Hate, the Oxycontin of Women in Social Media

by Pitchforks

There is, in social media, a particularly venomous hatred of women defendants with certain characteristics that is expressed by women. Indeed, most of the intense, negative emotional feelings posted in blog posts and threads towards Casey Anthony, Jodi Arias, Amanda Knox and other high-profile female defendants is by women. The excessive and indulgent hatred is often accompanied by expressions of exaggerated joy if the defendant is supposedly caught out or convicted, and at the thought of what punishment should or will befall her. This unhealthy combination of hate and perverse joy is like a drug that not only dulls pain, but if used in excess slowly and insidiously becomes an addiction. Though some men express similarly strong emotions on social media, it is noticeable that the vast majority of the most vengeful and perversely enjoyed comments are from women.

Some observers have expressed the view that such female hatred towards another woman is in part a reflection of deep-seated resentment or jealousy, a kind of inverted snobbery against someone who, despite their alleged monstrosity, is often bright, articulate and confident, and who also, infuriatingly, happens to be very physically attractive. This perspective holds that the inordinate amount of alternating loathing and ecstasy spewed by many women with regard to some women defendants, with whom they have had no direct or indirect dealings themselves, perhaps indicates unresolved insecurities and emotional issues in the hating women’s own lives, rather than appropriately proportional inter-relational reactions to another human being. Insecurity and hate certainly often breed unwholesome glee when a person one feels threatened by is brought down with a resounding crash – and if one can participate in that demise, even if only vicariously by joining the victory party, the relish is all the more delicious.

The backlash to these observations is equally vociferous, protesting that such views are outrageous, preposterous and shallow, but the focus of these protests is always misdirected and wrong-headed. The rebuttals are misguidedly aimed at refuting perspectives that attempt to demonstrate the erroneousness of their conviction that Knox, or other defendants they have internally condemned, are “guilty as sin”, and they accuse the observers of themselves being “sick” and too stupid to see the “evidence” for what it is because they have “drunk the lying bitch’s Kool-Aid”. The obsessive rancour of such women prevents them from momentarily stepping away from the specific target of their hate and reflecting on the true source and nature of their wrath as an entity in and of itself.

Such defendant-specific responses, to observations that women’s hate for Knox et. al. perhaps hint at the haters’ own insecurities, have missed the point. The defensive protest that said observers are wrongly associating these insecurities directly to women’s presumptions of Knox’s and her cohorts’ “guilt”- that they are making a blanket statement that any woman who believes Amanda Knox and other attractive women defendants to be “guilty” must be insecure – is a misunderstanding of what is being suggested. Indeed, these protestors are demonstrating their own addiction to the notion of Knox’s or others’ “guilt” and assume that others are similarly motivated by addiction to the notion of the particular defendant’s “non-guilt”. What these observations are saying, and what many consumed by hate are too angry to comprehend, is that it is the tone and extremity of the hate with which the perceptions of “guilt” are expressed about Knox and other high-profile female defendants that appear to reflect underlying issues, not the perceptions themselves.

It is natural and healthy to be disturbed and deeply concerned at a universal level about any perceived acts of brutality or injustice in society, but the violent emotion expressed, particularly by women, in these media-hyped cases is disproportionate to the personal involvement of those who express their hatred towards the defendants. If one is so worked up with turbulent thoughts towards someone with whom one has no remote contact, how much emotional energy is left for one’s personal, tangible life?

Violent emotions or obsessions directed towards abstract or inappropriate targets often reflect suppressed or subconscious emotions that do not find expression where they are really due. An extreme example of this in psychiatry is Obsessive Compulsive Neurosis, where sufferers attempt to gain control over and find an outlet for unacceptable (to them) emotions or urges by directing them onto “safe” activities like excessive hand-washing or repetitive pacing in a kind of strict choreography. Women in society in general are particularly conditioned and susceptible to suppressing the expression of negative emotions in their private, social and work lives. The media know that such outlet-seeking threatening emotions can be easily tapped with hype about suspected killers, particularly if they are young, attractive females, so they feed the kinds of crime stories that hook right into people’s, especially women’s emotional and psychological red buttons. The media provide the much-needed long-term medication for a female population in long-ingrained private pain, and “safe” targets towards whom women at large can express their rage.

Abusive insults or death wishes, not infrequently seen, expressed towards the speakers of alternative interpretations of evidence that do not necessarily condemn the female defendant outright, only reinforce the impression of insecurity, desperation, inability and perhaps lack of opportunity that defendant-hating women have to articulate and express emotions in a reasoned, healthy manner and safe place. Social-media hate addicts would benefit from investing the same amount of psychological energy towards examining the true source of their resentment within their own lives, and working with those in their immediate environment to resolve those conflicts. Sometimes the body needs to learn to heal itself rather than seek artificial resolution of symptoms in too easily and indiscriminately doled out medication.

Projecting seething and boiling rage towards strategically media-selected protagonists is not only emotionally dishonest, but delightfully gullible from the perspective of those dealers who have sought, successfully, to rile you, exploit you and drag you into a profitable quagmire of misdirected and grossly distorted righteous indignation.

Certain news media are the unscrupulous prescribers of a certain kind of street drug, and there is a growing epidemic of female members of the population who are well and truly hooked.

Pitchforks is a child and adolescent development and mental health specialist based near Washington DC who writes about the American criminal justice system and its juxtaposition with the media, runs the website Pitchforks, and hosts the blogtalkradio show Routing Out.