The Twitterverse has been ablaze with blokes getting things off their chests. Is it a guy thing?
It's been a shrill week for male rage on Twitter. Sony award loser Huey Morgan ranted about radio colleagues (Lauren Laverne: "Ask me to cover for her and up her ratings. F*ck that sh*t"; Fearne Cotton: "sh*t is fake") followed reliable Twitterranters Joey Barton (Gary Lineker is an "odious little toad") and Giles Coren, who called a critic of his Times column a "barren old hag".
If aggression is any act intended to do physical, emotional or psychological harm then women are just as aggressive as men, believes Cynthia McVey, associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. The differences lie in how we are socialised to express anger. It was once pistols at dawn for men while women sniped in tearooms. Now men brawl via an iPhone and women arch a condescending textual eyebrow. "Women tend to be better at understanding the social nuance of things," says McVey. A perfect example was Laverne's majestic tweet to Morgan: "Please stop being weird."
Psychologist Alan Redman says Twitter is an ideal platform for deindividuation – that sense of losing your identity in a group which, alongside anonymity, and not facing the person you are attacking, encourages more verbal aggression. Testing this hypothesis, I tweet Coren, who suggests I man up and call him.
Blustering male tweeters are basically road-ragers or those people who barge your shoulder on a Saturday night, Coren screams/says meekly. Unlike them, he is nothing like his Twitter persona. He simply wants to flog some books and so, despite his wife's pleas, won't quit Twitter until his next tome is published. "If I could have one wish from God it would be that Twitter would be uninvented," he says. That's because Twitterrage only wounds the aggressor. Coren endured a miserable weekend after he discovered his barren old hag was actually a thoughtful and attractive 23-year-old with lots of friends. "I adopt positions sometimes which are designed to be controversial and a bit dickish. Then, when people shout at me, I'm upset," he says. "I'm a terrible combination of attention-seeker and thin-skinned."
That probably applies to every celebrity. And thanks to the Twitterverse, we are all pumped-up little celebrities now. Read More
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