Don't be that guy - or gal

gryphons_lair linked to a great LJ post on How Not to be That Guy. And if you take out the overt sex part, it could also be "How not to be That Gal." Because many, many women commit these sins, too.

Especially me.

Nope, this isn't aimed at anyone else - nobody on my f-list and nobody off of it. For once, it's about what an asshole I can be. This is not to say this is always a bad thing - sometimes, The Asshole needs to make an appearance. But I've been wondering for a while, and definitely while reading this, if she needs to be as omnipresent as I make her. Especially on LJ (believe it or not, real life doesn't work quite the same way for me, though I can be quite bitchy - I do use manners a lot more often). Many is the time I've thought about something I've commented, a day later, and thought Well, fuck. Too late to fix that now. (Again, this isn't all the time; Anti-Abortion Dude started that fight, and considering there's a bunch of old white guys who already say what I legally can and can't do with my uterus most of the time, it's not a conversation on which I'll probably ever walk nicely away, especially if it's a man on the other side. See? I think being an asshole is sometimes necessary to communicate with another one.)

I believe there's a medium between my wholesale aggression of now and my frightening passivity of 20 years ago. I am not That Girl, and I could be more easygoing than This Woman. If LJ is in writing, why is it so easy to let annoyance and anger get more out of control than in a face-to-face debate? I'm sure I could probably sit next to one of those fans I've gotten "into it" with in the past, at lunch, without knowing who they are, and we'd get along fine. Maybe this is because we wouldn't be talking about that, but instead, about real things - many of which we probably have in common, being female and of a certain age range? And then, by the time we got around to that interest, it would be such a minor point of disagreement as to be negligible (because hell, I can point to plenty of RL friends with whom I don't agree about favorite characters, shows, or setups). Of course, here, we meet through entertainment or one specific issue, and sometimes that's all we ever know of one another. So it does become The Most Important Difference Between Us. And while that can't be helped - because you can't get to know everyone you cross paths with - maybe it would be valuable, just once, in the middle of a sarcastic exchange back and forth, to say in total non-sequitir something like: "Truce! I'm a woman in my mid-30s who votes socially liberal, who likes cats, and to read mystery books, and traveling when gas prices aren't so damn high. Do we have any of that in common, maybe?"

I don't have the answers. But it seems like it might help, so long as the other person understands you're trying to cool things down, rather than being a smartass. Maybe I'll try it sometime.

I thought about turning comments off, because I'm not seeking backpatting, but realized maybe people would have something else to add. So I didn't.