january 29, 2001. From the "may you live in interesting times" file: On Friday night the Boy & I had a big stupid fight. I can't even remember what it was about, really - just that I sulked in the office for hours before going to bed & systematically stealing his portion of the bedclothes. While I was sulking, I did a heck of a lot of netsurfing. It was pretty aimless for the most part; I was just killing time until phase two of the argument. In the course of this aimlessness, I visited a Ontario punk site run by friends of my brother. My purpose in doing this was to sniff around a bit & maybe see some photos of Nic. And amid the butt-ugly photos of my brother doing his best Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel impersonation, I discovered a message board. Aha! I thought. I will post an anonymous message complaining about the ugliness of Nic-pics. Then I will see who responds... I did this & went to bed, eagerly anticipating the next day. On Saturday morning I woke up, yawned like a cat & padded over to the computer to check my harvest of message board. Then I discovered that the entire board had been wiped, thanks to a bunch of negative comments made by other people. What a gyp! I thought, and shuffled off to eat cereal. On Sunday afternoon (after my recruitment into the choir, that is), I decided to re-run the experiment. As I was playing around with the forum, I noticed a thread called something like "millions of damn christians". The message listed his "top ten christian hating songs" and a bunch of anti-Christian quotes. There were three follow-ups to this post, all consisting of people saying stuff like "that band's cool, you forgot Lobotomized Pseudopunk's cover of 'I'm a rich white kid from the suburbs who thinks Jesus sucked'. Rockin!!!!!!" (Okay, I made that song up. Still.) Me, being me, posted a reply that went like this: boy, i wish i'd had a bunch of bands tell me what to think a lot earlier! i would've given up my christian hypocrisy long before i started to care about the suffering of my fellow man! (translation for the sarcasm-impaired: i'm christian. i'm smart. eat shit.) This morning I checked the board to see if Nic had caught on to my sass. As it turns out, he knew exactly who I was, which isn't too fun. Ah well, I'll fool him next time. When I checked around the rest of the board, I discovered something strange: another bunch of messages had been deleted that related to a threat. Some guy had threatened to "rape Nic's sister with a knife." Um. I went into shock for a few minutes, during which I actually felt happy & excited. "Coooool," I hissed to myself, "rape threats!" Then the shock wore off and I got up to lock the door. I've spent the day indoors, with a deadbolt between the world & me. All day I've felt weak and alone. All day I've wanted desperately to hear someone rush to my defense. I want someone to get angry about it and threaten to kill anyone who comes near me. Because I feel so vulnerable right now. That message board is based in Ontario, but there are people who post from Halifax. Do I really think that someone's going to wait outside my building until I emerge, only to throw me down and cut me apart from my cunt? No. Not really. This guy isn't anything. (read one of his posts here) It just makes me think about the tightrope I walk, and the tightrope that all women walk. I gave a philosophical opinion, and the response to that was a terror-tactic threat against my body. And you know what? It worked. I don't want to say anything about anything anymore, because I'm just too little and too weak and too scared to fight back if it really came down to it. And I'm angry. In between being scared & ashamed for being weak, I'm angry. I'm angry that someone could post such a threat publicly with no consequences. It's been wiped and I can't prove it happened. The moderator of that board didn't stop violence against women; he participated in it by hushing the whole thing up. I'll never know who posted the threat, where they live, if I'm safe. I'll never know. And that's the kicker. It's the silence that makes everything easy for the ones who threaten. I know this shit happens. It happens every day to women everywhere. And yet. Somehow it seems more outrageous and obscene when I'm the woman in question.