In popular culture, celebrities who take on animal causes are seen as a bit crazy — rich versions of the “crazy cat lady,” or dog-crazy Leona Helmsley. Not coincidentally, they are usually women.

It is very telling that when we frame relationships between humans and pets, we’re usually talking about women specifically. There’s a reason there’s no gender-neutral term for someone who is passionate about animals and deeply attached to specific pets; for that matter, there’s no widely-accepted neutral version of the ‘crazy cat lady.’ The assumption is that women specifically are the ones most interested in pets, and the implication is that this is because women are naturally more sensitive, or weaker, and thus can’t be blamed for their animal follies, after all.

It’s telling that men who love animals, particularly cats, are often considered effeminate. The idea of a man with a cat on his lap seems somewhat ludicrous to some people, because men are big and tough. They don’t have companion animals whom they love and adore and like to spend time with, because that is a womanly activity, not something men do or would feel comfortable with. This is used to marginalise men who have pets they love deeply; express your love, and be reminded that you are not performing your gender correctly.

There’s a certain sinister tone here too because it’s usually single women in these discussions, and some imply (or more than imply) that those women really just want children and are seeking that kind of relationship, even if that’s not what’s going on. People who have cats, for example, may love having a deep relationship with them and consider them members of the family, but they aren’t children. Nor are they romantic partners, which is the other thing people like to claim about people who have complex emotional relationships with their pets; the gross leer at a woman who has a big dog, for example, suggesting that bestiality is the only rational reason to love an animal and decide to give it a place in your home.

The gendered implications behind dismissive attitudes about pet-lovers run very, very deep, and are sometimes missed, even by people who are normally attuned and sensitive to these issues. While some people use ‘crazy cat lady’ self-referentially and in a joking way, as an identification that pokes fun at stereotypes, this is about more than just saying that only women are ‘weak’ enough to be attached to animals. It’s also about pathologising relationships, suggesting that a deep attachment to a pet is evidence of mental illness because of course only crazy people value connections with non-human animals, or think that they can be rich and deep and perhaps even equivalent to those with other humans.

Oliver also noted that:

Despite the proliferation of “cute” pet pictures and anecdotes on the Web, actual displays of affection toward one’s pet or companion animal, or grief expressed over their illness or death, is looked upon with ridicule.

This, too. The idea that people might have deep connections with their pets seems to cause an intense discomfort that leads to marginalising and dismissing the real pain of loss. While people can appreciate non-human animals on an aesthetic level, can enjoy videos of cute kittens tumbling around on the floor or puppies being surprised by someone opening the fridge, they have a harder time dealing with more mature human relationships with their pets. The idea that a kitten is not just the subject of cute YouTube video, but a valued and much loved member of the family who may live for a decade or more, who may become a very important part of the fabric of someone’s life, is utterly unthinkable.

The idea that the loss of a pet might cause deep, intense grief is alienating to many people, and they often feel very self-confident in asserting that alienation. Which means that people grieving pets have nowhere to turn, because there is nowhere they will be respected. There is no socially approved way to process their grief; they are supposed to ‘get over it’ and ‘get another one’ and ‘move on’ rather than continuing to bother people with their pain. The things people say to grieving people are often shocking, but the ones said to people who have lost pets really take the cake in terms of sheer callousness.

Some people love their pets deeply and wholly as themselves. It isn’t about seeking a replacement for children or wanting to compensate for something missing, nor is it some strange sexual relationship. It’s just a relationship, one of many someone may have and want to develop over the course of a lifetime, and it’s not evidence of anything suspect. A love for animals is not evidence of anything other than a love for animals, a desire to treat other living beings with compassion.

Perhaps it means someone is ‘soft,’ but I fail to see how that is a bad thing. Someone willing to share a home with an animal is soft in a way that I think is very good indeed, and it is hardly a character flaw, or an indicator of that person’s gender, mental health status, or anything else.

