What's it like to be a woman posting online?
We have a pretty good idea. At this site, the second we noted Ava and C.I. wrote the TV commentaries themselves (about a month after they'd been doing it), the hate mails poured in. Previously, the TV commentaries had been a group effort. What readers noted in their e-mails were the comments Ava and C.I. were coming up with, so we turned it over to them. Then we grew tired of hearing from friends, relatives and professors about how something was funny or "Good point about that TV show" and decided to give them credit to avoid the embarrassing moment after a relative (especially) has praised something non-stop when you have to reply, "Thanks, glad you loved it so much. But that was written by Ava and C.I."
Once it was announced here, not only did the hate mail and threats start coming in on their TV commentaries as they went up, but things that had gone up prior to the announcement suddenly garnered new attention. In two cases, the men (yes, it was men) had actually written in real time to defend their fave shows. They'd explained why they were right and Ty had replied to them. But learning that the pieces were written by women reactivated those two brave men who suddenly had to weigh in all over again and this time with cursing and threatening. We know the kind of e-mails Betty's received and Rebecca and Kat and Elaine.
Last Sunday, Elaine and Mike mentioned an idea they had. When Elaine started her site (Like Maria Said Paz), she and Mike (Mikey Likes It!) often noted the same items in their posts. So, for instance, they would take a headline from Democracy Now! and you could go to their sites and get two opinions on the event. Due to time constraints two Fridays ago, they revived that for one post. But last Sunday, the subject of the difference in e-mails to women and men came up and they said they could note the same things each night and come back with some results on the e-mails.
There were limitations going in. Chief among them, the fact that Elaine only blogs four times a week. Thursday nights she does group and doesn't blog. Mike blogs five times a week at his site. There's also the fact that their commentary could differ a bit.
But only a bit. Long before they were a couple, they were already "the blog twins" (as Rebecca dubbed them). So since they generally agree the only real differences is that, when upset, Mike jabs repeatedly and Elaine builds to an explosion. (That's true offline as well.) Elaine's strong conclusions would be offset, we assumed, by the fact that Mike's knocking the 'newsmakers' around a bit from the start.
49 piece of hate e-mail came in on the 9 posts. It's not an even number, but you'd expect it be divided reasonably even.
The 49 all went to Elaine. It was suggested she be strapped to a war head dropped in Baghdad in the most (or only) imaginative e-mail. The other 48 wrote of choking her, slitting her throat and raping her. Ironically, one man, Doug Z, wrote to both of them regarding their Wednesday posts. Of Mike's "Baby Obama makes a stinky," Doug Z was brief: "I think if you studied the Senator's positions, you'd see he's really a strong candidate." Doug Z saved his head of steam for Elaine. Writing her about "Obama the War Hawk speaks like an idiot," five hours after he wrote Mike, Doug Z declared, "I could slit your throat and piss down it. Where do you get off? Stupid b**ch, when Barack Obama is prez, you'll still be an idiotic c**t trying to get laid."
We've added the "*," just FYI. Mike found about Doug Z's e-mail to Elaine on Thursday. He wrote Doug Z who replied, "Sorry dude. Didn't know she was your girl."
Elaine heard no "Sorry dudette."
In reply to another e-mail from Mike, Doug Z explained that, though there really wasn't much difference between the opinions expressed at other sites, Elaine's post made him "mad and pissed. I just didn't like her talking about Barack Obama that way." Though Doug Z denies it, we think the "her" in the sentence is the reason Elaine got the e-mail she did.
49 hate mails came in and all went to Elaine. As Elaine notes, "Mike should have a larger audience than I do. He's been doing it longer, he posts more often and in the last three or so weeks, he's been linked to or reposted twice by non-community sites." And his tags are read by Technorati so someone using that tool to search for posts on certain individuals should come across Mike much more easily than Elaine.