Of Skunks and Sea Lions

After Anita Sarkeesian mentioned me on Twitter last week, the trolls and MRA’s came out of the woodwork for a good ol’ fashioned dogpile.

Or as women on the Internet would call it, Monday.

However, since I am male, the number of death threats that I received during the whole furor was precisely zero (see the Male Privilege of Relative Safety).

But among the usual witless h8ters were two especially insidious kinds of trolls: the sea lions, and what I call the skunks.

What Are Sea Lions?

Sea Lions are trolls in humane clothing. They assume an air of mock civility in order to get you to engage them. And it’s only after you’ve engaged the sea lions for some time that their true purpose becomes clear:

HT to David Malki ! You can check out his other fantastic comics at Wondermark.

Despite what they say, sea lions do not want a productive discussion. Instead, their goals are twofold:

1. To silence the conversation at hand by…
2. …making themselves the center of attention.

And sea lions achieve this through the following tactics:

• Sea lions treat all conversations they disagree with as biased and illegitimate. Devil’s advocate and “gotta hear both sides” claims are a sea lion’s bread and butter, but only insofar as they can be used to discredit conversations that they are not part of. And once a sea lion joins a conversation…
• Sea lions rarely if ever read, react, consider, respect, or respond to any counterpoint or evidence given to them, since responding to others would draw attention away from them. Sea lions aim to hijack conversations, which they can’t do if they aren’t the center of attention. When they do respond to others, it will be to quibble over minutia (aka. Gish Galloping) or to arbitrarily change topics, rather than to move the debate forward.
• While remaining civil, sea lions will say whatever they can to undermine and demean you. Outright lies and ad hominem attacks are perfectly acceptable weapons to the sea lion: whatever it takes to continue eliciting responses from you. If you want to see an example of a sea lion treatise, Clickhole has written a fantastic parody.
• Sea lions never disengage. They will run down the clock forever. For a sea lion, there is no such thing as an end of a discussion. They will always make sure to get in one last word, over and over again. The longer a sea lion is allowed to dominate a conversation, the more attention they will get, and the less useful work you will get done.
• Sea lions will always claim victory by default. No matter what is said to counter them, or even if they are straight-up ignored, a sea lion will always claim the moral high ground and victory in the “debate”.  Since fervency is often confused for sincerity online, sea lions use their unwavering stance to make any outright lies and ad hominem attacks they use appear more legitimate.
• Sea lions will return unless you remain silent. Sea lions want your silence, or rather, your intellectual silence. Sea lions treat discussions like wars of attrition. Their words are not wielded for enlightenment (as seen in the points above), but rather to punish people they don’t agree with while hogging the spotlight. By flooding your email, comments, and mentions with endless and repeated unsolicited questions, and never backing down even when asked to do so, sea lions engage in a stalking and harassment campaign that is veiled in civility. The goal of which is to make their targets dread the endless blowback from saying anything online. Want peace in your life? Ever again? Then you’d better remain silent.
• Sea lions lead the charge for the Skunks. Skunks (see below) play “bad cop” to the sea lion’s “good cop”. Sea lions provide the rhetorical justifications that inflame the Skunks and drive them into much more damaging harassment of their target.

What Are Skunks?

Skunks are the nasty hybrids of trolls and sea lions. While they participate in the same relentless harassment campaigns as sea lions, their tactics are closer to that of an actual skunk: they stroll in like they own the place, raise a hideous stink, hang around until everyone else is choked off, then trot off proudly with their tail high in the air.  While sea lions aim to dominate the intellectual high ground, skunks see no point in maintaining a false pretense of civility. Instead, skunks treat conversations like scorched-earth warfare: flooding the target with a relentless onslaught of sexual harassment, sexually harassing images, stalking, death threats, and other abuse until everyone has fled the conversation.

Why Do People Skunk and Sea Lion in the First Place?

Skunks and sea lions have an axe to grind. Your typical Internet troll harasses and abuses people for their own sadistic pleasure, but they tend to remain detached from the proceedings and typically get bored and wander off when ignored. Skunks and sea lions, on the other hand, are heavily invested in the topics at hand. When they engage you, it is because they really hate what you have to say, and they feel threatened by your words. (This undercurrent of rage and fear leaks into their otherwise civil-looking comments, providing yet another telltale sign that you’re dealing with a sea lion.)

At the heart of skunking and sea lioning is the paranoid belief that you don’t deserve the attention that you’re getting online. Unless you’re extorting your audience or duping them with a fabricated life story, this belief is obviously the result of a troubled mind. Your readers can come and go as they please. If they stick around, then they have found something genuinely worthwhile in what you have to say. But the skunks and sea lions can’t stand that fact, so they make it their mission to draw all that wicked attention into a subject that they see as far more worthy: themselves.

So How Do You Deal With Skunks and Sea Lions?

I won’t lie to you, dealing with skunks and sea lions can be very, very hard. But while the task can be incredibly difficult, the strategies to counter them are at least fairly straightforward:

First, Don’t give your attention over to sea lions or skunks in the first place, because they don’t deserve that from you. Focus on what you are there to talk about instead. Only when a skunk gets in the way of the real conversation should you actually engage them. And when you do, be smart, incisive, firm, and brief. Hit them hard once and be rid of them. Don’t ever engage them repeatedly. Engagement is attention, and attention is a win for them. Comment moderation and banning should be used with skunks and sea lions.

Remember: people resort to sea lioning only when you have the power to control the conversation. They are on the periphery of what you are talking about, and they don’t have the power to make themselves the center of attention without you. If you keep control of the conversation away from them, you keep power over them. If they derail and draw your attention away, they win. You become part of their periphery, instead of the other way around.

If the above seems disrespectful or impolite to you, it isn’t. Remember that by engaging in sea lioning or skunking in the first place, they have already proven that they don’t respect you. They don’t value what you have to say, and they won’t actually listen to you. So why give them your time, your energy, and your attention? Why give up on your voice to cater to of their demands? It is disrespectful of your own intelligence and personal integrity to act in a way that makes your voice subservient to theirs.

Besides, if they wanted to respectfully engage the conversation at hand, they would have done so already. A basic dialogue is not rocket science. But they decided to treat you like their own personal feminist Siri instead, so they don’t deserve your time or politeness.

And Second, don’t let skunks and sea lions dominate your thoughts and words. Never start your videos, articles, speeches, or blog posts with caveats addressing the arguments of your detractors. Assume that readers may stop listening after the first few paragraphs, so start out strong, with your own arguments on your own terms, no matter how legitimate your opponent’s arguments may seem to be. In real-life meetings and on the Internet, starting with apologies and caveats for your detractors is not seen as courtesy, politeness or good manners. It is seen as debating from a point of weakness.

This goes double for the arguments of trolls, sea lions, and skunks. If every video and blog starts out with concessions to them, you will only embolden them. You will also be hampering your own ideas and exhausting yourself, as you constantly force yourself to waste paragraphs walking the audience back from their (typically out-of-touch, echo-chamber-fueled) point of view to your own before you even get a chance to talk about something new. if you reach this point, you are essentially sea lioning yourself before every post. Don’t do it.

Also, don’t confuse strength for ignorance. You should still be mindful of critics, and you can still address any legitimate counter-arguments later on in your post. There is just no reason to make them the starring focus of your attention or the launching point of your thesis. Otherwise, you are ceding your thoughts and your ideas to your opponents from the outset. And no one deserves that kind of deference over your own mind.

Your own ideas are always worthy of being the focus of your own conversations. Don’t let others take that away from you.