One of the more complex, troublesome, and ultimately frustrating relationships on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the Buffy/Spike relationship. Spike, originally introduced as a bit character, wormed his way into being a central character on the series, and with good reason. He’s complex, he’s dynamic, he’s interesting, and a lot of viewers really like him. The way the creators decided to handle their relationship was extremely irritating to me just on general principles, and also because of some of the dangerous messages I think it sent about relationships.

Here’s the thing about Buffy and Spike: They are hot together. They have chemistry. And a lot of that chemistry comes from the extremely rough physical nature of their relationship; it comes from sparring together, from wrestling, from the episode where they literally tear a house apart with the force of their physicality. Now, I realise that relationships like this are not to everyone’s tastes. I, however, really respond to their relationship (well, except for the sexual aspect). I like sparring with people. I like interacting with people on a rough, physical level. I like cutting loose with people. I like…a lot of things that I will not get into here. Suffice it to say that I loved seeing their relationship on television because it looked a lot like relationships I enjoy, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Spike gets Buffy on a level that other characters do not, because the characters have so many shared experiences. They are both outsiders in their own communities. The season six opener, where Buffy crawls her way out of the grave, was so striking, because you had all her friends not really getting, at all, what she had just gone through, while Spike is just quietly there. It is Spike who tenderly cleans and bandages her hands, who knows on a very personal level what it is like to dig your way out of your own grave. It is Spike who is willing to wait, to let Buffy talk when she wants to, to mourn with her for what she has lost, while her selfish friends crowd around and continue to demand things from her.

Their relationship is hidden and secret. I see a lot of people criticising that, and I can understand that. Buffy is a strong, self-determined woman, and some people think the relationship is hidden out of shame, that the entire thing is rooted in shame and self hatred, and her character is sometimes written and played that way, unfortunately. But that’s not how I read it, as a viewer. I read the decision to hide the relationship as a practical one, rooted in the idea that people will not understand the connection between Buffy and Spike. People are used to a specific version of Spike, a particular kind of Buffy, and their relationship transcends and busts right out of that. It is uncomfortable. It takes people out of the setting where people want them to be. Buffy’s friends are not exactly known for their tolerance.

Their relationship builds and contorts in interesting, fascinating ways. Until the show decided to throw it in the garbage with the horrific rape scene, which they then use to spin off a redemption storyline for Spike. That scene turned my stomach and made me quiver with rage. It was such a rejection of all the great things about the relationship, and it carried some distinct implications about BDSM and violence in relationships. Rough contact, it seemed to imply, to me, leads to rape, because eventually people will cross boundaries because the lines have been blurred. Rough play inevitably causes violence because people do not know when to stop.

I don’t know why they chose to do this. I have heard that they got uncomfortable with the relationship and wanted to find a way to wrap it up. I have also heard that they planned to do this all along. Or that they specifically wanted a redemption storyline for Spike and decided this was how to do it, despite the fact that the whole series is, on one level, about Spike’s redemption, and they could have found so many better, more appropriate ways to go there. They could have preserved the integrity of the relationship and both characters.

The rape scene was a violation on so many levels; of Buffy, of their relationship, of Spike, to some extent, because it was so not true to his character. Joss Whedon identifies as feminist and talks about feminism, and you could read the rape scene as ‘even superheroes can experience rape, and we should talk about that’ but what I read it as was punishment for Buffy, who lies helpless and torn on the floor of the bathroom, powerless to defend herself, stripped of all autonomy. I read it as punishment not just for her hidden relationship, but also for the specific physical context of that relationship, for a relationship where sexuality and sparring are tangled together.

Spike doesn’t have a soul, so we are supposed to take the scene as the expression of that, reminded of Angelus and his darkness. Except that Spike, throughout the series, clearly does have ethics and morals, which apparently just abruptly vanish. Where have I heard this before? Oh, yes, when I hear that men who rape simply couldn’t control themselves because of some extenuating factor, you know, like the fact that she was wearing a bathrobe or he had been drinking. The show sets us up to excuse the rape, sets up the other characters to do the same, because, you know. Spike wasn’t himself.

