Crapping All Over Beauty

No, not literally crapping; this isn’t that sort of website.

Over on Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex, Figleaf posted a long entry about folks who come to blogs where there are nekkid pictures, only to leave strongly derisive comments about the nekkid pictures in question. He likened such folks to trolls, and suggested deleting the body-critical comments plus the standard troll cure: ignoring them.

I posted a long comment over there, which this post mostly duplicates, not because I disagree with the prescription (I don’t) but because I don’t think the nasty body-critical comments are really deliberate trolling behavior. A true troll knows he’s a troll; these guys (and they are always guys) are just bringing to the internet their “normal” obnoxious behavior from daily life.

Here at ErosBlog, I’ve always been ruthless about deleting anything that attempts to drag down my attempt at maintaining a body-positive, sex-positive, kink-friendly editorial tone. For example, awhile back I posted some public nude shots of Kirsten Dunst, and attracted a whole host of folks commenting on how ugly her breasts supposedly are. She’s pretty by any reasonable measure, so what’s up with that? I dunno, but the ugly comments I had to delete far outnumbered the ones that remain.

What I’ve learned running a sex blog is that there are a whole host of guys whose only mode of discourse about bodily appearance is to make a negative comment. I think perhaps it originates in adolescent one-upsmanship; one guy says “Sally’s hot, I’d like to do her” and the other guys all say “No, man, she’s a pig, she’s got a huge ass” as a way of belittling the first guy. However it started, the result is a fairly large class of guys whose reflex response whenever they see an erotic picture is to say something mean and ugly about the body depicted.

It’s clearly an act of emotional aggression, some sort of attempt to establish superiority by expressing contempt for that which other people consider beautiful. An extreme form of this (which I’ve seen in various places on the internet) is the “It’s a tranny” game. The way the “game” is played is to post a picture of an unknown but pretty woman, and then wait until other men admit that the woman shown is lustworthy. Then the trap springs, as the original poster (or others) assert “It’s a tranny!” It doesn’t have to be true; the point is merely to score points by belittling another man’s opinions about sexual attractiveness.

I guess the point of all this is to suggest to other bloggers that they not take it quite so personally. If you post your boobs or butt on your blog and some nasty guy makes a rude comment, it’s possible that he doesn’t hate you specifically and didn’t stop by your blog to cause trouble specifically for you. More likely, he’s just a boorish lout who says “fat ass!” by reflex whenever he sees a pretty butt. It’s not aimed at you at all; it’s male posturing aimed at the other men who are admiring your ass.

Sure, delete his comment, just the way you’d evict a stinky drunk who stumbled into your living room from the street. But don’t take the comments so much to heart, any more than you’d worry about the good opinion of the drunk.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Crapping All Over Beauty, Redux