I feel like this behavior goes wayyyy beyond what the term “trolley” implies and should be redirected to a more severe term like “stalker” or “harassment”. Pretty much what @technogeekagain was saying, too.
trolley /v.,n./ [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from the phrase “driving trollies for newbies” which in turn comes from mainstream “driving trollies”, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed trolley is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate trolley. If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.
Some people claim that the trolley is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a trolley is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial.
Could you tell us more about the female trolls who stalk, harass and make rape and death threats ? I am sure there are some, but I strongly doubt that for every uber vindictive and predatory troll who has engaged in a pattern of severely threatening behaviour online that there is a 50/50 breakdown along gender lines* ? (*Based on the binary assumptions of gender).
Citation needed. There is a massive volume of literature concerning the dynamics of violence. The concept of mutual combat is often wrongly applied to intimate partner violence. Law enforcement often arrests and charges women who have been physically assaulted by their male partners, because the women physically fought back from an assault in self defense. Mutual combat implies that the people engaged in an altercation are equals of similar size, physical strength, age, skill. It does not take into account things like race, economic, educational or social status. See: Trayvon Martin.
Women are not outraged, offended and terrorized by rape threats because “the media” told us to be - it is because approximately 25% of North American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Most sexual assaults are never brought to trial, and even fewer rapists are charged or incarcerated. However, victim blaming is rampant. Most rape kits are never processed by police departments due to lack of funding, and even when there are photographic and video recordings of sexual assaults occurring, the victim has to go to great lengths to prove that she was not “asking for it” (see: Steubenville, Reteah Parsons). You might think that you don’t know anyone who was raped, but trust me you do. Just because they did not tell you about this, does not mean that this did not happen to them. You might also be surprised that you know rapists, too. They don’t consider themselves rapists, probably, just guys who had to “get her drunk” or ignore her protests, cries, etc.
Do some investigation into the extremely flawed world of self-help “co-dependency”(much of which has been written by authors with zero psychology or social work education/credentials) before you toss that terminology around. It is another form of victim blaming, where the bullied or abused is considered to be responsible for somehow being able to prevent the abuse that happens to them. Because you personally do not identify as any sort of victim, does not mean that other people are not victims of things that you have not experienced. Erasing their experiences by claiming they lack any faculties of critical thought is hateful. Perhaps you take issue with “Social Justice Warriors” because they take issue with things you cannot see like privilege, racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, etc.
The concept of abuser is generally very correctly applied. The issue is not the “sheer prevalence” of the application - but rather the astonishing prevalence of abusive tactics that are used to attempt to bully, silence, intimidate, threaten and harass particular targets online. Abuse is generally not one incident, once. It is a repeated pattern. Abuse may masquerade as anger, but it is about an attempt to control, by a person using power over v.s. power with.
Lucky you, for not being on the receiving end of this sort of violence, so you can choose to believe that things are not as bad as they are.
I want to start here, at your end, because this is your “trump card”. You’re making a boatload of assumptions and engaging in the very sort of zero-sum thinking that I’m critiquing. Aside from making it difficult to have a conversation, you’re just making an emotional appeal.
The above assumes a few things: 1) that you’ve been the victim of “this sort of violence”, and 2) that I have not been the victim of “this sort of violence”.
I want to quash that right now because I spent years in an emotionally and physically abusive relationship. I’m not some asshole, I’m just not the “right” kind of victim for this narrative.
Ironic, as you’re calling for me to do something you show no interest in. I’m calling this what it is: a trap. We’ll circle back around to this.
You’ve obviously swallowed the political points whole. You’re right that there’s a “massive volume of literature concerning the dynamics of violence”, and it supports my assertion that the majority (not all and certainly not a reason to dismiss other models) of intimate partner violence is reciprocal. Here’s your citation. The study found a prevalence of violence in about 1/4 of relationships. Of these violent relationships just under 50% were reciprocal and of the remaining instances, 70% were found that women were the perpetrators of unidirectional intimate partner violence.
Wow. That’s pretty much the opposite of your argument isn’t it?
And here’s another gem from that study (emphasis mine):
Conclusions. The context of the violence (reciprocal vs nonreciprocal) is a strong predictor of reported injury. Prevention approaches that address the escalation of partner violence may be needed to address reciprocal violence.
I mean, it’s almost as if I base my position that a more “whole” view of the issue would solve more problems on some sort of fact.
Thanks for being part of the problem. It’s easy to invalidate and twist the discourse. As long as you engage in poor faith and rely on your magical hypotheses (like “Patriarchy” and “Rape Culture”) to solve all of your cognitive disconnects, we’re just all going to keep fighting. If you take a step back and wipe the confirmation bias from your clouded eyes, you’ll find that there is a severe majority of people who want to make this whole issue better but who aren’t allowed to be involved because every time someone like myself opens my mouth, I’m going to get dogpiled by accusations of sexism.
Somethings as serious as abuse and rape are simply being made a mockery of, and it isn’t by a poorly thought-out Tosh. You’re placing the political advocacy of a single group (women, or more accurately middle-class women) over the needs of the whole population. You turn a blind eye to the idea that complexity and context are an inherent facet of any social construction in favor of simplistic “men are bad, women are good” formulation. There never exists context or progression, for someone like you, because that contradicts the dogma.
