dbentley666 — 6 years ago(March 03, 2020 07:40 PM)

This has always struck me as so obvious as hardly to need mentioning. True, the dominant trolls tended to be male (e.g. Pete, Bentley), but there was always a huge number of very influential female trolls (or at any rate posters) on the board. Bee, Klam, Crystal, MoB, Raven, Cornell, Nudes, Jane, Gigi, and even Dalaryca come to mind (Dal was a TWD reg till she quarreled with Pete: now that’s a really interesting story, I’m sure, if anyone knows it).
One of the reasons why there were so many powerful female posters is that there were very few powerful male posters who overtly
performed
their masculinity. From the beginning, male posters were playful, even somewhat effeminate: maybe metrosexual is the defining term. Rob is probably the perfect example: effortlessly masculine, but amused by demonstrations of masculinity in any form. Pete was perhaps closer to alpha male status, but even he was quite playful. And then there was Horatio who was probably the single greatest provider of entertainment that this board has ever witnessed, and who was also very woman-friendly, although Bee says emphatically not. Bentley was, if anything, even more flamboyantly metrosexual and ambiguously gendered than any major troll before him (to the annoyance of those moustachioed quasi-women, MoB and FRTT). Corwin and Styg, arguably the two most interesting male posters of the Bentley era, are not particularly invested in macho posturing either. Shredder tried to set himself up as the perfect man, again and again, and failed resoundingly. Spec, I think, was driven off because he was really nasty to Cornell. MoB became more and more unpopular because she represented a strange compensatory masculinity: she was like Lady Macbeth (selling underwear on the Web). Nobody on TWD board ever aspires, or aspired successfully, to the kind of hyper-masculine status that hungry, say, pulled off without too much comment on GoT board. The soapbox here seems to be full of angry men seeking redemption through message-board violence.
So it is, in a strange way, a woman’s board. When the board relocated, whose board was it? Crystal’s. When the board was in the doldrums who resuscitated it? Bee.
I rest my case.