourse is still our relationship anchor. Th3 female style of communication you describe drives me crazy, especially when employed by board organization decision making. I suffered through seven years on a state mediation organization board which eschewed Robert’s Rules of Order for consensus decision making. The hours wasted arguing to get to consensus (and back channel weaseling and pressure) still irritates me, even though I left the board eleven months ago.
During law school, in my early forties, I noted how people treated me differently in public once I told people I was a law student. Prior to that disclosure, I would be viewed as an ignorant middle aged housewife out shopping. Once I revealed my professional education, people would make noise, open their eyes, and the entire demeanor would shift. And, that is probably why, now at the cusp of retirement in my current state, planning a move to a new state where my spouse has been offered a job having obtained license reciprocity, I consider applying for reciprocity myself. I have enjoyed twenty five years of respectful treatment by strangers and don’t relish being thought of in my new community as an old woman (and nothing else). I have thought that the cost and time to obtain reciprocity might be worth it, even if I don’t practice— even if only for the continued respect it engenders.
I can imagine, dear Demi, you had similar thoughts after you experienced the heady respect men give men when you were anonymous, when you identified your sex overtly later in the same chatboards and discovered the diminishment, disregard, and even distain some men have for smart women. I am with you, sister!
This is exactly it. And thank you. If I am known and my educational and/or professional background is also known, I am less likely to experience the issue. If we're coming in cold, there are rare men who will still treat me as a peer and will remain respectful. However, the majority will try to engage in a pissing contest to assert dominance over me (which, I think says more about them than about me - I don't go into conversations assuming it will happen, and I'm just being my usual neutral self). When I invariably win that pissing contest (necessary, unfortunately, but an utter waste of time), the entire dynamic shifts. After that, I'm either a "bitch" or I am "hot." If I am anonymous, none of this occurs because I am well-spoken and comport myself rationally. I hate to say it, but if I were you, I'd get the reciprocity just to have it.
There have been times when I just listen to someone’s manure and smile and nod and let them pontificate about their deluded version of the law and restrain myself from educating them otherwise. I had a client fire me early in 2023 because, as he earnestly explained to me in the court hall, “no offense, I think you just don’t know what you are doing and I need someone experienced to represent.” I told him I sincerely wished him well and hoped his new attorney (a much newer attorney, also new to our state) would meet his expectations. Within two months or less, and no court appearances from his new attorney, the client was back in court asking for a new court appointed attorney, having burned through the $5,000 he paid the privately retained attorney. Of course, I declined, when asked, to be appointed again. He got the nastiness, meanest attorney in our panel. I am certain she told him exactly what I did, but certainly not framed as I try to do with my clients to help them come to the reality of their situations. The last time I saw him, he was on a bench in the hall, waiting for his case to be called. He smiled broadly and greeted me like an old friend. I saw him but didn’t even acknowledge his presence. FAFO.
I am a big believer that educating jerks is like teaching pigs to sing: it is impossible and it just frustrates you and angers the pig. I make a habit of not teaching pigs to sing. I say, let the ignorant pontificate. Eventually they will be knocked off their perch so hard and they will wonder why no one tried to tell them sooner. Like walking around all day with toilet paper trailing out the top of one’s pants.
On the pissing contest for dominance thing, there is an absurd game some men play with other men when shaking hands. One will begin to squeeze the other's hand to show their strength and expect the other to squeeze back to show theirs. If the 2nd man squeezes back even a tiny bit, this incites the first to squeeze even harder. My reaction to this is to never squeeze back, I go limp wrist on purpose give the minimum 2 shakes and retract my hand asap, while giving them a slightly disappointed, disgusted and shaming look. It usually has the desired effect, they leave me alone.
Regarding “the diminishment, disregard, and even distain some men have for smart women”: I guess I got lucky. I was blessed with a powerful spiritual conversion at age twenty two. Part of the conversion was understanding the word of GOD as literally true. Why am I relating this to you? Because Wisdom is personified as (1) being in the beginning of creation (2) being a co-Creator and (3) being feminine. I also took to heart the conventional wisdom that girls (and women) matured more quickly than boys (and men). I was able to see my female peers as probably more smart, intelligent, wise than myself — until they proved otherwise. It also helped for me to see myself as a fool — until I prove otherwise.
Thanks for your post. I wish you the very best of luck and success as you effect your move to a new state.
