The perplexity of online incivility and ignorance

In an editorial titled "Incivility Creep" that I wrote earlier this year, I expressed my concern about the fact that we've been conditioned to accept, and even expect, a disturbingly low standard of civility online. "What's especially harmful about that," I wrote, "is the natural and inevitable incivility creep that is permeating other dimensions of our lives."

I can't remember writing anything that has drawn more incivility and ignorance than my recent Editor's Note titled "Using Women." One of the most stunning examples is an e-mail I received on Saturday from Robert Ostman of Severn, Maryland. Here is the full text of Mr. Ostman's e-mail:

Nice try Don, but women are not going to flock to your "manly but sensitive" door ready to give themselves to you. The jig is up on the "sex and drugs and rock-n-roll" generation's attempt at telling everyone they cannot do what we did. The politically correct manure wagon ran off the trail and over the cliff. People are no longer willing to let the news media tell them what is acceptable and what is not. If naked women offend you, then you and your boyfriend should leave. We don't really care what offends who. The world can't, because a cure for cancer would offend someone. If I have offended anyone, place your thumbs (assuming you have thumbs) in the appropriate areas, wait a minute, then switch! Grow up, sex sells. Always has and always will. It seems real men enjoy the semi-nude female figure, and it took a company from the U.K. to put it back and say it is okay to be a normal man. America, you are such a mess. So are you, Don.

What Mr. Ostman was responding to is a column about female IT professionals being subjected to an attitude of dismissiveness at a major IT conference when a vendor at the conference used two scantily-clad women to attract a crowd that its strategy clearly defined as male. Why on earth would that position elicit such a mean-spirited response?

To his enormous credit, at least Mr. Ostman had the courage and conviction to identify himself. It would have been very easy for him to hide in the shadows of anonymity in expressing his view, as far too many people do. But consider the view he expressed: "If naked women offend you, then you and your boyfriend should leave. We don't really care what offends who ... It seems real men enjoy the semi-nude female figure, and it took a company from the U.K. to put it back and say it is okay to be a normal man."

That is so ignorant on so many levels that it's almost a caricature of narrow-mindedness and insensitivity. I am left to wonder: Into what other dimensions of Mr. Ostman's life does this incivility and ignorance creep?