A Tale of Three Call-Outs

And what I learned from each one.

Three people pointing at a computer screen. Photo by John Schnobrich, courtesy of Unsplash.

I’ve been writing on the internet since about 2001. I was twelve then, and most of my writing at the time took the form of Invader-Zim-themed raps posted to a Jhonen Vasquez fan forum. They were not great. From there, I graduated to Livejournal, then Deadjournal, where I wrote about body image issues and lurked on the private accounts of my friends. After that came Myspace, and then Tumblr, which has held my attention since about 2011.

On each platform, I’ve waxed rhetorical about a number of social and political issues, often upon absolutely no one’s invitation. Suffice to say, I have been guilty of some bad takes in my time. I used to be a Ron Paul libertarian, for goodness sake. I believed that talking about sexism and patriarchy made gender-based oppression worse, because it “drove people apart”. I thought Don Draper didn’t write the Hilltop ad on Mad Men.

In my writing I have been wrong in ways large and small, meaningless and catastrophic, and I will continue to be wrong intermittently until I die. Sometimes when I’m wrong, I get called out for it. That’s if I’m lucky.

Getting called out is the price of having an internet presence. It’s also a gift. I’ve learned a lot from the various call-outs I’ve endured, though I was not always receptive to the call-outs at…