I recall being on one web forum back in the late 90s and early 2000s. My screen name was Chicolategenii. Chocolate is one of my many nicknames and Genii is a magic magazine. I was just trying to think of a clever magic name. So after being on it for about a year I became real life friends with a guy name Darthwatton. Darth after Darth Vader and Watton was his last time. I didn’t expect this witty very intelligent person who I guessed was a male to be a quiet polite professor who was a Brit Lol. He imagined me to be a short chubby black male. 😃
Those chat days were the best and to return again. I made a few lifelong friends and here is where I began to unravel from my hypnotized state. Off-topic, but I remember first learning about chemtrails on a discussion board. Going outside to check a few days later I saw them. As an aviation enthusiast I recognized these were not regular contrails from a plane. It shocks me that so many pilots in the aviation field do not want to acknowledge the difference between con trails in chemtrails.
Some of them might be scared to acknowledge it, that they might lose their jobs or worse. If a military guy or a pilot starts talking to you like Confucius or in some kind of stilted sideways code, you know there's always some kind of shit they don't want to say head on. It usually starts, "Well, I'll put it this way...." and then you know you're only supposed to listen to every third word and then shoehorn seven more in. ;)
"Relationship compatibility also depends heavily on intellectual alignment. Heterosexual partners closer in IQ with emphasis on knowledge exchange tend to fare better through having and pursuing resonant life values."
—That describes Judy and me. However, while similar in IQ, our types of intelligence are more complementary than they are similar. There are times when I get a bit too philosophical for her and she just smiles and nods 🤣
I read this twice, and hesitate to comment but if I don’t now, it won’t happen. Many investors invest in a creator’s project if she or he has skin in the game. I feel that way about transparency, no amount of persuasive communication without a true identity moves me. Like Bansky bullshit. Antonymy can also be blackmailed. You made some excellent points of the value of transparency. My experience online is that 8 out of 10 times anonymous posters are nasty. And people posting in their own name circumspect. 🤔😂
Ok, but those aren't the whole story. The circumspect persons comment could be useless to you, because it was so circumspect they didn't tell you what you needed to know. And the nasty person may be nasty, and well informed, and bring out some facts you haven't considered, and be just as nasty to the idiot on your thread...
I would generally much rather have a nasty well informed person commenting on my posts than hear 'that was nice' or 'Well, I didn't have anything nice to say, so I didn't say anything'.
Interesting. Not so for me. The value I take in a response is the value I see in the response... having very little to do with the responder. I might well take a response as meaning something different if it came from different people, and if it comes from someone I highly respect I will hesitate to discount it. But I don't care who tells me that 1+1=2... if it really equals 2.
After reading "absent the usual visual signifiers", I imagined a linguistics major- frat boy, walking up to some lady at the bar and dropping this terrible pickup line. "Nice visual signifiers, may I buy you a drink?"
My short experience with this anonymous pseudonym has been a bit inverse from your experience. The few people that have attempted to guess my gender have assumed female, incorrectly. Not sure what their clues were. My best guess is the first name ending with an 'a'. Maybe my penchant for caveats was construed as consensus seeking?
Regardless, I refuse to play identity politics, as arguments should stand solely on merit and soundness of the ideas.
Even if this was the Starfire Codes with Pat, I think I would have behaved similarly towards you.
On a side note, I really enjoyed reading this article, both for the intriguing subject and how articulately you weave together ideas and never shy away from writing at a college level. (I've read that the average reading comprehension level is 5th or 6th grade, sad.)
I think there's another component besides pseudonymity that didn't get well-addressed in John's article and comments (which were great fun): scale and connectivity.
Things were small in the early days. Mailing lists rarely had more than a few dozen participants, IRC got impossible to keep up with beyond a dozen or two active chatters, BBS rarely supported more than a few connections at a time, and when the forums started popping up they might attract a few thousand members but individual threads stayed pretty quiet.
When the whole space is small, your pseudonym has weight and stickiness. Newcomers weren't taken very seriously one way or other, but if you said something really thoughtful you'd be remembered. And if you were a jerk, that would be remembered too. Over time you built a reputation. When scale started exploding in the early 2000s we lost this; online spaces grew from small towns to big cities where everyone was anonymous, real name or no, unless they were *huge*.
Incidentally, there was also an effective redemption ritual: because all your behavior was attached to a pseudonym, if you decided you no longer wanted to be what it represented, you could just shed the pseudonym like an old skin, or a baptism. You didn't have to own everything you had ever said to anybody anywhere as we do now in the world of mass surveillance and transparency.
