I sometimes wonder how narcissists manage to get by in the world unless they’re wealthy or politically influential enough to attract a flock of sycophants eager to tell them that their egocentric weltanschauung is correct. It must be crushing for them to be reminded on a daily basis that the universe absolutely does not give a shit about them, and that most of their fellow humans care hardly a particle more than that. Of course, I’m assuming that they aren’t completely delusional; perhaps they go about distorting everything they hear and experience until it supports their own grotesquely-inflated sense of self-importance. I can’t imagine any other way that some random tweeter with a couple of dozen followers could actually expect a positive response to his demands that I produce citations and links for statements made in 140-character tweets. Yet I encountered not one but several of these last week; these champions of Not Getting It apparently failed to grasp the difference between a tweet and an academic paper until I none-too-gently reminded them that a tweet looks like this and an academic paper like this. Narcissists of this sort are neither rare nor focused on me; as I explained in “Spoiled Children“,
Apparently, every last anonymous prohibitionist on the internet believes that I just lie about all day, looking at myself in the mirror and eating bonbons while my staff writes my blog; I therefore surely have unlimited time to refute all of his tinned arguments, look up links for him and restate the content of my entire professional oeuvre in convenient 140-character sound bites. As I told one such individual recently, I would take as much time with him as necessary if he were a legislator trying to push for decriminalization or a celebrity who planned to advocate it on national TV; I’m sure you won’t be surprised when I tell you that he was offended by the suggestion that he did not have the power to influence millions. Nor does the relative fame of his target make any difference to such a person; Laura Agustín…wrote a post explaining that no, she couldn’t do students’ research for them, and (despite her stage name being practically a household word) Brooke Magnanti still gets people who are Terribly Offended when she won’t take time out from writing, traveling and public appearances to refute prohibitionist myths for the umpteenth time on Twitter…
But it’s been almost two and a half years since I published that last, so I reckon it’s time for a re-iteration. This blog is currently composed of almost two thousand posts and almost a hundred pages. It’s exhaustively indexed and tagged, and can be searched either by WordPress’s own search function or by Google (via the simple expedient of putting “Maggie McNeill” before or behind any topic you wish to look at, like this). There are also numerous other subtle functionalities designed to tie the blog together, plus a resources page, and the aforementioned Google will bring up beaucoup other sources to support just about anything I assert as fact. I write this blog in order to advance the cause of individual rights in general and sex workers’ rights in particular, and to have a personal creative outlet. None of those goals are advanced by wasting even a minute of my increasingly-precious time in spoon-feeding negative, narcissistic nobodies who have neither money nor influence nor anything else to contribute. So if you’re one of those, please stop expecting me to dance like a monkey at your behest; either take the time to do your research, or else make it worth my while to do it for you.
