I won’t pretend that being a mother to a small child is the most stimulating thing in the whole wide world. After all, the little being you’re caring for is still developing — and unable to carry on a conversation.
The first several weeks before baby Rocketship began responding to my flirting were the hardest. I found myself doing inane things, like shaking a rattle in her face, hoping she would follow it with her eyes. I ended up tweeting this, and days later getting this response:
I went and investigated this guy –I have a stalker, and so I was afraid that he had found me, for all that I don’t do much to disguise my identity on the internet. It appears that he’s just an asshole who decided to look at the #momtweets hash tag and make fun of women, and that for some reason, he aimed his ire particularly at me, and only me.
I tweeted the discovery of my daughter tracking her eyes simply because I realized how ridiculous it was to spend so much time shaking a rattle for her. It was making fun of myself. But this mysterious stranger clearly hated women — and he seemed to hate me i for being in on what he seemed to think was his private joke.
I reported him to Twitter for spam, but otherwise did not respond.
Have you been harassed on the internet? How did you deal with it?
Practicing Empathy 
Aw, I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t know why people feel the need to lash out at each other on the internet like that when, in real life, most people wouldn’t.
The only bit of harassment that I remember at the moment dates back to my livejournal, shortly after I started dating Matt. I was being a goofy fangirl, and I decided that I was NOT going to listen to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack for the XX amount of days leading up to the dvd release. I mean, it was a livejournal, I was 18, and I thought it was clear that I was being silly on purpose. I posted something about how it had been X number of days, and I had the shakes. Someone anonymously posted that I needed help, that I needed to turn to Jesus for my salvation and rid myself of idols, etc. It made me sick to my stomach, and I believe I cried. Matt, unprompted, defended me, though I didn’t say anything for myself, because I was too shaken/shocked.
Periodically, I’ve shared things and they’ve made people upset, or I’ve accidentally run over social boundaries, and over the years, this has made me much more filtered. Some of it has been good, sometimes though, I miss the flamboyant transparency I had. There’s still part of me that feels the need to justify whenever I want to “geek out” about something.
All that said, if I were you, I wouldn’t have done anything different in that scenario. People like that aren’t worth responding to. Last night on the way home from Target, some teenage girls screamed something at me out their car window – I didn’t catch what they said, except for the last two words “three hours!”, and then the girl ducked her head back and and started giggling with her cohorts. Part of me wants to know what they said, though I’m sure it was probably intended to be offensive. But I also know that they’re juvenile, and it wasn’t worth rewarding their behavior with acknowledgment. So I guess that’s how I try to think of harassment … in not responding to it, I’m not rewarding it.
I think you handled the situation with grace. Well done.
I can’t really answer your question, though, because I’ve been rather fortunate so far.
Normally, I’d block them, but I’m nOt sure if you can do that on twitter. Check it out. Also, what a dbag!
When I made bad choices last summer term, a certain alumnus of a certain fraternity started sending me texts. They said some pretty awful and terrible things. It was at the point that I locked text messages from him and a few of my responses asking him to please stop and leave me alone in case he kept it up and I had to go to an authority of some sort about it.
He would sometimes go a couple weeks without doing anything, then I would get something at 3 am while I was studying that said “Stay the f*** away from (Greek Letters). We have no more blood left for you to suck.” In the end, he stopped. We have had no contact in about seven months.
I know that I made mistakes and that I should have made better choices, but that is no excuse for harrassment, especially when I was already avoiding (Greek Letters) like the plague. And to think they let that boy graduate and think he was so grown up…
❤