And you paid a price: if you really wanted to stay "the new you", you had to *be* the new you, or people figured you out pretty quickly. That meant sacrificing relationships, access, benefits, or in the case of MUDs and other early multiplayer games, a whole lot of work.
Of course that could be abused by bad actors, but are we free of abuse now with near total transparency and permanent records? I'd say it's much, much worse. We now have a culture where the most hostile people in the world build their reputation on "taking scalps", digging up decade-old shitposts, taking them out of context, and ruining people with them. And this goes on until someone "takes their scalp" in return, which always, inevitably, happens. And everyone who participates in this sociopathic game gets rewarded for it.
Thanks for the mention. Regarding “When perceived as male, my unconventional opinions were met with interest and respect. But openly identified as female, the exact same perspectives faced automatic skepticism and demands for extensive proof - revealing unconscious bias.” I presume that there were exemptions to this rule.
Presuming that we are building a genuine online community, we are all brothers and sisters, no? If so, some treat our siblings preferentially based on how well we get along and (theoretically) based on how emotionally and intellectually compatible we are; while others treat every single brother and sister with the same amount of dignity and respect and equanimity. And this is also presuming that the family consists of fully functional adults who have already manifested the character traits of empathy (understanding) and sympathy (literally “feeling with”) and compassion and (non-condescending) pity for each others’ suffering and (Buddhist) dukkha. Correct me if I am wrong here. It seems to me that it’s inescapable that some of us treat those who we get to know better preferentially. While others treat everyone equally, with the same (divine) love. Some of us — even as fully functional adults — are more mature at walking the path of enlightenment or living (abiding) in the Spirit of Truth than others. Differences in maturity doesn’t affect the love we have for one another. We’ll never abandon walking in love for one another. To me, this is (partly) what it means to be in the world but not of the world. Those who are of this world do not love. This seems to be a harsh reality. “Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many will wax cold.”
Not a unified family of enlightened and loving fully functional adults yet, eh? 😊
I guess I was getting ahead of myself.
That other online forum you were on — highly militarized and strictly hierarchical — sounded extremely intellectually oriented. I like the highest form of logic, believing (1) logic pursues truth and (2) the highest form of logic is critical analysis and (3) lower forms of logic include the dialectic and the eristic and sophistry. Now, if critical analysis can be brought into harmony with the highest forms of love. Wouldn’t THAT be sublime.
Persona non grata are the intelligent females and non alpha males. They get chewed up everywhere as they cause the fight or flight response with articulated words and wisdom while holding the markers for being not as strong and less then by social training standards. Common sense isn’t that common 🤣. I can see why a woman like you would cause such a stir. Bahahahaha
It’s a long time thing where females have had to assume male identity as writers not simply because times have changed just because of the inherent issues. Not everyone is especially literate.
Out of everyone commenting, only two have shown any sort of disrespect, which serves to prove another point: Everyone on Substack is so awesome that anonymity is NOT required here. WOW.
Thank you, everyone, for making this place AMAZING.
It's always intriguing to me to read about "early adopters" in the 1990s. I used to regard myself as an early Internet adopter because of my participation in online communications in the late 1970s. This would be heavily derided and lampooned by those who came even earlier. Of course, they were innovators and from today's perspective it seems that I was, as well.
To give the general readers a sense of this earlier scope, there is an important novel, Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card that reflects how profile anonymity figured in globally important discussions. Published in 1985, the book mentions Ender Wiggin and his sister Valentine Wiggin who posed as "Locke" and "Demosthenes" in online discussions about how the world should respond to the invasion of the insectoid alien species that nearly wiped out mankind. So, we really did have an Internet before there was a world wide web, before blogs, before YouTube. I know, shut up old man.
But it was not only gender that the Wiggin children wanted to conceal in taking up prominent identities in the same way that "Publius" was used by the authors of the Federalist papers who were, in fact, proposing overt treason and the overthrow of the government of the Articles of Confederation, but also age. You see, Ender Wiggin is a boy of age 6 at the beginning of the novel and all of 13 years old as the novel concludes with the destruction of the alien enemy species' home world by human military systems under Ender's control. His younger sister Valentine and he conceive of the need to influence world events while they are children and they believe that their ideas won't be taken seriously because of their youth. But their ideas are really good and important, and age has nothing to do with it.
I worked on an aspect of anonymity for online discussions way back when. Anonymous remailers were important because it was essential to discuss certain topics without any danger of being identified. Survivors of rape and survivors of childhood violence needed to be able to participate in online discussions (email list services, USEnet newsgroups, yes, go ahead and make fun of the old man for knowing about technologies before Twitter, idgaf) without suffering retribution at the hands of the same people who had harmed them.
