A reminder about my comment policy

It seems like my latest feminism related post has devolved into commenters either 1) telling each other how to properly comment or 2) telling me how I'm a horrible person because I'm not moderating the comments. My posts on feminism devolving into flame wars?! Shocking, I know.

So it's time for a reminder about how commenting works in the land of Blag Hag. If bloggers were like gods (which is pretty much how we see ourselves, with our ginormous egos and all), I'd be very much a deist goddess. I usually won't moderate comments, except if those comments are:

• Spam
• Hateful, abusive, or threatening
• Trolling or thread derailing
• Evangelizing or godbotting
• Mindbogglingly stupid

With the exception of spam and threats, I only ban repeat offenders. That is, I figure most people will occasionally say something mindbogglingly stupid every once in a while (myself included), and I shouldn't remove them from future discussions for a single event.

My commenting policy is very lax, and for a reason other than laziness. I don't want Blag Hag to become an echo chamber, so I don't moderate comments that disagree with me, no matter how insipid or annoying I find them. A lot of feminists blogs moderate out annoying comments by even the most well meaning privilege denying dudes, which is understandable. Those blogs are meant to be safe havens for women who are sick of hearing the same stupid shit over and over again. They're not feminism 101 blogs.

As much as I want everyone to feel comfortable commenting here, I think it's important that my blog in particular not delete these sorts of comments. Why? Because I'm constantly getting emails and comments from guys who finally understand and are improving their behavior. They thank me for being patient with them, and for showing what assholes they were being. If I banned them outright, they would have never stuck around long enough to learn more about feminism.

That and as my dad says, "No man is ever totally worthless, he can always serve as a bad example."* I view comments the same way.

But also, I'm busy. Like, really fucking busy. Grad school hardly leaves me with enough time to blog, and I do at least skim all of the comments to make sure no one is breaking my rules. And when it's finals week like this past week, I don't read anything until the weekend - so sometimes a bad comment will sneak through.

In these cases, the proper course of action is not to repeatedly hound me about moderating that comment, thus bringing even more attention to the trollish remark. You know why? Well, for one, you become a thread derailer, which I rank as a graver crime over a single incident of trolling or poorly attempted snarky humor.

And two, I'm kind of an asshole. The more you get upset about a comment someone left on a random blog on the internet and feel like you have the right to tell me what is or is not acceptable for my own blog, the more I'll lol and leave it there out of spite, and then continue to giggle at your more and more angered pleas for moderation. At that point it doesn't even matter if I theoretically agree with you on the trollish comment's craptacularness. Yep, when I'm not being a deist goddess, I'm more of a chaotic neutral trickster god.

So, go forth and make the comments multiply, but don't make my head hurt while doing it.

*I still find it somewhat disconcerting that my dad has a blog. Oh, the internet.