Public Snarkilation

We’ve all heard the old saying: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” but I think a better amendment to that would be “don’t say anything in public“.

Snark and sarcasm are two of my favorite things. But lately I’ve seen people taking it too far, more specifically – people in the sex blogging community. The point of my post isn’t to call people out and shame – that would be hypocritical here and it’s wholly unnecessary. It doesn’t make my point for me to say “So and So said XYZ”. I can make it just fine by being a bit vague. And no, it’s not passive-aggressive, either. The situation I’m discussing was the catalyst for me writing this, for me being disgusted by conduct in general over recent months, but it is not the only time it’s happened lately.

Recently on Twitter someone who’s blogging and opinion I respect did something I can’t respect – they publicly called out a post as being bad. Poorly written, poorly executed, and verbally equating the quality of the sex toy reviewer’s writing skills with the sex toy site that it appeared on. First of all – any blog, any site, any place can and will have posts and reviews that are lacking. To pick on a review/post by a PERSON as a way of picking on the SITE is low. To do so publicly, to point people to it? It’s unnecessarily mean in the “open up the bathroom stall door, gather ’round and point and laugh” way. And there were others gathering around – re-tweeting it, adding in their own pokes of fun against it.

I have no idea who the reviewer is they were ragging on; I’d never read other reviews by her, I don’t know if she has a blog. When I read the review I had to admit it wasn’t great. The writing was fragmented and choppy kind of like a bad copy/paste job, and a few safety points missed, etc. I don’t know if the writer saw the public lynching on Twitter but in short order the review was fixed a bit – at least the bad writing was. The sentence structure, the grammar issues.

I’m getting off track. My point here is that not only was this tweeted once, but a number of people I respect and consider friends also RT’d it and joined in the guffawing and pointing. Seriously? Does that make you feel better about yourself, or popular? What gives you the right to step up on that pedestal? What if someone had tweeted that about a review or post written by a person you considered to be a friend? Would you still have RT’d it and laughed?

We all snark and make fun and bitch and gripe about other reviewers, other bloggers, badly written erotica, ugly site designs, etc – IN PRIVATE. To our friends…. be it phone, text, DM or IM, or email. We’ve all been guilty of that once in awhile (or more, depending) and so long as it’s kept private it’s not going to hurt feelings of the person you’re ripping on. But all this public snarkilation I’ve been seeing lately is getting way too personal against members of our own community. We all like to strut our sex-positiveness, our openness, our liberal nature. Everyone that has ever been accused of “being in the in-crowd” or being clique-y will staunchly deny the faint lines of separation – but when we treat people this way? We’re none of those good things when we run new reviewers or bloggers out the proverbial door with our attacks rather than constructive criticism.

Snark and sarcasm can be awesomely funny when done right. Sometimes though, it’s just ugly. And I thought that this community was above that kind of ugliness. AGAIN – this post is not meant to attack any one person. I am simply not able to stay quiet on how I feel about behaviours/actions I’ve been seeing more of. Maybe you are…….but I’ve reached my limit.