Hi! I understand how you can feel a bit down -- you put a lot of work and thought into a post only to have it trashed by various folks. Welcome to life on an anonymous chatboard. You've seen me pontificate on how people should deal with posters who annoy/irritate/enrage them -- don't click on their posts! What you're facing is sort of the flip side. If you were dealing with RL friends, they would probably be a bit more circumspect -- try to understand what you were saying and suggest areas of agreement and possible disagreement. Here? People just let loose. Best try to take it in stride. Believe me, I (or at least "Sick Rose" and earlier nicks) have been subject to vitriol and hatred beyond anything I have ever encountered in RL In my early days on BC, it used really to bother me. Then I forced myself to realize -- these are words on a chatboard by people whom I really don't know at all (there are a few exceptions -- I have some very close RL friends here but I'm not going to say who for obvious reasons.) Sometimes the catcalls are actually useful in that they force me to think about things I might have missed. If the catcalls are just motivated by venom, I try to shrug them off -- it gets pretty easy with practice. And, as you well know, it's far worse out in the wider world for anyone who shares their uncensored real thoughts -- BC may be a rough-and-tumble place but it's a good practice arena for developing a thick skin. The real value of working on a post such as your OP is that it forces you to think through things, organize your thoughts, and put them down in a coherent manner (which you clearly did) -- and you can do it here without self-censorship (other than RL details). Yeah, you may get catcalls and worse, but, not to repeat myself, they're just words on a screen. For me, just knowing I engaged one reader is enough -- and you did: me! (As Pharmakon suggests below, looking into the history of BL in East and Southeast Asia can be a real eye-opener. Start with Edmund's website, then move on to books like Phlugfelder's). SR |