14 DAY TRIAL // Like few other stars, reactions to everything Gwyneth Paltrow does or says are, without exception, either very positive or extremely negative. Fans and people online in general can’t seem to find a middle ground where she’s concerned and she is more aware of this than you probably imagine.
Hot on the heels of her comments that fanned the flames of the “mommy wars” and after a few months of very bad press and even worse reception in the blogosphere, the actress spoke out on the topic of online trolling and bullying in a surprise appearance at Code Conference, Recode.net reports.
She was there because, with her Goop website, she qualifies as an online entrepreneur, but she steered the discussion into an even more familiar realm: that of celebrity and how it’s entitling some people to say the most negative things without repercussions because the Internet provides them with whatever sense of anonymity they need.
The points she makes are all valid, from saying that the Internet is an amazing social opportunity to how it deceives us into thinking some of the nasty things we put out there do no harm to anyone, not even to the person we’re saying them about.
Gwyneth goes even further in her “analysis,” explaining that all this negativity is actually a projection. This is how she’s learned not to be affected by some of the things she reads about herself: because she’s a public figure, she imagines herself as a screen onto which “haters” project feelings and frustrations they have bottled up inside.
This way, their negative comments don’t really say anything about her as a person but about them for making them.
“The Internet also allows us the opportunity to project outward our hatred, our jealousy. It’s culturally acceptable to be an anonymous commenter. It’s culturally acceptable to say, ‘I’m just going to take all of my internal pain and externalize it anonymously’,” she said, pleading for “containment and self-regulation” online.
These could only be achieved if the haters posting negative comments stopped for a second to think before posting them, to ask themselves questions like, “What is unhealed in me?,” “Why am I using the Internet to do this?” or “Why does this matter to me, and who am I in this?”
So far, so good. Even though she’s widely hated for coming across as way too pretentious, many agree that she’s making a good point and, just as importantly, offering solid arguments to back them up.
Then Paltrow goes and compares Internet trolling to warfare; to be more exact, she compared being a victim of online trolling to surviving a war.
“You come across [online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanizing thing. It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing, and then something is defined out of it. My hope is, as we get out of it, we’ll reach the next level of conscience,” she says.
There’s no denying that bullying (online or in real life) is a danger and that it can cause death or permanent emotional scarring. But that’s not really what Gwyneth is talking about here: she’s merely saying that reading negative comment about herself, whether justified or not (so, not bullying) is like surviving the war. For someone who does not know what war even is, she irks by acting like she does, don’t you think?