Taking Sides

There was a recent twitter fight between Anna "Auntie Pixelante" Anthropy and Jim Sterling earlier this week. The two exchanged inflammatory comments back and forth, with Anthropy calling Sterling a closet homosexual and Sterling eventually calling her a "feminazi slut". Anthropy (feels weird typing a name like that every time), basically blackmailed Sterling after this, and Sterling fired back saying that he was only offending  and apologized to anyone else who might've been offended.

He also responded by saying that all the harassment Sterling was dealing with ignored his side of the story, where Auntie (that still feels kind of odd) was being a hypocrite by calling him a closet homosexual while taking offense to his insults. That doesn't make him right though. Retaliating in kind to insults certainly rings true for the part in all of us that wants to see people get their just deserts, but it's still incredibly unprofessional. Auntie may have baited him, but whether or not his views represent those of his company's, he has a responsibility to not act like an ass, even when confronted by one.

A loose analogy: If you work at Burger King and the manager finds out you smoke pot, whether it was while you were at work or not, you're out. To a certain extent, companies are not willing to support employees performing illicit acts. Destructoid can decide what they're going to do with Sterling, and it's not my place to say that they should fire him. But c'mon, act your age.

And saying that you were only offending "the type of woman represented by who I was dealing with" is an incredibly ambiguous cop-out, specifically because it's the kind of offense people use to get themselves out of trouble. "I wasn't saying all of them are bad people, just her and her ilk. You know the kind!" No, we don't. We don't know the exactly what kind of person you think she represents. I can only guess what kind of person you think I'm thinking of. Maybe I'm in that circle. Maybe I'm not. It's not an out because if were I woman and I responded with "hey, I'm offended" he can say "Well, I didn't mean you people. I meant those people."

Of course, Auntie's not off scot-free. She did in fact call him a closet homosexual while making his insult a jumping off point for a diatribe on misogyny. Whether or not that's the case is irrelevant; you called him gay, so don't expect him to respect you. Now, the "feminazi slut" is taking things a bit too far, but Auntie clearly established an attitude of escalation early on, so something like that was bound to pop up. You're not employed by a larger entity like Sterling is, but that only means you have a larger responsibility to act professionally, since the buck stops with you.

None of this excuses the comments either side made. People are often prone to take sides, especially in a knee-jerk fashion. The point I'm trying to make is that you don't have arbitrarily fly a flag; as far as I'm concerned, they're both wrong. The conversation quickly devolved into the bickering of children trying to outwit each other by proving they were above insults while responding to them. When both sides act like idiots, it's hard to root for either.

Twitter fight link courtesty of Nathsies's blog post on the subject.