One emotionally disturbed woman v. A Gaggle of Violent Misogynist Loons: the Internet at its finest

Ugh. In the grand scheme of intense angry blog fights that seem omnipresent in certain circles and make it damn hard to forget that it’s only about .000005 percent of the US population who has any indication that this is going on, — we’ve got quite a doozy on our hands.

Here is the summary, from what I can gather: A woman named Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, age 55, (who also goes by the name “Heart”) started a blog and forum called Women’s Space. Heart does seem a bit, uh, odd – she’s running for presidency on the “Free Soil” ticket, for one thing. And she’s that kind of old-school-hippie-feminist who kind of makes you cringe a bit because dear-god-no-wonder-people-get-such-misconceptions-about-feminism-when-you-have-people-like-her-running-around. Still, off-kilter or not, she seems intelligent, as well as harmless and well intentioned, and her Women’s Space community obviously fills a need for like-minded souls, and that’s fine. Great. Good for them.

Except ….

A woman named Biting Beaver – the kind of person that also makes me cringe because she refers to women as “womyn” and such — wrote a post on one of Heart’s forums about how she was very upset to find her teenage son looking at porn on the Internet, and sometimes she wishes she would have aborted him. What we can see here is a woman who is clearly (if not a parody) somewhat mentally and emotionally disturbed. A few commenters make some disturbing comments as well.

And that’s that, right?

Well … no. I don’t know where the attacks began, but somewhere in the dark nether-regions of those-people-who-give-Internet-geeks-a-bad-name, someone coordinated an “attack” on Heart’s Web site, presumably to teach her a lesson for having positions they don’t agree with and allowing other people to post in her forums with positions they don’t agree with (the horror!). They sent enough traffic to her site to shut it down, and they filled the comments section with frightening remarks such as this:

Heart, this is horrible. I’m sorry that this is happening to you. These people want nothing to do but to hurt you and your cause. I feel for you. In fact, I want to feel you now. I’d like to tie you down, take a knife, and slit your throat. I’d penetrate you over and over in all orifices, and create some of my own to stick myself in.

Begging the question of Um, really? Really? Who is more nuts in this situation????? One emotionally disturbed woman makes a post on a site run and frequented by a group of slightly kooky individuals, and they are met with a coordinated Internet attack and hundreds and hundreds of threats containing truly disturbing and graphic descriptions of violence? Who is more nuts, a woman who says she wishes she’d had an abortion or a person who says they’d like to slit someone’s throats and penetrate all their orifices?

Of course, people are chiming in now and trying to say that the words of Biting Beaver and a few of her supporters at that site constitute proof that ALL FEMINIST BLOGGERS ARE MURDEROUS MAN-HATING HARPIES. For instance, the comments at Riehl World View read mostly like this:

At any rate, the batshit behavior exhibited by Biting Beaver is considered nowadays to be normal and protected by the feminist groups who share similar conditions. Meanwhile, legions of young men held in the crossfire of these womyn’s rage and anger will grow to be mentally and emotionally dysfunctional creatures who will either self-terminate themselves or be removed from society after fulfilling the very prophecies embedded into them by the very womyn who raised them.

And God help us all if they stumble upon Islam as a way to reclaim the manhood stripped of them by these womyn. If there is ever a growing trend for disaffected males to turn to the Religion of Peace in lieu of a patriarchal figure, the feminists will be responsible for condemning their fellow womynfolk to a religion which views them in the same regard that the womyn viewed the “evil rapist” men. Just notice how Islamic cultures don’t have the “rabid feminist” problem. And there is a very good reason for that.

And again, I ask you, what is loonier? Some old-school-hippie-feminists still using the term “womyn” (which is something they harp on in a good majority of the comments there), or someone who believes that “rabid feminists” are going to lead to Islamic jihad committed by America’s own children?

[I love this, though. Riehl asks in the post’s title, “Are some radical feminists child abusers?” to which Jill replies “Uh, yeah, probably. Lots of different kinds of people are child abusers -- being an asshole certainly crosses ideological lines.”]

A Web site called Encyclopedia Dramatica has a round-up of the whole thing, although I warn you, this place is like the dark unkempt labyrinth of hatred, hysteria and lameness. It seems to be an entire wiki documenting Internet memes and flame wars while simultaneously spewing insults at women, gays and liberals, with links upon links that take you to more and more weird wiki entries, like the 7th Circle of Wingnut Internet Hell.

Update: According to Shakespeare’s Sister, a lot of the original “quotes” from Biting Beaver that provoked such outrage and such weren’t even real quotes, but from a parody site. (Edit 2 — which, as someone in the comments points out, may or may not be true).