Recap: MBS Sunday Brunch for July 1

Our question this week dealt with why female bloggers receive bizarre messages and comments. Here's what you thought.

Kevan: As a man, I'm as baffled as you are. But I'll bet all of the above come into play.

Joeyred: All of the above. A good friend once gave me wise advice, "Hurt people, hurt people." There are lots of sad lonely people who try to verbally hurt people.

Red: Any and all of the above, plus probably many other reasons. It's somewhat akin to a pretty woman walking by a construction site... wolf whistles and more.

Sadder yet, I never get women sending me emails or comments like this. :) It's definitely a gender thing!

Renee Rose: I think they are completely inept socially. I haven't received one of those. I'm glad for this warning or I would've been SHOCKED if I did get one.

Ronnie: To be honest, I have no idea, but I should think it's all of the above.

Reece Seever: I would venture to guess that it's just a reflection of the general dumbing down of communication skills, combined with people feeling free to say anything in the anonymous world of on-line communications. In other words, dumb people feel free to say whatever comes into their feeble minds. Take a look at the comments on any politically oriented news article on Yahoo or any other internet news site. It's stupid people saying vicious things in inarticulate ways.

Ana: I would put forth a small objection to the "English not being their first language" option. Generally, the completely illiterate (and ill-mannered) messages are very distinct from the ones that are written by someone who isn't a native speaker. I think that people writing in English as a foreign language are often (but not always) *more* careful because they know that they may not get the nuances of another language. At least that has been my experience.

I agree, Ana, and I don't mean to criticize non-English speakers in general. I appreciate when someone makes the effort to reach out to me across cultural and language barriers. As with any correspondent, I do my best to answer their questions. My objection is with messages that are nonsensical.

Morningstar: I have to say that I don't get emails - or comments - like that (hope I am not jinxing myself).

But I do believe they do it simply because they can. The anonymity of the net allows people with no lives the freedom to display their questionable intelligence.

Fred Bloggs: The nudist club where I spend the summer gets very similar emails, letters, phone calls and sometimes the person turns up on the doorstep. But it's not just nudist clubs and spanking bloggers. A friend who looks after the local Quaker group's email says she gets some odd emails too. We have put it down to being socially incompetent, but all of the items on that list apply.

Spanking Resource: I used to get them all the time! Then I posted that I was a man and it dried up. I was very sad. :( They were great to read with my morning coffee.

I had no idea it was so easy!

Hermione: I don't get this kind of email. (Why not? What am I doing wrong or right?) I suspect it's a combination of being socially inept and oblivious to internet etiquette, and hoping for some kind of response, whether positive or negative.

Julia: I don't get this type of email or comments. At least not so far. I probably will now that I wrote that. I am pretty sure it is teenage boys and English as a second language!

Jean Marie: As a school teacher, every year I get one male student who doesn't care what kind of attention I give him, as long as I give him a lot of it. This kind of child seems to thrive on being balled-out as much as praised. I try to change this over the course of the school year, usually with little results. I imagine they grow up to be this kind of blog poster.

R Humphries: Of course I am not a female, so I don't personally get such traffic with the exception of emails that make unpleasant observations about my wife. Less frequently, I get emails regarding strange fantasies about the characters of my books and the cartoon characters presented on my site.

I tend to agree with most of the guests. Spanking sites are not unique in being innundated with weird requests, comments, etc. Just go on a soccer forum after England has just lost and then you will witness the truly bizarre.

Rosie: The reason is pretty simple. It doesn't just happen to bloggers. Any website with human interaction has these people, but there is a large number of them on spanko sites.

And there are a lot of women who respond to them. Women who are so needy for attention that they throw themselves at anyone who approaches them. So the men keep trying because they do succeed sometimes.

I hadn't considered the possibility that illiterate mumbling could actually be a successful tactic for meeting women. Perhaps everyone does have their mate out there somewhere.

Midwest Reader: Some of those messages may well be the product of spam bots. The big-time spammers and phishing artists have developed some very sophisticated algorithms to read text on a web site, correlate the words found there with other words found in similar contexts, and generate plausible-sounding text to use in spamming the site and any e-mail addresses found thereon. Finally some use for all those 1980s academic papers on artificial intelligence and artificial language theory. But unfortunately for those trying to run a web site (or just read e-mail) not a very nice use.

I didn't realize that. Thank you, MR.

Daisy: I also think, probably all of the above, along with the fact that their one brain cell died of loneliness...

Anon: It's social ineptness. If a man received such a message from a woman, he'd find it titillating (at least potentially).

These men don't realize that women are generally wired differently from them. Also, as mentioned, female bloggers of vanilla sites get inappropriate emails now and then too.

Spanking Photo Blog: I think it's because many of the commenters are not properly informed about the topics published. I agree with others, that freedom of expression on the Internet makes it possible for anyone to comment what you want, when you want.

Lea: Ha, we were of the same mind this week! I just wrote about something similar today. I'm going to guess that #2, 4, 6, and 8 are entirely possible. I think most of these people just spam the messages to a lot of people at once. I KNOW that some of them do because I've described some bizarre ones to friends and they'll reply "OMG, I got that one too!"

Thank you all for helping to enlighten us about this strange phenomenon.

For those socially inept fellows who really just want to talk with a woman, I suggest the following opening, “Hello, my name is ____ and I wonder if you might have a few minutes to chat with me.” From there, you can ask a question, offer feedback about the blog, or share a brief story. Even if such niceties seem irrelevant, believe me, they're not.