Bing, Twitter Rage and Japan

As the earthquake and tsunami devastation in Japan continues, a post appeared on the Twitter account for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The post promised to donate $1 to victims in Japan for every retweet up to $100,000. The idea has a clear element of self-promotion, but it’s also an attempt to give a small corporate donation that involves their fans. Comedian Michael Ian Black responded with a Twitter post, ”Fuck you, Bing. For every RT, I’ll donate one inch of my dick up to 100k inches.”

The post rang an angry bell across the social network, with hundreds of people picking up the “fuckyoubing” hashtag to add their own rebukes. It reminds me that the most vulgar way to say “fuck you” is with a penis. In good times and bad, genitalia remain the center of a man’s subconscious thought. Every plain-spoken sentence is subject to review as a possible sex pun; every angry thought transforms into a shaft crowned by a sensitive clump of nerve endings.

Even the word fuck reverberates with macho sexuality, a synonym for sex that allows us to think of the act without any emotional context. Its secondary meaning–to ruin or damage–makes explicit the underlying aggression in the term. Taken in context of the ever-present thrum of the male brain-phallus and it’s alarming how even the most overwhelming natural catastrophes can be framed with sexual aggression. We can defend our reactions to the death of more than 40,000 human beings by reference to the same veiny vessel and banner that would apply to a weekend disco sex in public bathrooms.

The anger at Bing–which later apologized for their misstep, pledging the full $100,000 without condition–is a too-familiar example of people taking offense on the presumption that someone else might be offended. We’ve begun to consider each other as platform-holders and pose-takers and rather than idiosyncratic animals with dwindling amounts of body hair. When idiosyncrasies of self-interest mix with the benevolence we eagerly accept the occasion, not to reinforce the benevolence, but instead turn loose a priapic howl of rage.

The “fuckyoubing” theme didn’t find much traction with the Japanese, who might have felt jusitifiably aggrieved by any delay in aid because a PR benchmark hadn’t yet been reached. The discontent was largely American, and using Twitter as a hyperbolic sluice of mal-formed thoughtlets, people were induced into a stream of aggression on behalf of a group that didn’t seem to be offended.

The outrage would have made more sense if people who reposted the original message lamented their having been turned into mini-billboards for a few internet minutes–the anger of a creature aware of its own gullible nature and sensitive to exploitation in the sudden rush of sympathy that can experienced through the media.

But Bing’s original thought–self-promoting though it might have been–wasn’t exclusively bad. It might have been a fine enough way for those not capable of giving money to still feel involved in some way–a young kid with no money of his own, or a suddenly unemployed auto worker living on credit cards might well have gotten some sense of solidarity in reposting the message. If some company wants to attach their brand name to a donation and offer people a way to feel connected to the effort, let them. All forms of international aid come with brands on them. It’s ghastly to think Bing might have withheld a portion of the donation because their Twitter benchmark wasn’t reached–but that seems to have been a hollow and poorly thought-out claim.

It’s no less ghastly, though, to encounter dick’s and fuck’s as the instinctual reaction to a compromised aid effort in time of a natural crisis. In a culture where sex is burnished into a mannquin prop it makes sense that the cruelest insult a person could give is a penis joke. You can insinuate sex on the cover of Vanity Fair or in a Mad Men scene, but never will you see an unburnished instrument of sex. No veins, no flaps, no empurpled skin–any literal detail of physical love must be asterisked out or triggered in the viewers own imagination. We are terrified to talk publicly about sex without euphemism. And after years of using canned language and false modesty it’s not surprising to find a well-spring of sexual disgust below the surface of our most intimate insults.

The insults are not exclusively phalocentric either. We can all agree we hate douchebags, the human symbols of filth that we’d like to expunge from the community. Of course a douchebag is the vessel that holds the vaginal cleaning solution and doesn’t ever contain the runoff. It’s not that calling someone a soapy sack of water couldn’t be an insult, but it doesn’t seem to be what most people mean when they use the term. They mean the waste, the strange accretions of mucus and matter that our sex organs collect when left for a few days without washing.

There is something to this mistrust of our most intimate parts. I was diagnosed with an obscure sexually transmitted disease a few years ago–a series of small pimple like things that can’t be popped, don’t really lead to anything, and are eventually killed by a healthy immune system. It was an innocuous disease to have, yet I’ve opened fearful new pathways in my brain. I have the sense memories connecting physical symptoms to an awful few minutes in a doctor’s chair, hands sweating as his penlight shined on my speckled thigh before pronouncing, “Yep, that’s moluscum contagiousum.” I cannot exorcise the hidden suspicion that there are things at work in my pants, and in the pants of those around me, that are infectious.

And yet there’s also a great commonness in this fact. Whatever microscopic life might be waiting to cause chaos with our social anxieties and genital phobias, we are all susceptible to them. So too our various discharges. We are all susceptible to the pungent work of the tiny miners laboring in our bloodstreams and sticky nooks. To reappropriate something naturally possessed and produced by all humans is a perfect hypocrisy that no amount of hygiene can erase. You can’t shower your own stink away, it always comes back. Even on the most personal level nature overwhelms us. Michael Ian Black’s penis, on the other hand, never will. And now that Bing’s donation has been set aside for Japan, he’s left us with a slightly new way to say fuck you to one another.

*Images via author and petesimon

**Bing’s Tasteless Tsunami Tweet Sparks Twitter’s Rage (Adrian Chen, Gawker)