You’re invited to a self-pity party. RSVP on social media.

No doubt Alberta NDP novice Sandra Jansen — previously of the Progressive Conservatives until ditching that party for a more comfortable pew with the province’s left-leaning government — was dismayed and hurt by the coarse, misogynistic, even threatening messages she received after crossing the floor last week.

So she read a sampling of the missives aloud upon taking her new seat. It was Jansen’s first statement in the legislature as a member of the NDP caucus. Reeling off some of the foul content, she was given a standing ovation.

And no doubt those who’d voted for Jansen as a Tory were equally indignant that she’d swapped three-decade loyalties, rendering their ballots pointless.

But that probably doesn’t matter much because haters don’t need an excuse — a rational incentive — to spew venom. Many just giddy-up on their high social media horses to whip and whinny about any topic that grabs attention fleetingly. This is the new normal for anyone with even the slightest social or political profile.

Have we not had enough of it, the whinging over online abuse which has become endemic? Raising it so prominently merely stokes the bitter-enders and misanthropes. When a columnist does it, referencing virulent emails and such, it’s just a lazy day at the office. Damn, what to write about? Oh, let’s just dip into the mailbox offal. When in this case a politician does it, the implication is of exceptional bullying, an insider look-see at the burden borne by females who seek or achieve elected status, the slime-splatter that women are exposed to as civil servants. But really, is there a muckier mosh-pit than politics?

“I worry about the next generation of female leaders who aren’t going to come to the table,” Jansen said afterwards. “Because they see this and say, ‘Why would I bother doing something like that with the kind of misogynistic, gendered abuse that seems to be leveled out there right now at female politicians?”

In the world of infinite babble where we all live now, there’s nothing remotely special about Jansen or her profession. No shielding, no battening, no filtering. Jansen, in her vexation, has landed on the gender dynamics of anonymous odium. That’s a particular strain but hardly more significant than homophobic malice or racial bile or just scattershot nastiness.

I know that males in my business, for example, get just as maligned as females on their Twitter accounts and other yip-yap forums, though the malevolence may not be so skewed to how they appear in logo shots or the genitalia between their legs. But they’re equally damned and derided as idiots, incompetents and jerks. Maybe men just don’t carp about it as much. Perhaps they’re made of stronger stuff and don’t need to solicit sympathy from the privilege of a journalistic podium.

A while back, a podcast team at “Just Not Sports” pushed out a video that gained wide attention. It featured men — they’d volunteered for the gig without knowing specifics — sitting across from female sports writers, reading toxic emails the reporters had received. The sessions began with mildly insulting dispatches about their dearth of knowledge because, you know, women can’t possibly understand sports the way men do and thus aren’t fit to venture into that sphere of journalism and shouldn’t be taking those jobs away from the superior jock gender.

Then the fusillades worsened. “I hope your boyfriend beats you.” “Hopefully this skank is…Bill Cosby’s next victim.” And, aimed at a Sports Illustrated writer who’d earlier opened up (to the Huffington Post) about her “astoundingly typical rape’’, there was this: “I hope you get raped again.”

The men reading the email became increasingly uncomfortable. “I’m having trouble looking at you, saying these things,” said one. “I don’t think I can say that,” said another.

Because of course it’s different, looking someone in the face, repeating those vile words.

Yet the video disturbed me for other reasons. My contribution to the commentary thread: “No. No. No. I am a female sports writer and I refuse to be an object of pity.”

Sometimes you can choose not to be a victim. I don’t need sympathy and I don’t need condolence and I don’t need cosseting.

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That’s what bothered me about Sandra Jansen’s show-and-tell performance — the wallowing in cheap pathos, the exhibitionism, poor poor pitiful me. Man up a little, woman.

I’ll RSVP: No thanks.

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