This is not a feminist message; the layers of context happening within their relationship, and in that scene, are in fact very strongly antifeminist, when you have a woman punished for her sexuality that way, when both she and the man are stripped of agency, because being denied responsibility for your actions is a form of denial of agency. And a reminder that, yet again, there will always be excuses for rape, even on a ‘feminist’ television show.

I should note that I am speaking of a lived experience as a nonadoptee in white, secular US culture. I say this at the outset because I want to make it clear that the things I talk about here are my own experiences, and while some people share them, not all do. It is not possible to generalise when it comes to statements about how people view family and interact with family relationships, not when you are considering the huge spectrum of human experience.

For me, family is what you make it. By which I mean that sharing some amino acid chains with some people doesn’t create a sense of obligation or connection to them. I may have a genetic relationship with them, which is all well and good, but anything further needs to be built. It doesn’t spring into being. And genetic relationships don’t erase betrayal and any number of other sins, despite what society wants me to think, despite what I am trained to believe. Nor do lack of such relationships make connections less meaningful.

I am estranged from part of my family. Usually when I say this, people get sad eyes and they pat me on the arm and say it will all work out in the end. Or they tell me how sorry they are. This is supposed to be a tragic state. Finding out that someone isn’t in contact with part of ou family evokes feelings of strong sadness on the part of many people because people are told that family is the most important thing. Along with these attitudes also comes, though, a sense of shaming; I must have done something wrong, to be estranged, there must be something wrong with me for viewing my sad state with such equanimity, for referencing estrangement as casually as one might mention having relatives in Stockton.

I’m not sad I’m estranged. I’m happy that I built up the self determination and strength to separate myself, that I don’t feel obliged to live in a state of constant conflict with myself to uphold social norms. Talking with other people who are separated from their families by choice, I find a common thread; many of us would be quite happy, if people would stop leaving us alone with their puppy dog eyes and comments about how sad it all must be.

People assume that because I am cut off from some people with DNA in common, that I do not have a family. This is what people are sad about, the thought of someone living without fellowship, friendly faces, and support. People who enjoy close connections with some or all of their families can’t imagine having those emotional ties severed and think life would be bleak without Aunt Susan or Granddad in it. And for them, it absolutely would be, because they have built strong connections with those people.

I have a family, though, and that gets erased when people bemoan my estranged state. My family is not, for the most part, comprised of people to whom I am directly related. But that doesn’t make them any less my family. I have a network of people I can rely upon, who provide support and assistance, a good laugh sometimes, a delivery of soup when I’m feeling dour and skulking in the living room and people start to worry. Those people are my family and I can’t imagine living without them and my ties with them are strong because we built them from the ground up. We weren’t thrust together by happenstance, we had to seek each other out and decide we were worth it. This kind of family is common in the queer community, where people may be estranged from their families involuntarily and they need to build new ones to survive.

But it’s not exclusive to queer folks. After all, my family includes transgender and queer people, but it also includes cis, heterosexual people. It includes people with disabilities and nondisabled people. People who are extremely wealthy and people who are very poor. It includes people of colour and nonwhite people. It spans continents and cultures, which is more than you can say for some families. And they are my family, and I love them, and would go to the ends of the earth for them and fight for them in any arena you care to name.

For some people, maybe those kinds of connections are indeed primarily based on genetic or adopted relationships. Those people lucked out, and happened to have family members whom they also want to be family with, like my father and I. Others of us are forced to cast a little further afield to find people we want to connect with and spend our lives with; to find the people we want to, as I said one night, sit in a meadow drinking lemonade and eating sandwiches with while we watch unicorns play.

To treat estrangement as a tragedy and the worst thing ever is to override the actual experiences of estranged people. Some people absolutely do suffer and struggle when they are separated from their families, for a variety of reasons; maybe it was not by choice, maybe the separation is complex, maybe they are forced to cut off people they love in the interests of protecting themselves from people who are abusive and dangerous. Those people need support, though, rather than empty platitudes about how sad it all is. And for those of us who are happily estranged, well, we could benefit from substantially less repeating of tropes and substantially more lemonade.

