Eurgh

This guy has been leaving me creepy comments on this series of photos with me and Tisha. I’m not entirely sure he actually means to be creepy, but it’s hard to read comments like this and not have my skin crawl: “These two [meaning Tisha and me] are waiting for me in some alternate life. I am married to an beautiful Asian wife and we have a cat.” Eurghhh!

I looked at his pictures and the comments people have left on them (and the replies he’s made to the comments), and aside from his being loud and proud about his thing for Asian women, they don’t strike a particularly skeevy note. I’m trusting my instincts here, which people always say you should. That said, though, his Flickr profile actually says: “I love Asian women and cats. My ‘favorites’ are full of them :)” So. Is he gross, or just grossly ignorant?

Assuming both are a possibility, I sent him a private message:

Hi,

I appreciate your comments on my photos, but I don’t like being referred to over and over again as an Asian woman, or being told how much you love them. It makes me feel objectified and no one likes that. I don’t know if you realize it’s offensive. If you didn’t, no hard feelings, just please don’t do it anymore on my flickr photos.

Thank you,
satsumabug

Reading that note over again, it does sound awfully polite. And I know I have a tendency to be nicer that I need to, to people who don’t deserve it. But I forgot to mention I was also thinking of a third possibility when I wrote that: he could be completely insane and unbalanced. I prefer not to antagonize people like that straight off the bat, though God knows my note might already have done it.

Blrgh. By sending him a message I was trying not to be a “let’s-just-ignore-bad-things” sort of pushover person, which I sometimes tend to be when something really disturbs me, but if he’s honestly just a disgusting bigot he deserves a stronger note than the one I sent him. I guess there’s time for that still, if he writes back rudely or continues to leave creepy comments. It’s just that I’ve learned enough about people to know that a lot of them are just plain ignorant, and we the self-aware, thinking, educated people of the world are a total total minority. And sometimes the really ignorant people are perfectly nice and don’t mean to offend at all. So I guess what I’m saying is I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, and I’m worried that maybe I shouldn’t have.

Dealing with human beings is always so messy. Reminds me of being a TA.

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com. Originally this photo was restricted to my LiveJournal friends, and I also linked the offending flickr user’s page, but that link is now broken. Definitely read the follow-up too — it should be linked below as a pingback.]