Sad Desk Salad (14 page)

Alex182 (1:57:29):
The Rebecca West thing?

Wienerdog (1:57:44):
Yeah.

Alex182 (1:58:58):
What do you mean, what’s the deal? It’s pretty straightforward, no?

Wienerdog (1:59:25):
I mean, where do you get off posting something like that? I think it’s a pretty fucked-up thing to do.

Alex182 (2:02:12):
Oh come on, don’t be so uptight. You’re starting to sound like the commenters.

She doesn’t respond to that for several minutes. I can’t believe that Rel—of all people!—is reacting this way. This from a girl who posted a video of herself getting her nipples pierced, replete with an extreme close-up of the needle going into her tender bits? Where does she get off judging me for posting something that is arguably way less graphic? Part of me is pissed that she’s not more supportive, and the other part is worried that if no-boundaries Rel thinks I messed up, I must have done something morally repugnant. I want to understand what her damage is, so I decide to ask her, flat-out.

Alex182 (2:10:44):
What’s your damage?

Wienerdog (2:11:15):
You know, I might put up a lot of intense stuff. But it’s about ME, not about other people. This is that Becky chick’s private shit and I just think putting it up is a really messed-up thing to do.

Alex182 (2:12:09):
You didn’t seem all that concerned about other peoples’ privacy when you published that jerky e-mail from your ex-boyfriend last month.

Wienerdog (2:13:14):
First of all, I didn’t use his name. Secondly, he was an abusive shit who deserved it. What did this Becky ever do to you?

Alex182 (2:13:47):
Nothing. It’s not like that. It’s not personal! But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference between what you did and what I did.

Wienerdog (2:14:14):
You’re wrong.

My face prickles and I close my computer to get away from the heated conversation. When I think about it, Rel’s reaction shouldn’t be a surprise to me. She’s always had her own set of Internet ethics. Once she went nuts on one of our most frequent commenters, SelmaBouvier. In the comments of that post about Rel’s ex-boyfriend (“Douchebag Dearest,” pubbed on Valentine’s Day), Selma posted a photo of
her
ex-boyfriend with his bare ass hanging out of a pair of truly unattractive cargo shorts. The context was one of sisterly bonding: “Hey, look,” that winking bottom was saying, “I used to date a loser, too.”

The problem was that you could see the guy’s face, which wasn’t blurred out. Rel thought that it was a violation of his privacy and messaged Selma to tell her that she’d better take the pic down or Rel would have her booted from the site. I believe her words were: “Take that fucking thing off our website or I will make sure you never get to comment again.” Selma told Rel that she was a major cunt for threatening to cut her off from Chick Habit, which she described as a “lifeline” for her. But she took the photo down anyway.

I wish that I could take back that IM conversation with Rel, but it’s too late. Now I just need to wait until she’s cooled down a bit before I initiate any further contact, virtual or otherwise.

But Rel’s condemnation has left me too shaken to call Peter. If she disapproves, what will he say? Instead, I decide to rub salt into the wound: I reopen my laptop and type breakingthechickhabit.com into my browser to see what my Becky exclusive has wrought.

The site is taking forever to load, and when the severed head of that chickie finally appears, I realize that BTCH hasn’t updated yet. That post making fun of me for posting about the cat video is still right below the banner. This is mildly heartening: If the hate blogger—my harshest critic—hasn’t even commented on the Becky West post, it must not be that bad, right?

MoiraPoira (2:30:15):
Little miss, don’t let this traffic go to your head. It’s been 90 minutes since your last post and I have barely heard a peep from you! Molly has already done three posts since your last one.

Alex182 (2:31:23):
Sorry, I got distracted.

MoiraPoira (2:32:04):
I’m not interested in the excuses.

Alex182 (2:32:44):
Of course.

MoiraPoira (2:33:02):
Not much going on today. All I’ve got for you is that some Tea Party governor just confused the Civil War with the Revolutionary War while speaking at Gettysburg.

Alex182 (2:34:11):
Meh. I’m over her.

MoiraPoira (2:35:02):
Yeah, me too. Listen, since Molly’s been so on the ball, I’ve got stuff scheduled for the next 45 minutes. You’ve got some breathing room to find something else. You got lucky this time.

Alex182 (2:36:10):
OK, I’ll do some poking around.

It’s so rare that I get forty-five minutes on anything in the middle of the day that I am determined to find something great. I head to my RSS feed and only have to scroll through about a hundred headlines before I find a gimme: an article in
Ad Age
about how a sanitary napkin brand is coming out with a line of printed maxi pads. There’s a contest where pad users can come up with new designs, and visitors to the manufacturer’s website can vote on their favorites—the top three of which will be created and sold in a drugstore near you. The front-runner is currently a gauzy watercolor of
Twilight
star Robert Pattinson. The headline is obvious: “Would You Pay to Have Robert Pattinson’s Face Between Your Legs?” I write three hundred words summarizing the
Ad Age
article and asking our readers what other stars they’d enjoy bleeding on.

I file to Moira a little after three.

MoiraPoira (3:12:11):
This is terrific. You should art it with some Photoshopped magic—take R. Patz and make him look like he was painted by a swoony 15-year-old.

Alex182 (3:13:22):
Maybe even with a few artfully placed red splatters??

MoiraPoira (3:13:50):
ahahahahahaha

Alex182 (3:14:33):
I love this idea! Will do.

MoiraPoira (3:15:06):
I’ll have Molly do it. Your reward for the traffic that your Becky West exclusive is getting is that you can just do your gossip roundup and then take off for the day.

Alex182 (3:15:48):
Oh, OK, sounds good.