So when an officious person such as Nikki Haley demands that nobody is allowed to get on the Internet without her being able to know for sure who that person is, she is going against all of decency and humanity. She is demanding that people who are in danger be identified by their abusers and attackers and subject to ongoing and repeated violence, because Nikki Haley is against freeom, against humanity, is indecent, and wants to enslave mankind. So do most of her identifiable political opponents in the current milieu, so please don't misunderstand me in supposing I am against her in particular. I don't vote because voting is an idiotic way to take choices and I don't support the usurpation government of the constitution because it was written by demon worshippers, kthx.
Anonymity is possible technologically therefore it will prevail. Attempts to prevent it, like the Great Firewall of China, will only impose costs of time and complexity. As coders have long said, another layer of indirection will be found that renders the control of the authoritarians irrelevant.
Yes, I am being self-effacing as an old guy because it is currently unfashionable to be a nearly dead white male, and I'm making fun of those stereotypes. Also because age and infirmity is just as likely to be used against me as youth and inexperience are against the Ender and Valentine Wiggins of today. It's an interesting time we live in. But if I were unable to laugh at myself, I'd be pretty miserable in it. -smile-
The substack community is just something else, so empathetic and warm, feels like home.
I don't think that the male/female divide is the only issue in which anonymity makes a difference. I think there are dozens of ways in which we react to people based upon their percieved status.
Suppose there was an argument going on between 'Tiger' and 'Lion'... ie two anonymous internet aliases. And Tiger and Lion were going back and forth about some issue of politics. I suggest that that entire conversation would look very different, to the participants and to the audience (who were all chipping in) if instead of 'Tiger and Lion' the participants had been known as "Ben Shapiro and Robert Reich' or 'Joe Biden and Donald Trump' or even 'Robert Redford and Tom Hanks' etc etc.
We have all been trained (and I would argue properly trained) from infancy to treat different people differently. We can say 'give me that toy!' to a friend we were playing with... but not our mother. At least, not without consequences :)
And it works both ways. Seriously both ways. Females who are known and females (and celebrities, etc) expect you to act differently.. and act differently.
As far as the use of 'Sir' I would suggest that it isn't as significant as it seems. The English language lacks a neutral equivalent. It is not nearly as gendered as French (and don't get me started on German) but if anyone were to take a fiction book and try to rewrite it to make it completley gender anonymous they would find, for most stories, that the end result would be ugly, almost unreadable, English. And in French or German... impossible. You cannot say 'The' in either language without gender, or 'red', or 'little'.
As we discussed before, I think it would be fascinating to try to work up a list of 'clues' for female vs male speech (average! speech). And to run an experiment where people look at a long form discussion and try to guess the gender of the participants after removing all overt clues. (And not one where we have fudged it by including people who are non-traditional).
Thanks for the mention :)
So, this was eye-opening just now and completely speaks to what you're saying.
A childhood bestie of mine who is an admin in one of the anon groups I used to be in says to me, "The way you felt as a woman under cloak of anonymity in the rooms is the same way I feel about it as a gay man."
This guy is a white straight-acting prepper gun-toting rural Southern gay man.
I'm floored.
Thank YOU, Von! :)
Well, as a linguist not so much.
There are literally thousands of gender marked words in English. There are perhaps five or ten for homosexual and similar numbers for other sexual issues. You can easily and without thought carry on consersations all day every day without ever using a sex-preference marker unless the subject is about that. You would have to struggle to speak for five minutes without using a gender marked word, and probably several.
The space we interacted in was military style and highly hierarchical. So that's very telling as well.
>> if anyone were to take a fiction book and try to rewrite it to make it completely gender anonymous they would find, for most stories, that the end result would be ugly, almost unreadable, English.
You'd think so, and yet...
I recall reading a book to my kids when they were little, called "The Grandma Mix-up." After reading in multiple times, it occurred to me to check my assumption about the sex of the main character, Pip. Looking carefully through the book, I could not find a single case where the character was referred to in a gender-specific way - and hadn't noticed it.
Now it's not a very long story - maybe 64 sparse pages (reading level 2) - but the author's ability to carry it off without it sounding odd was quite impressive.
And I did notice what you did here... but it wasn't easy. In a free flow conversation unless you are a genius at monitoring your word use you would have slipped up :)
Yeah... for one character. But you did mention the name of the book... which was already gendered. I would guess that there are also dozens of other gendered words in the book, if not hundreds.
