Harassing your idols

We are now going into that other incident I alluded to last week, and this one ends up being more hopeful. There is a lot of background and complexity, though, so I am going to spread the telling out over two days.

First of all, I need to go back into the Twitter history of My Chemical Romance. I covered this a little in Gossipy, but basically the members were all on, they were getting a lot harassment from South American teenagers for not being gay, and it had gotten to the point where the only one who was tweeting regularly was Frank, and even he wasn’t tweeting that much.

Probably the other point that needs to be explained here is that a lot of fans like the idea of the band members being involved with each other, which sometimes the bands encourage. This is not limited to MCR – I think it happens with Of Mice & Men and All Time Low as well – but it happens a lot with MCR, and especially with Frank and Gerard, or “Frerard”.

That all happened before I was even on Twitter or into MCR, so I had heard of it, but I had not really thought of it much. I did sometimes get a glimpse of it from seeing the tweets that Matt Pelissier (their former drummer) would get. His did not have the sexual element in there, but still, there was a lot of ignorance and disrespect at times, and I could totally understand the frustration.

In the aftermath of My Chemical Romance breaking up, I have picked up some extra Twitter friends. Also, Gerard has been tweeting a lot more, and some people were maybe getting a little giddy with it.

On the night in question, one of my newer contacts was sending many tweets to Frank, and they were things like, if he would have sex with someone in the band to save his wife, or post a Frerard tape (“we know they exist” was added) to save his dogs, and things like that.

You probably think that sounds creepy. I agree. Even if you have developed a certain amount of tolerance for speculation on your sex life, mixing it in with threats to family members, including pets, is not comfortable. And I know there were more; I only saw some of it.

I was appalled, of course, but I was also surprised, because looking at issues of sexism and feminism, and seeing so many examples of harassment, there were interesting correlations.

All right, this was not misogyny, nor misandry nor misanthropy. This girl, and the others writing creepy stuff, love Frank and Gerard. They admire them. They want to be noticed by them.

I guess being offensive may get you noticed. There was probably some gradual buildup, where maybe it started with just innuendo and then the threats came later.

The role that the internet plays can be a factor as well. There is an element of anonymity that encourages bad behavior, and probably makes everything feel unreal.

There could be some latent hostility and resentment because the band broke up. Actually, there could be resentment of the love they feel for the band members. After all, it is a one-sided love. Bands love their fans in a way, and they meet some of them, but it’s not the same. Perhaps that distance makes it weird. They are real people, yet also unreal. Maybe that makes it easier to objectify them, and we have seen that people treat objects badly.

It’s weird that even though I feel like it was Gerard’s increased tweeting that drove the frenzy, the recipient was Frank. Maybe Frank felt like a safer object. He has been the more consistent presence on Twitter, and Gerard had recently established some boundaries on what would get you blocked. That could have had an impact.

I would call this sexual harassment. I would also say there was no harm intended and the ability to harm was probably not even understood. There are factors here with technology and celebrity that complicate it. So there was a lot that was interesting about it it, and I don’t know exactly how it works.

In the moment, even though there were flashes of recognition of this larger issue, I wasn’t thinking about how interesting it was; I just wanted to stop it. I am sure that Frank gets a lot of tweets, and that he does not see them all. It is likely he never saw these. I would also wager that he has a pretty thick skin. On a visceral level, though, I did not care about that. It was wrong, and I felt like I should do something, just like with Catwoman. This time it went a little better, and that was hopeful. More on that tomorrow.