Never read the comments!

This excerpt from Best White and Other Anxious Delusions by Rebecca Davis has published with permission from Pan Macmillan SA publishers.

Imagine if people behaved in real life the way they do on the internet? You’d have folk walking down the street ranting like lunatics.

‘But what about FARM MURDERS?’ they’d yell at total strangers.

People would turn to the person sitting next to them on a bus and say things like: ‘Just feeling really over it today,’ or show them pictures of their breakfast.

In group situations, friends would painstakingly tell each other every single thing they were doing, as they were doing it.

‘Brunch with the girls!’ they’d parrot repeatedly, forking rosa tomatoes into their mouths.

‘Scrambled eggs and potato rosti with my favourite ladies! Drinking cappuccinos in the sun, yum!’

People would think you were mad or at least tedious company. Yet online, this shit is normal.

People apparently feel freed up to behave in all sorts of astonishing ways the minute they’re in range of a wi-fi signal.

It does something to our heads, similar to the way some out-there scientists claim inaudible high-frequency sounds can affect brain activity.

Sometimes I imagine people opening up their laptops, cracking their knuckles and saying: ‘Let’s see what kinds of crazy provocation I, as an otherwise perfectly normal individual, can stir up on the  internet today!’

It’s a bit like everyone’s drunk, all the time, online. Oversharing with strangers, picking fights, getting needlessly emotional over tiny things. The internet is like the perpetual closing time at the biggest bar in the world.

I’m no different, of course.

There is a vast – and growing – chasm between my online persona and my real-life personality.

Online, I am braver, chattier and about a million times more confrontational than offline.

In the real world, I will go to absurd lengths to avoid confrontation, silently accepting the entirely wrong food order in a restaurant, for instance.

On the internet, I’m out there like a torch-wielding dogmatist, baying for blood. Come at me, world!

People talk a lot about this liberating effect being attributable to the ‘anonymity’ of the internet, but a lot of us aren’t anonymous at all online.

Almost everything I do on the interwebs is under my real name, accompanied by a fraudulently flattering photograph.

The one exception, which is perhaps telling, is my TripAdvisor account.

I write those reviews under the cloak of a pseudonym, clearly because I fear on some level that if I say something negative, I will be gunned down on the street by a hotel manager who moonlights as an assassin.
And it’s always something negative, though truthful, because I never bother writing reviews for the nice places.

I get absurdly thrilled by TripAdvisor’s emails to me, sycophantically informing me what a splendid job I’m doing.

‘Did you realise how many travellers you’ve guided with your advice?’ the last email read. 207! I actually punched the air with excitement. Now 207 people know that the Belvedere Estate has a major shongololo problem!

(It’s not called the Belvedere Estate, obviously. As if I’d risk my life like that!)

When I’m not skulking around TripAdvisor in disguise, though, I’m surfing the web as myself. Just a slightly different version.

There are days when I have to cling consciously to my last scraps of decorum online. My Twitter drafts folder – tweets composed and then thankfully set aside before sending – could be submitted to the South African Human Rights Commission in one shameful dossier.

I am intrigued, however, by the people for whom there is no online brake whatsoever.

There are Twitter users whose timelines constitute an endless stream of abuse, sent forth almost indiscriminately to real-life humans. And there are those who go out of their way to leave comments of extraordinary vitriol on relatively insignificant online news articles. These people are usually anonymous.

I have stopped reading the online comments on articles I write – particularly on op-ed pieces. This makes me quite sad because sometimes people say really nice things, which make me feel proud and happy.

Sometimes they also say pretty useful things: constructive feedback, factual corrections, interesting additions to the debate. But so often the comments are so genuinely hateful that I have had to wean myself off the habit of reading them.

When journalists whose work is posted online tell people this, they often accuse you of arrogance – of not wanting to engage with readers or of thinking you’re too good to listen to advice.

Then I say: ‘Imagine, if you will, that someone bursts into your workplace, where you’re sitting trying to do the best job that you can, over- worked  and  underpaid. This person then whips down  their  pants  and proceeds to piss all over your desk, while hurling abuse about your appearance and character.’

Would you simply accept this as part of your job? Would you say: ‘Oh well, it’s only two out of every ten people who burst in here who urinate over my stationery and shout terrible personal insults at me. The other eight are pretty level-headed.’

As much as I try to convince myself that the worst commenters are using one hand to pound their tiny genitals while the other bashes out their hate-filled words, the problem is that their bile tends to stay with you.

‘Rebecca is a rug-munching cunt with a wasted Oxford education,’ is one that I’ll probably need deep hypnosis to remove from my memory.

I once wrote an article criticising sexist billboards erected by a local strip club, Mavericks, which attracted hundreds of memorable comments.

‘Rebecca comes across as a neurotic sex-negative house wife,’ one began. ‘Ironically she will most likely marry a man who will visit strip clubs.’

Spooky! How do you know my future, Gypsy Rose?

Someone else wrote: ‘I bet this Rebecca tool works at Mavericks, auditioned for these ads and was horribly turned down, now the jealousy of not being on one of those billboards drove her to post this.’

But how can I be both a neurotic sex-negative housewife and a stripper?

‘Rebecca must have the painters in,’ wrote another, which is a hilarious and original reference to the female menses.

It’s apparently widely believed that the arrival of one’s menstrual cycle induces a sudden uncharacteristic disdain for sexist billboards.

‘Written by a hormonal woman … it shows,’ said another.

And more, apparently reading from the same page of Awesome Bro Comebacks: ‘This piece was definitely spurred on by a certain monthly visitor.’

‘Rebecca obviously has sand in her vagina,’ wrote another. (I think this would have been more effective if he had added: ‘Cos she’s a beach.’)

‘Don’t you have dishes to do?’

‘Poor Rebeccy is just worked up ’cause she isn’t half way as hot as the girls in these posters.’

‘Work on your body, relationship and sexuality then your man would not feel the need to go to Mavericks.’

‘Shame … Rebecca’s man cheated on her with a stripper.’

‘Rebecca, why aren’t you in the kitchen?’

‘Soz but Reb ain’t eye candy. That’s the real problem here.’

I find it hard to accept that online writers should simply stomach this puerile rudeness as part of their job. I wouldn’t be allowed to walk into a stranger’s workplace and yell: ‘WHY HAVE YOU GOT YOUR TITS IN A TANGLE YOU FREAKY HO?’, so I don’t see why they should feel entitled to do the same to me.

To read more, you can purchase a copy of Rebecca’s book, Best White and Other Anxious Delusions on takealot.com.  

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