And I don't think it was easy to write.
Ok, so I read the book. Well, saw it on youtube. And it is incredibly gendered. Gendered in clothes etc etc. But it does, pretty well but still awkwardly, avoid the gender of exactly one character in the book. A lot of workarounds to make it work. And actually based on the rest of the book, they do gender the character, but it is subtle.
You make an excellent point re Tiger and Lion example.
Our subjective filters are activated by objective perceptions (lion and tiger, neutral, Trump and Biden, triggering) - these in turn are activated by by those internal filters, informed by many external distortions....round and round it goes.
Basically we're in a house of mirrors. Which reflections snag us, pull us in? Wherever we feel a need to defend, wherever we perceive an attack, we have an identity snag. Not a problem as long as you know it's not really 'you.'
The image isn't the thing its reflecting anymore than a map is the territory.
Interesting stuff.
Well, I'm not sure you got my point.
My point is that when we speak it is actually important to whom we are speaking. The relationship we are in may very well correctly determine not only what we should say, but how words will be heard.
Let me give a very sexist example. If I, as a male, am in a conversation with another male, and I say, "No, that's wrong..." the normal implication is that we are speaking about theory, and on that level I am disagreeing with his theory about what the underlying truth is. If I, as a male, say the same thing to a female, the normal response will be for her to hear it as a personal attack. So bluntly put. I didn't give any clues I wasn't trying to attack her personally. I would be more inclined either to shut up or to say, "Well, actualy, I was reading about it yesterday, and I believe that the correct dose (of that medicine that you are about to give of that medicine which could kill the patient if you get the dose wrong!) is 20 mcg, not mg."
IOW the implicit male assumption is we are talking theory and practice, for females personality and feelings.
Or, as GK Chesterton put it, "I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her grand green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer “Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade you would turn me out of the house.”
I love that G.K. Chesterton quip.
Actually, I don't think I missed your point. Though appreciative the elucidation. Apologies that I ran with it in another direction.
I've just been mulling a bit about identity, especially in a time of collapse - and how the outer and inner are reflective of each other, how they inform each other and the role manipulation has played in that. The massive distortions in which we've come to know ourselves, each other and the world.
My comment was moving your point beyond the identifying qualifiers we have been taught, are part of the world, that we have adjusted to, and also are part of the larger manipulation.
Thanks.
Yeah, OK, then I will just say I didn't get your point. Still don't, actually. Maybe I need a few more words :)
I have been writing under my given name since I first started commenting online sometime around 2004-5. I saw early how unaccountable some anons could be, and I just decided, I am going to be accountable for everything I say. I've structured my life such that I could say what I want, with no power of anyone to cancel me.
Just lately though, I have been questioning that. Woke TDS is a mental illness, pernicious and mainstream. Even among some friends lately, IRL, expressing not sufficiently liberal opinions has lead to some deeply disturbing conversations, otherwise normal people turning full authoritarian in the blink of the proverbial eye, projecting their fear and hatred of Trump onto me.
Making plans locally I am suddenly mindful when I have never cared, how different the local landscape is, than the community I have become familiar with on Substack particularly. I find myself censoring myself like never before, the more I engage IRL.
It is a volatile time. Anon is suddenly more attractive.
Yeah, so out of fear you are censoring yourself?
More like self-preservation. I am not censoring myself online. By censoring IRL, I mean merely not trying to provoke mentally ill outbursts in my fellows. But that will ultimately depend on the context, and when it comes down to it, I am not particularly shy about speaking direct and clear to the point of ruthlessness.
Also, for the record, I prefer to be friendly and good natured
If you live in a Blue State, as I do in WA, you definitely have to self censor, to avoid a conversation going off the rails. I have been self censoring less and less as to the effects of the jabs, because the information is now readily available to anyone not so silo’ed that they refuse to look. Still, there is so much pushback. Recently, a younger colleague actually said to me, “please don’t tell me that, because I got two before I realized they were bad and now I am scared.” Well, if you want, I can also tell you what to take to mitigate the damages. But no, that is too much work and she was not interested. I also have very strong feelings about the trans issue due to having my youngest two adult children lost in this Halloween delusion. I refuse to play the pronoun game. I try not to engage on this topic, unless asked, and then just say, “don’t get me started—this is personal to me and you don’t want to hear what I have to say.” That usually shuts them up. This is also why I now merely “Like” on FB and don’t post any more. It is too public (as is NextDoor), and I value my privacy IRL.
