Comments Elsewhere

That Girl:

Personally, I find it more informative to have certain kinds of trolls. Not only do they force someone to clarify their argument and hone it, but they allow a response to be made to an opinion that will be found in the “real world”.

Well, “people who disagree with you” aren’t the same as trolls. (To take a real-life example, can you identify anything that Robert has helped clarify or contributed in this thread, other than contempt and distraction?)

That said, as a lot of people have pointed out, it’s a mistake to think that just because a particular community is, say, limited to feminists (or even some particular faction within feminism) doesn’t mean that everyone is just sitting around agreeing with each other and clapping themselves on the back. It just means that disagreements, and the work in “clarifying” and “honing,” occurs on a different level. Instead of constantly focusing on apologetics to non-feminists (or, in this case, belligerent anti-feminists) and explanations of The Basics to be delivered to people who don’t get them, it allows space for feminists to talk and analyze and argue about different kinds and different levels of disagreements, or to come at it from a different angle than they would have to if they’re constantly trying to anticipate and ward off responses from the bellowing blowhard brigade. That can be valuable too and I think it’s true that there is not nearly enough space for it in public feminist spaces on the Internet, partly due to the deliberate disruption of belligerent anti-feminists.

Amp:

In short, I think there’s room in feminism for a variety of approaches to running a blog. I disagree with the folks who have told me that I can’t be a feminist unless I run my blog the way they want me to run my blog. Feminism isn’t all-encompassing, but neither is there one and only one True Path of Feminist Blogging.

Amp, in principle I’m really inclined to agreeing with this. But it worries me that it just so happens that the two weblogs where this kind of moderation policy is an issue just happen to be the two most prominent weblogs run by male feminists, and I, another male feminists, am ready to defend it. In principle it seems perfectly reasonable to say that we ought to let a thousand flowers bloom. But why is it that this particular style of moderation seems especially to appeal to male feminist bloggers? Even if it is, on balance, justified, it certainly seems like that’s a question that you and Hugo and I ought to be asking ourselves.