mcbride
Posts: 333
Joined: 1/14/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyHibiscus McBride, this is an unwinnable argument. A few of them men faked some profiles in a little experiment to see just what happens from the female side of the mailbox, and it wasn't pretty. Come up to me in the pub and offer me a shandy, and I will be gracious, and hopefully you won't come back with 'well you're a fat cunt anyway' if I give the wrong response. Odds are good that if I turn down your email, the response will not be good. Why should I open myself up to that? Even responding to an innocuous email can lead to a nasty result, I assure you. I'm always relieved when I respond to a comment on one of my pictures and the objective really IS. A convo about parrots or horticulture! I am not shy about initiating contact with people that interest me. Do you think I hear back from everyone I write to? (Or wrote, rather)? Of course not. And if they don't write back, they don't. It's okay. The social contract of the internet is not the social contract of face to face interaction. Do I respond to every compliment with a thank you? Yes, I do. Do I respond to every 'hi' or 'do you do this to your slaves?'. No. I just delete. I think of it as time management. I acknowledge that there is another human on the other end of that email, no one is just 'pixels on a screen' to me, except that I do not grant them the ability to make me feel badly. I had a long run as Helpful Hib, trying to explain what is NOT acceptable as an approach. I am done with that. I leave the teaching of social skills to the more patient and tolerant among you. Actually, I don't even see a point of disagreement. I'm in perfect agreement with all of the above, and I have no doubt that that you and others gets tons of perfectly horrifying mail, so I'm a little exasperated that folks keep telling me that they don't reply to jerks, which is (a) fine with me, and (b) not what the OP was talking about. Can anyone spend a moment, just a moment, on replying to a reasonable email? I was a little surprised by the initial reaction to the OP, who has, perhaps, fled the thread. Is there the slightest chance that his emails were as described?
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