Living on the West Coast now, I sometimes see what’s going on with East Coast baseball a bit later in the day. When I got home yesterday afternoon, my feed was filled with tweets about how one of our #MetsTwitter favorites, Shannon, aka, “@Miss_Met” had deactivated her account. Why? Because several dudes, (Or maybe it was just one? Twitter really needs to start checking IP addresses on these accounts) in our beloved sect, decided it was time to harass the hell out of her. By the time I had gone through all of the info that was left, the threads of what they’d done were long deleted. But it had to have been pretty bad for her to deactivate her account completely.

“Why didn’t she just block them?” is a familiar phrase I’ve seen tweeted by men since this happened. I assume they’re trying to be helpful, and this comes from a place of ignorance. So let me clarify, you don’t know what that feeling is like, and you probably never will. When harassment reaches a point where you start to question your safety, you want to get the hell out of there. Additionally, when you say something like this, you’re putting the blame on her. It rings with the same tone of “Don’t be so dramatic” or you know, “Why was she wearing that?” It’s not our problem. It’s yours. Perhaps the next time, you or a friend think of harassing a woman online, for whatever reason, think instead, “Could this time be better spent pouring gasoline in my eyes?”