MN is trying to out-compete California, for the title of the most pathologically self righteous liberal state, or at least the greater metro area.
No one locally has any idea what I write about. That is fine with me, though I would be sure to find some support, "rocking the boat" is not welcome generally.. I have some plans to build a business here, so I won't be able to hide it, I just need to work out how to navigate that.
As a female attorney, I relate strongly with your thesis. I have been fortunate that I married a wonderful young man I met before I ever went to law school when I was a teaching assistant in the graduate school of English. He is ten years younger but at least my intellectual equal, if not even smarter than I. We both ended up in law school, one after another, following humanities educations (MA for me and BA for him). We married thirty three years ago and discourse is still our relationship anchor. Th3 female style of communication you describe drives me crazy, especially when employed by board organization decision making. I suffered through seven years on a state mediation organization board which eschewed Robert’s Rules of Order for consensus decision making. The hours wasted arguing to get to consensus (and back channel weaseling and pressure) still irritates me, even though I left the board eleven months ago.
During law school, in my early forties, I noted how people treated me differently in public once I told people I was a law student. Prior to that disclosure, I would be viewed as an ignorant middle aged housewife out shopping. Once I revealed my professional education, people would make noise, open their eyes, and the entire demeanor would shift. And, that is probably why, now at the cusp of retirement in my current state, planning a move to a new state where my spouse has been offered a job having obtained license reciprocity, I consider applying for reciprocity myself. I have enjoyed twenty five years of respectful treatment by strangers and don’t relish being thought of in my new community as an old woman (and nothing else). I have thought that the cost and time to obtain reciprocity might be worth it, even if I don’t practice— even if only for the continued respect it engenders.
I can imagine, dear Demi, you had similar thoughts after you experienced the heady respect men give men when you were anonymous, when you identified your sex overtly later in the same chatboards and discovered the diminishment, disregard, and even distain some men have for smart women. I am with you, sister!
This is exactly it. And thank you. If I am known and my educational and/or professional background is also known, I am less likely to experience the issue. If we're coming in cold, there are rare men who will still treat me as a peer and will remain respectful. However, the majority will try to engage in a pissing contest to assert dominance over me (which, I think says more about them than about me - I don't go into conversations assuming it will happen, and I'm just being my usual neutral self). When I invariably win that pissing contest (necessary, unfortunately, but an utter waste of time), the entire dynamic shifts. After that, I'm either a "bitch" or I am "hot." If I am anonymous, none of this occurs because I am well-spoken and comport myself rationally. I hate to say it, but if I were you, I'd get the reciprocity just to have it.
There have been times when I just listen to someone’s manure and smile and nod and let them pontificate about their deluded version of the law and restrain myself from educating them otherwise. I had a client fire me early in 2023 because, as he earnestly explained to me in the court hall, “no offense, I think you just don’t know what you are doing and I need someone experienced to represent.” I told him I sincerely wished him well and hoped his new attorney (a much newer attorney, also new to our state) would meet his expectations. Within two months or less, and no court appearances from his new attorney, the client was back in court asking for a new court appointed attorney, having burned through the $5,000 he paid the privately retained attorney. Of course, I declined, when asked, to be appointed again. He got the nastiness, meanest attorney in our panel. I am certain she told him exactly what I did, but certainly not framed as I try to do with my clients to help them come to the reality of their situations. The last time I saw him, he was on a bench in the hall, waiting for his case to be called. He smiled broadly and greeted me like an old friend. I saw him but didn’t even acknowledge his presence. FAFO.
I am a big believer that educating jerks is like teaching pigs to sing: it is impossible and it just frustrates you and angers the pig. I make a habit of not teaching pigs to sing. I say, let the ignorant pontificate. Eventually they will be knocked off their perch so hard and they will wonder why no one tried to tell them sooner. Like walking around all day with toilet paper trailing out the top of one’s pants.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
On the pissing contest for dominance thing, there is an absurd game some men play with other men when shaking hands. One will begin to squeeze the other's hand to show their strength and expect the other to squeeze back to show theirs. If the 2nd man squeezes back even a tiny bit, this incites the first to squeeze even harder. My reaction to this is to never squeeze back, I go limp wrist on purpose give the minimum 2 shakes and retract my hand asap, while giving them a slightly disappointed, disgusted and shaming look. It usually has the desired effect, they leave me alone.