I am told that I will ‘regret’ this at some point in the future. Pop culture tells me this a lot; in almost every narrative where a character is separated from close family members, the story ends in reconciliation. Even if those family members did horrible things. Very rarely does pop culture affirm the choice to remain estranged. In cases where that reconciliation never happens, the character is left adrift and sad, filled with unhappiness and longing for what can never be. In the face of that, sometimes it is a struggle for people to be happy with the families they have spent painstaking time building.

The Internet is a real place. There are real people on it and in it. Like people in physical interactions, sometimes they do horrible, evil, unspeakable things to each other. Sometimes they engage in random acts of kindness. I am tremendously enriched by all of the people I am friends with online, and I wouldn’t trade any of those friendships for a day in a coffeehouse with someone who bores me, I tell you what.

It’s something that I wanted to expand upon and touch upon more deeply, because it is a very important point. The Internet is a real place. Things that happen here happen to real people. You may not see them or come into close contact with them, but they are still real. There’s a reason I don’t say ‘in real life,’ as in ‘I’m so excited to finally get to meet you in real life!’ Because when I meet people from the Internet offline, I’ve already met them in real life. I’ve already met them in person, too; we may know each other very intimately even if we have not physically been in the same place.

The suggestion that interactions taking place with people physically in the same space is ‘real’ implies that other interactions are ‘fake’ or of lesser value. This is what allows people to do things like dehumanising people they only interact with online; because they aren’t ‘real’ and those interactions apparently do not count, or have no consequences. It doesn’t matter if you behave badly to someone because it’s not real life.

A lot of discussion last year surrounded behaviour on the Internet, including bullying, and the mainstream media picked up on a lot of issues. Numerous newspapers revamped the way they handled comments and everyone talked at length about notable online bullying cases and all sorts of opinion editorials were crafted to explain why people are so vicious on the Internet. Many included the claim that anonymity was the problem, which doesn’t explain why some very high profile cases last year involved people known to each other, and why people people have no problem hurling invective under their own names or under very stable and easily traceable pseudonyms, which are definitely not the same thing as being anonymous.

I saw fewer people talking about the rapidity of the medium, the way the Internet tends to facilitate nastiness by sheer virtue of the speed at which it operates. It’s very easy to toss off hateful comments because it doesn’t take effort. It’s even easier to forget you made them when the cycle of activities online is so fast; once something drops off the front page, it vanishes as though it never was, and thus people don’t live with the long-term consequences of their actions.

An even smaller number of people talked about the consequences of dividing Internet and ‘real life’ and what that means when it comes to how people interact with each other online. If the Internet is not ‘real life,’ then what you do there isn’t really real, in any meaningful sense. When people are taught that the Internet is a fake and artificial place and the people they encounter are not real, it means that they don’t have to check their actions, to think about what they are doing. It doesn’t matter if you do them under your name or another, because they don’t matter.

Paradoxically, even as the Internet creates a permanent record of actions, it also erases them. Things move by at such high volume, and so quickly, that things are quickly forgotten about, except for a handful of people, usually the victims of abuse. Long after things have filtered down to the bottom of the pile, people may still remember them and still be living them, to some extent. The sustained bullying many teens experience online is awful not just because it is awful, but also because people focus on what is happening in the present, and don’t think about the past; don’t think, for example, about the fact that this person was deluged with the same messages on a Facebook wall a month ago, because those messages have been removed or they have dropped off the page so no one can see them, and having it start again renews all the wounds opened the last time, and the time before, and the time before that.

It’s all real life. In ‘My Friends On the Internet’ I focused on the value of online relationships and the connections made between people who only meet and interact online. But there’s a flip side to that; the same devaluation that leads people to dismiss friendships made online also ensures that people don’t feel as obliged to mind their behaviour and think about the consequences of what they do in online spaces.

There are a lot of things to talk about when it comes to discussing bullying and the way it manifests online. This is only one of them, of course, but it seems important to find a way of bridging understanding and communicating that what people do online matters and is real. It matters to the people they do it to, and it matters to the people around them. And, because the things we do also live with us, the infliction of damage on others also comes with damage to the self, but people may not recognise or realise it, because it didn’t happen ‘in real life.’

