There were all of two people I replied to here on tumblr, and I replied to maybe one or two people on Twitter of the hundreds of notifications. (I heard most of them were very rude.)
If you come to my page disrespecting the unspoken rule of polite discourse, absolutely do not expect a kind reply tailored to not make you feel bad for having a terrible, wrong, high-and-mighty opinion.
Why are you approaching me to tell me you don’t like me not taking their abuse? Why aren’t you approaching them to berate them for being snide in my direction at all? Why is it that people love to approach an artist not kindly replying to abuse to tell the artist they handled the abuse poorly? Like, this happens in general, not just to artists. Something shitty happens, and people get mad when the person REPLYING firmly rebukes the commentator for being thoughtless. They get mad at the REPLY.
As for what I’m hoping to accomplish? Who knows? Maybe I just actually like standing up for myself when people act like they know exactly how to do everything right and that I don’t.
Maybe I’m hoping to accomplish letting other people know it’s perfectly fine to tell people to leave you the fuck alone if they come in disrespectful from the start, and that being assertive is not the same as being an asshole.
What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.
Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?
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Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity.
i wish there were a button i could push to make everyone on the internet read this article