Regarding “the diminishment, disregard, and even distain some men have for smart women”: I guess I got lucky. I was blessed with a powerful spiritual conversion at age twenty two. Part of the conversion was understanding the word of GOD as literally true. Why am I relating this to you? Because Wisdom is personified as (1) being in the beginning of creation (2) being a co-Creator and (3) being feminine. I also took to heart the conventional wisdom that girls (and women) matured more quickly than boys (and men). I was able to see my female peers as probably more smart, intelligent, wise than myself — until they proved otherwise. It also helped for me to see myself as a fool — until I prove otherwise.
Thanks for your post. I wish you the very best of luck and success as you effect your move to a new state.
I recall being on one web forum back in the late 90s and early 2000s. My screen name was Chicolategenii. Chocolate is one of my many nicknames and Genii is a magic magazine. I was just trying to think of a clever magic name. So after being on it for about a year I became real life friends with a guy name Darthwatton. Darth after Darth Vader and Watton was his last time. I didn’t expect this witty very intelligent person who I guessed was a male to be a quiet polite professor who was a Brit Lol. He imagined me to be a short chubby black male. 😃
That's awesome!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Those chat days were the best and to return again. I made a few lifelong friends and here is where I began to unravel from my hypnotized state. Off-topic, but I remember first learning about chemtrails on a discussion board. Going outside to check a few days later I saw them. As an aviation enthusiast I recognized these were not regular contrails from a plane. It shocks me that so many pilots in the aviation field do not want to acknowledge the difference between con trails in chemtrails.
Some of them might be scared to acknowledge it, that they might lose their jobs or worse. If a military guy or a pilot starts talking to you like Confucius or in some kind of stilted sideways code, you know there's always some kind of shit they don't want to say head on. It usually starts, "Well, I'll put it this way...." and then you know you're only supposed to listen to every third word and then shoehorn seven more in. ;)
Yes! My uncle who was a Colonel responded in code and took his hearing aids out when he was elderly. 😂
Yeah, they're not saying anything. 😂😂😂
😏😆
"Relationship compatibility also depends heavily on intellectual alignment. Heterosexual partners closer in IQ with emphasis on knowledge exchange tend to fare better through having and pursuing resonant life values."
—That describes Judy and me. However, while similar in IQ, our types of intelligence are more complementary than they are similar. There are times when I get a bit too philosophical for her and she just smiles and nods 🤣
That was brilliant and very insightful.
I could pull many lines from this essay to quote, but I'll choose one:
"We get the discourse we tolerate so we must model the change we want to see."
Exactly right.
Thanks, worth re-reading, which I will do.
Thank you so much, Kathleen! I'm honored! Sending my love!! xo
Sending love right back! 😘
👍😊
I read this twice, and hesitate to comment but if I don’t now, it won’t happen. Many investors invest in a creator’s project if she or he has skin in the game. I feel that way about transparency, no amount of persuasive communication without a true identity moves me. Like Bansky bullshit. Antonymy can also be blackmailed. You made some excellent points of the value of transparency. My experience online is that 8 out of 10 times anonymous posters are nasty. And people posting in their own name circumspect. 🤔😂
I don't blame you for being reluctant to address it. I am too. I usually don't talk about it at all.
Ok, but those aren't the whole story. The circumspect persons comment could be useless to you, because it was so circumspect they didn't tell you what you needed to know. And the nasty person may be nasty, and well informed, and bring out some facts you haven't considered, and be just as nasty to the idiot on your thread...
I would generally much rather have a nasty well informed person commenting on my posts than hear 'that was nice' or 'Well, I didn't have anything nice to say, so I didn't say anything'.
I didn’t convey it well, that neither circumspect nor anonymous people have any value for me online.
Interesting. Not so for me. The value I take in a response is the value I see in the response... having very little to do with the responder. I might well take a response as meaning something different if it came from different people, and if it comes from someone I highly respect I will hesitate to discount it. But I don't care who tells me that 1+1=2... if it really equals 2.
Love your work, even if you happen to be a female ;) (I have 5 sisters)
After reading "absent the usual visual signifiers", I imagined a linguistics major- frat boy, walking up to some lady at the bar and dropping this terrible pickup line. "Nice visual signifiers, may I buy you a drink?"
My short experience with this anonymous pseudonym has been a bit inverse from your experience. The few people that have attempted to guess my gender have assumed female, incorrectly. Not sure what their clues were. My best guess is the first name ending with an 'a'. Maybe my penchant for caveats was construed as consensus seeking?
Regardless, I refuse to play identity politics, as arguments should stand solely on merit and soundness of the ideas.
Even if this was the Starfire Codes with Pat, I think I would have behaved similarly towards you.