I know a lot of people who find this very odd.

And there’s an interesting reification of communication and relationships that happens when discussions about Internet communities and communicating online come up. Basically, there’s a widespread and common idea that Internet friendships and communities are somehow lesser, less important, less real and that things that happen on the Internet take place sort of behind a veil or curtain separating people from reality.

I think that there are a lot of undertones to this, ableism in particular. It is ableism to tell people who cannot easily leave their homes that the relationships and communities they build are somehow lesser. It is ableism to tell people who are not comfortable on phones or in face to face interactions that chatting with people online ‘doesn’t count.’ It is ableism to act like you are somehow better and your relationships are superior if you interact with people face to face.

There are all sorts of things going on when you start telling people that some forms of communication are greater or lesser than others. Many of these things are very, very dangerous and they reflect widespread social attitudes about people who can’t communicate to the satisfaction of others. Attitudes about our capacity for understanding and empathy, for example.

It’s profoundly disrespectful.

Let me tell you about my friends in the Internet, because they are awesome, awesome people. And every single one of them is a person I would not have met otherwise. I get to interact with people from all over the world, people with lived experiences that are totally alien to me, people from all different sorts of cultures and backgrounds. Living in a rural and isolated community, there is a very real risk of isolation for me, but all I have to do is fire up IRC and I can find someone fun to chat with, someone fun to spend time with.

We make things for each other. Did you know that? You might not, if you are not part of a tightknit Internet community. A lot of long-lasting communities set up gift and craft exchanges where we send each other cool things. We support each other. We pitch in when a crisis happens to talk to people we will never meet in person, to help people who need a little help now and then. We send things to people without knowing their legal names, or what they look like.

Members of many marginalised communities have set up safe spaces online. If you’re someone who is, as a friend in the Internet put it, ‘a roulette wheel of privilege,’ you might not be aware of how important this is. If you’ve never been, say, a transgender teen in a conservative community or a person with disabilities in a region where people think you should hide in your house all the time, you have no idea how freeing the Internet can be. How critically important it is to be able to meet up with people like you, people who have been where you are, people who are navigating the same things you are dealing with.

The creation of safe spaces has enabled some amazing conversations, taking place in locations you don’t even know about and will never see. When I see people being derisive about things like Second Life meetups for people with disabilities or private feminist chatrooms, it actually makes me see red with anger. It’s so profoundly disrespectful. It’s yet another reminder that some modes of communication are deemed better, more important, than others, and that people who can’t communicate like the rest of the world wants us to will always be lesser. And it’s a reminder that people working in solidarity with each other will always be threatened by people in dominance who find them frightening.

My friends in the Internet hold my hand when I am sad. They send me silly videos and bars of chocolate and lovely notes. We stay up late at night chatting and passing notes. We mock things we think are funny. We process things that are happening in our lives. We have rich, complicated relationships that are deeply meaningful to us. I spot silly things at the store and get them for people, I see something interesting and think ‘oooh, I’ve got to remember to tell so and so about this.’

I’d like to imagine that this digital/meatspace divide is the result of a shift in communication and culture, and that perhaps in a few decades online friendships will be valued equally with relationships that take place in the form of physical interactions. But, somehow, I doubt it, because online relationships are threatening and scary to people who are interested in the dominant mode of communication. There is a very real desire and interest to keep people experiencing oppression away from each other. To ensure that we do not network, do not communicate, do not exchange information, do not tell each other about our lives. And for that reason, I suspect that people will always sneer about friends in the Internet, and they will make a point of being proud about their ‘real life’ relationships and they will insist on devaluing activism that takes place in online spaces¹.

The Internet is a real place. There are real people on it and in it. Like people in physical interactions, sometimes they do horrible, evil, unspeakable things to each other. Sometimes they engage in random acts of kindness. I am tremendously enriched by all of the people I am friends with online, and I wouldn’t trade any of those friendships for a day in a coffeehouse with someone who bores me, I tell you what.