Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica,
erotic romance, and dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her
husband, son, and three cats. Visit her web site, her Facebook page, and her Amazon Author Page.

They are coming out
of the woodwork. Plenty of people, especially women, have had to deal with Internet
crazies. These crazies often show up in your Facebook private messages.
Sometimes they aren’t even your friends. I’ve had a slew of them recently,
mostly men. Claiming to have military service is popular. Just today, I saw
another one who claimed to be military stationed in Iraq. He had only one
friend in common with me and I have no idea who that woman is. There was no
other information about him available on Facebook. He doesn’t update his
timeline with anything about himself. Nope, all these guys do the same thing.
He posted a picture of himself in civies and another picture of himself in his
uniform. That’s it.

Why do so many of
these guys think that making a fake military listing will attract women? I’ve
heard from numerous high-ranking (yeah, like I’m going to believe that) military
personnel, especially doctors, who say they are stationed in the Middle East.
They’re rank, all right. Then there are the non-American men who immediately
ask me if I’m married with children. Unfriend. Block. Or the men who tell me my
profile picture is beautiful and they want to be my friend. When I told one I
was married and not interested in hooking up with anyone, he said he’d love to
pretend I was his sister. Yeah, sure. Unfriend. Block. Or the men who claim to
have incurable illnesses (brain cancer is popular) and want to leave their
money to me if only I leave them my bank information. Unfriend. Block. I toyed
with one of these guys a few years ago only because he wrote in French and I
wanted to brush up on my French. He asked me where I lived, if I was married,
if I had children, and then launched into his sad story of having brain cancer
and he needed me to donate money to him for experimental surgery that just
happened to cost thousands of dollars. I noticed all his friends were female,
mostly romance writers I knew. I warned a few about him, and they unfriended
and blocked him. He did not update his timeline at all. The only updates were
from unsuspecting women thanking him for his friend invite. I imagine he
contacted them with the same tall tales hoping to get some cold hard cash out
of them. I told him I couldn’t give him any money, but I was suffering from an
illness myself – terminal acne – and I desperately needed him to send me money for experimental surgery. I
can’t take credit for that one. I first saw that one on the comic strip Bloom County. Bill the Cat died from
terminal acne. So I stole from the best. He ignored me and kept trying to get
money out of me. He didn’t react to anything I wrote no matter how outrageous
it was. All he wanted was to part me from my money. I finally got bored and I
stopped writing to him. He never wrote back and I see now his account is gone.

Women pull these
stunts, too. I heard from one from Japan whom I friended and I should have known
better. She immediately signed me up for two groups on Facebook with explicit
porn. Unfriend. Block. Or the other woman on Facebook who talked to me for a
few days before sending me a private message to say she was in dire need of
several thousand dollars and could I lend it to her? Nope. Those “I’m
stranded in Europe and I need money” scams from people faking your
friend’s accounts are common. So are money scams on the web. Unfriend. Block.
These Facebook porn groups piss me off. Facebook won’t take them down, but you
post a book cover with so much as a hint of a nipple and not only is your cover
taken down but you’re put in Facebook jail for a week or more.

About ten years ago,
I stumbled upon The Spam Letters, a
website by Jonathan Land, a wiseguy who answered spam he received in the most
outrageous and ridiculous manner. Some of the spammers actually wrote back and
still tried to sell him stuff he didn’t need or tried to part him from his
money. He included lots of his responses to classic Nigerian e-mail scam
letters. He has since taken down all of the several hundred spam letters except
for about two dozen since he has compiled them all in a book, and the book is
available for sale on Amazon. I did manage to find my favorite Spam Letter. He
responded to an unsolicited email trying to sell him erectile dysfunction
herbal supplements. Here’s his hilarious reply.

Boy,
do I have a bone to pick with you.

You
should really pay more attention to who you send your advertising to.

I
am a 17-year-old college student, who, as any average 17-year-old male could
tell you, is sexually excited more often then not. If a butterfly flaps its
wings in China, I guarantee you there isn’t an atomic clock that can accurately
measure the speed with which I will pitch a tent.

I
know you were hoping to get some 45-year-old dentist who has spent the past 20
years of his life with a woman who makes any given NPR personality look like a
sex kitten, and yes, that includes the guys from “Car Talk”.

My
point is this: because of your primitive “marketing strategy, you have
screwed me over BIG TIME!

I’ve been seeing this girl for about three months now, and I’ve finally figured
out the right combination of sensitivity and alcohol to coerce her into
relieving me of that mighty, mighty albatross: virginity. So, we’re back at my
room in the frat house. We start making out a little and I need to go to the
bathroom because I’m wicked blitzed, and I haven’t taken a leak all night. So
she asks, “while you’re gone, do you mind if I download some mood music
off of Napster”? Since I only have Limp Bizkit CDs, I have no
“sensitive, love-making music,” so I say, “Sure, get some
Smashing Pumpkins or shit like that Baby.” Am I good or what?