Except that this is the one day that I don’t want to take off early. Truthfully, mocking up a red-spotted Robert Pattinson would be a welcome distraction from my fight with Rel, the hate-blogger drama, and dealing with Peter. Still, I tell myself firmly that I made my decision to run the Becky West video, and I need to stand by it no matter what the consequences are. Yet I can’t resist peeking at the comments again to see if our readers think the Becky West exposé is as scummy as Rel seems to. There are now over nine hundred comments on the post, and when I take a look at the latest ones, I realize that it’s at the point in a commenter pileup where they’re no longer even posting about the original content. Instead, they’ve turned on each other:

VIVisection (4:45:22):
@Mamacita79 I can’t believe you think you’re a good parent because you’ve read every one of Darleen West’s books. She’s a snake oil salesman and you’re a moron.

Mamacita79 (4:46:31):
@VIVisection You sound like one of those women who can’t find a man to have kids with. I feel sorry for you, but you don’t have to be so prejudiced against mothers because of your own bad luck.

The internecine commenter strife fails to make me feel any better about the post, so I turn back to my final duties for the day. As I’m reading about how much Sandra Bullock’s new boyfriend is bonding with her adopted baby, Louis, I realize I should probably check my Chick Habit e-mail account. With all the other things going on, I haven’t really scrutinized my inbox—I found enough fodder without it, and I didn’t want to read a bunch of angry missives sent by our more sensitive commenters and/or Darleen West’s lawyers.

But I also want to see if Rebecca West has surfaced. She hasn’t responded to my Facebook message from a few hours ago. I click over to my mailbox. I don’t see any word from her, which seems strange—you’d think that she’d want to get her story out there, to counter what seems to be going on in the video. Is it possible she doesn’t know about it yet?

Then my eye catches on a familiar-looking name.

From:
Breaking the Chick Habit

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Now You’ve Done It

I knew that the hate blogger wouldn’t be able to resist the Becky West bait, but I didn’t expect her to break the fourth wall and contact me. There are single-subject hate blogs littering the Internet, and BTCH, for all that I find it upsetting, really isn’t any worse than many others. It’s certainly not as bad as the response I saw to the blog of a fourteen-year-old girl named Dakota who had been writing about her cancer treatment in chipper posts with titles like “Chemo Was Rough but It Won’t Get Me Down!!!” accompanied by photos of her shrunken self in a hospital bed—she always had a wan smile on her face and was often giving the camera a thumbs-up. That girl’s hate blogger would copy every single post she wrote and write a snide and unoriginal comment at the top of it (for example, “nice hairdo, Mr. Clean,” after Dakota lost all of her hair). The hater, who was eventually unmasked by a TV newsmagazine—it turned out to be the disturbed mother of someone Dakota had snubbed in middle school—kept this up until the girl died, just shy of her fifteenth birthday.

So BTCH, comparatively, is child’s play. I can almost pretend that whoever is behind it never intended for me to see it—she’s just been using it to vent about sometimes-legitimate criticisms of a site that she feels strongly about. Because of the conversational tone we Chickies take and because of the emotionally charged subjects we tend to discuss (say, water birth), our readers often see posts they disagree with as a personal affront (hence the common comment “I thought this site was supposed to be supportive of women and their choices”).

But now BTCH is trying to contact me. This e-mail she intends me to see.

Dear Alex,

As you probably know already, I’ve been following your writing closely. When you were first hired at Chick Habit I had high hopes for your work. But as the months have gone on, you have disappointed me time and again. I thought that your unsympathetic item about the plight of displaced sex workers in Reykjavik was the lowest you would go. I was wrong. With this Becky West piece, you’ve posted the private video of a successful young woman—and probably ruined her life—just to whore for some page views.

Don’t you think you deserve some comeuppance for your casual cruelty?

I do. But I am a fair-minded individual, so I’m going to give you until eleven a.m. on Friday to make things right. If you don’t take down the Rebecca West video and publish, in its place, a sincere mea culpa, I’m going to release the incriminating materials I have about
you
.

What are these materials, you might wonder. They’re pretty remarkable. I just wanted to say what a lovely tramp stamp you have, my dear. Some people might find a bright pink smiley face so near your ass crack to be tacky, but I think it’s just adorable.

There’s still time to do the right thing, Alex.

Stay Sweet,

BTCH

I instinctively look around the room—it’s like I can feel her watching me. The small, paranoid voice inside wonders if BTCH has somehow planted a camera in my apartment, though the rational rest of me realizes that that is insane.

My brain immediately shifts into high gear. I go back through the BTCH archives one more time to see if I can dig up any clues to either the blogger’s identity or the dirt she has on me. As I’m scrolling through I notice that the site began dissing Ariel, Tina, and me in equal measure, but in the past two weeks almost every single post has been attacking me alone. This lends some support to my theory that I know the bitch behind BTCH.

I know I can’t comply with BTCH’s demand to have the video taken down. Moira would never delete the Becky West exclusive now that it’s live and skyrocketing. I know from experience. I freaked out once about an unnecessarily nasty post I had written about Vince Vaughn’s bloated carb face that had engendered tons of hate mail. Now I can laugh about the number of people who really, really care about Vince Vaughn, but back then I wanted to make it all go away and I asked Moira to remove the post. Moira said that unless something is factually incorrect our company policy states that we do not recant anything that has been published, and then she added that there are no exceptions for writers with an overdeveloped sense of guilt. That same no-exception policy would apply, I’m sure, to writers being threatened by Internet vigilantes—and, besides, even if that were reason for Moira to consider taking down the Becky West piece, the fact that the post already has five hundred thousand page views and counting is an even stronger reason not to.