Suzanne Portnoy

Suzanne, i have listened to a few of your podcasts, mostly out of curiosity, and this podcast is the most interesting of them so far. You discussed bullying on your blog and mention Val as a bully, that you wrote to. My point is i thought the comments section was for anyone to comment on, but you never took them too seriously. So i was surprised you named someone who upset you abit.
If we had to pass a test to be acceptable before we commented, that would be fun. It did make me think who you class as the bullies and whether you should come out and name them, or tell them after their comments to shut up and stop bullying. I say it to people who shout down at me and have a big grin on my face, so they are not threatened…

Would you consider me a bully on your blog…….(worried now)….

Sure, anyone can comment but I expect people to adhere to common standards of decency and good behaviour. I don’t really see the point of being nasty for the sake of it or for one woman to take a stab at another woman because she doesn’t think she’s particularly attractive. When I write posts about feminism and then get criticised for being unattractive, it’s not smart or funny or even interesting. I enjoy a good debate as much as the next person but often in my case, it’s not debate, it’s just bullying for the sake of it. And no, Ian, I don’t rate you as a bully!

Hi Suzanne

I like your blog and Ms R’s (we email occasionally) although only read yours about once a week as I find walking around at work with a hard on can have some negative effects! I’ve thought about blogging bullying a lot in the past - I think that it’s actually the anonymity of blog comments and the fact that if email addresses are recorded, they are probably false hotmail or googlemail accounts that are used. These people would never say these things to your face or probably on the phone. A similar phenomena is the BBC ‘Have your say’ forum - full of madness and vitriol. Where are these people in the daytime….write next to you in the office, but blogs and these kind of forums give you the opportunity to vent your spleen without recourse and just generally complain about how shit your life is.

So - short of banning people from your site, I think the only solution is to ignore these imbeciles. Delete their comments. And sit there feeling smug that these tools are basically miserable and jealous.

Keep it up