So
I’m in the bathroom thinking: Okay, if I take her clothes off at the rate of
one article every 10 minutes (an efficient, yet sensitive pace – I’m a math
major), I will be losing my virginity within the hour, but then I realize: Hey,
we’re in Buffalo, NY. In winter. Who knows how many layers of clothing she’s
wearing! I might stay a virgin for two more hours! I can’t take it! (That’s
when I remembered that I had thermal underwear on, and that just ain’t manly by
any yardstick, so I got rid of them.)

I
come out of the bathroom, and she’s just sitting there wit this completely
different expression on her face. She says: “Sweetie, I saw that e-mail
about the natural Viagra stuff that your friend sent you. It’s okay, we don’t
need to rush this.” I was completely torn. I can’t say something like,
“Yo, that ain’t true, I’ll make sweet, sweet love to you senseless right
here, right now, over and over and over” without giving up the sensitive
front. So I say, “Baby, I’m sorry you had to find out about my erectile
dysfunction this way, but I’d like to try this. I’d like to try and make you
happy.” She was on board. Kid Genius had saved the day!

So
we were fooling around for a few hours, and all I’m thinking from the get-go
is: “Okay, why am I not hard yet?” This girl is a cheerleader for
Christ’s sake, and my penis is acting like I’m in bed with Nathan Lane. After a
while she gets real frustrated, calls me a fag, goes home, and the next day
she’s doing one of my fraternity brothers. My one prospect of virginity-loss
has slipped through my hands like a grain of sand in an hourglass, a moment of
time that cannot be regained, just like that grain of sand that will never pass
through the glass chamber in the same way, no matter how many times you flip
the thing over. And believe me. I tried flipping her over, and that didn’t work
either. (I’ve got a minor in philosophy – can you tell??)

Did
you know that some ancient tribes from South America, such as the Yanomamo,
punish murderers not only for the people they’ve killed, but for the deaths of
the potential descendants of those people as well? Well I should fucking sue
you to the tune of all the girls I could have done by now if I lost my
virginity as scheduled. All because of you, I’m still a virgin. Maybe since
last week I could have banged 30 chicks a night, but I’ll never know now. I’m
just sitting around waiting for the mayor of Poonville to award me the medal of
pity and give me the key to the city.

Thanks
loads, dude,

Jon

If you’d like to buy
the book to read more of these delightful letters, just to go Amazon and look
for The Spam Letters in either Print
or Kindle.  What’s really amusing is that Land convinced a
spammer to write his forward. Go check out the book.

Now back to more
Internet crazies. Before I was a fiction writer and sex/relationships writer, I
wrote political and feminist articles for several magazines and web sites. I
was quite well known, and with the fame came the misogynistic baggage all
feminists have to deal with. These were my first Internet crazies. I regularly
heard from men’s rights activists who liked to tell me I was wrong about
everything while calling me a cunt and worse. In case you don’t know what they
are, men’s rights activists are men – mostly middle aged white men but some are
younger and of color – who feel that their sense of entitlement is being
threatened by gains made by women, people of color, and GLBT folk. There are
also women in the men’s rights movement. They are the men’s auxiliary, and they
support the guys in every way, even down to doing their grunt work for them.
These women were most often wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers of the men
in the movement, and they had a vested interest in seeing the status quo
maintained. I estimated that women comprised about 40% of the movement. Some of
these guys want to repeal women’s right to vote. They claim the vast majority
of rape allegations are false. These guys will whine to anyone who will listen
to them, and that often consists of an echo chamber of their own kind. Now,
they meet on the Internet. Before the Internet, they met in member’s homes,
church halls, or other public places. They’re very politically active and they
try to roll back gains made by women, people of color, and GLBT folk over the
past 30 odd years. And I heard from plenty of them, the emails ranging from
mild insults to death threats.

Due to the influx of
nutcases harassing me on Facebook over the past week, I’ve decided to host a
radio show on The Women Show about Internet crazies. Do you have your own tales
of strange men harassing you on Facebook? Do you get email from Nigerian
princes who want to send you millions of dollars (people still fall for that
one?)? Do writers friend you only to immediately spam your timeline and private
messages with junk about their books without so much as saying hello? If you’ve
experienced any of this or know someone who has, this is the show for you. Here
are details:

The Women Show –
Internet Crazies

Date: Thursday February
18, 2016  6:30 – 7 PM EST

Host – Elizabeth
Black

Guests – Phoenix
Johnson, Christine Morgan, and Jen Winters.

Keep an eye on my
Facebook page for more details, including a link to the show with more information.

Elizabeth
Black – Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/elizabethablack