On a side note, I really enjoyed reading this article, both for the intriguing subject and how articulately you weave together ideas and never shy away from writing at a college level. (I've read that the average reading comprehension level is 5th or 6th grade, sad.)
This resonated so deeply with me. ♥️
Thank you, Kaya!! 🥰
I think there's another component besides pseudonymity that didn't get well-addressed in John's article and comments (which were great fun): scale and connectivity.
Things were small in the early days. Mailing lists rarely had more than a few dozen participants, IRC got impossible to keep up with beyond a dozen or two active chatters, BBS rarely supported more than a few connections at a time, and when the forums started popping up they might attract a few thousand members but individual threads stayed pretty quiet.
When the whole space is small, your pseudonym has weight and stickiness. Newcomers weren't taken very seriously one way or other, but if you said something really thoughtful you'd be remembered. And if you were a jerk, that would be remembered too. Over time you built a reputation. When scale started exploding in the early 2000s we lost this; online spaces grew from small towns to big cities where everyone was anonymous, real name or no, unless they were *huge*.
Incidentally, there was also an effective redemption ritual: because all your behavior was attached to a pseudonym, if you decided you no longer wanted to be what it represented, you could just shed the pseudonym like an old skin, or a baptism. You didn't have to own everything you had ever said to anybody anywhere as we do now in the world of mass surveillance and transparency.
And you paid a price: if you really wanted to stay "the new you", you had to *be* the new you, or people figured you out pretty quickly. That meant sacrificing relationships, access, benefits, or in the case of MUDs and other early multiplayer games, a whole lot of work.
Of course that could be abused by bad actors, but are we free of abuse now with near total transparency and permanent records? I'd say it's much, much worse. We now have a culture where the most hostile people in the world build their reputation on "taking scalps", digging up decade-old shitposts, taking them out of context, and ruining people with them. And this goes on until someone "takes their scalp" in return, which always, inevitably, happens. And everyone who participates in this sociopathic game gets rewarded for it.
This felt key: "Anonymity Versus Openness Depends on Purpose and Platform"
Thanks for the mention. Regarding “When perceived as male, my unconventional opinions were met with interest and respect. But openly identified as female, the exact same perspectives faced automatic skepticism and demands for extensive proof - revealing unconscious bias.” I presume that there were exemptions to this rule.
Presuming that we are building a genuine online community, we are all brothers and sisters, no? If so, some treat our siblings preferentially based on how well we get along and (theoretically) based on how emotionally and intellectually compatible we are; while others treat every single brother and sister with the same amount of dignity and respect and equanimity. And this is also presuming that the family consists of fully functional adults who have already manifested the character traits of empathy (understanding) and sympathy (literally “feeling with”) and compassion and (non-condescending) pity for each others’ suffering and (Buddhist) dukkha. Correct me if I am wrong here. It seems to me that it’s inescapable that some of us treat those who we get to know better preferentially. While others treat everyone equally, with the same (divine) love. Some of us — even as fully functional adults — are more mature at walking the path of enlightenment or living (abiding) in the Spirit of Truth than others. Differences in maturity doesn’t affect the love we have for one another. We’ll never abandon walking in love for one another. To me, this is (partly) what it means to be in the world but not of the world. Those who are of this world do not love. This seems to be a harsh reality. “Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many will wax cold.”
What you're saying is happening right here, right now. Some are engaging with me respectfully as a peer, and some are not. :)
Not a unified family of enlightened and loving fully functional adults yet, eh? 😊
I guess I was getting ahead of myself.
That other online forum you were on — highly militarized and strictly hierarchical — sounded extremely intellectually oriented. I like the highest form of logic, believing (1) logic pursues truth and (2) the highest form of logic is critical analysis and (3) lower forms of logic include the dialectic and the eristic and sophistry. Now, if critical analysis can be brought into harmony with the highest forms of love. Wouldn’t THAT be sublime.
It worked well there. Huge community, too. Strict and fair. Completely meritocracy focused.
Biases are a lot like illusions. Some illusions seem to be necessary. It’s extremely hard work discarding illusions.
Persona non grata are the intelligent females and non alpha males. They get chewed up everywhere as they cause the fight or flight response with articulated words and wisdom while holding the markers for being not as strong and less then by social training standards. Common sense isn’t that common 🤣. I can see why a woman like you would cause such a stir. Bahahahaha
It’s a long time thing where females have had to assume male identity as writers not simply because times have changed just because of the inherent issues. Not everyone is especially literate.