"Who?"

Today, on my Facebook feed, I saw some pictures of the Baftas and, in the comments, a man called Tony had written under each photo either "Who?" or "What are they doing there?" A picture of the famous actor David Tennant looking sharp in a suit at the Baftas: "What's he doing there?" 

I looked up Tony. He has posted only five times on his Facebook page, all memes about historical genocides. There is nothing of Tony there. He only has opinions on other people's pages. 

A while back it was Joanna Lumley's birthday. She was 79. Amongst all the congratulations and the "she's a national treasure"s, one man opined: "79? Yeah, and she looks it too." He was a chap called Roland, and I decided to check out Roland too. He's a man in late middle age. His eyes and mouth look like rogue nostrils. He has the beak of a raptor and eye bags that could save his life in a car crash. He's wearing a black rollneck and appears startled, even though the photo is a selfie and he presumably knows he's taking it. Maybe he has a short attention span. I don't know how old he is but he looks it. 

Facebook likes to send me sponsored pages about Dua Lipa, the pop singer, and I duly checked the comments. There they were. The men with the opinions. They don't fancy Dua. (That's a result, Dua. Thumbs up) She's too "mannish" for them. "Nah, she looks like a bloke. No thank you." As if a desperate Dua Lipa had been standing outside their bedrooms holding up a boombox playing "In Your Eyes". 

All of them were, of course, decrepit and woefully ugly, but they each felt they owed it to the world to point out they wouldn't, not even with yours. These men, with their thinning hair and thickening everything else, their grey stippled chins, like prickly life preservers, the flash from the camera turning their eyes to hard boiled eggs, the only hard thing about them, would turn down intimate congress with the multilingual, millionaire pop star, currently the face of a Chanel handbag, on the grounds that she so clearly resembles Charles Bronson. 

Urgh! Rank

I don't get it, fellas. 

Of course, you have ugly, little thoughts. You're over-looked, you're inadequate, you're in pain, you're probably not very bright. Not all of these things are your fault. Some of them definitely are. So you write dismissive comments about women who are immeasurably out of your league, successful, confident, beautiful women, who have accomplished more in a week than you have in a lifetime because...I don't know. 

I don't know why. Petty, random nastiness. What's the point? Writing, "Who? lol" on obituaries. Why? 

And doing it with your given name too! Poison Pen Letters used to be anonymous. That was sort of the point. But the world can see you being a dick. Do you not care? What's happened in your life that you are desperate to tell the world that if, in an unlikely, unthinkable scenario, Emelia Fox visited your semi in Glossop desperate for some powerful, no-strings nookie, you'd say "Sorry love, you've gone off the boil. I have standards. I mean, look at me." You delusional little prick. 

It never stops. Endless, lumpen, boring misogyny. Forever. 

I'm old, though not as old as these pricks seem to be, and I don't really understand the world any more. The internet really is Pandora's Box and the lid's off. People don't care. It's an opportunity to be rude to a stranger in the most dunderheaded manner possible. So they do it. 

I was watching the poor film "Demolition Man" the other day because that's how I choose to live my life. It was made in 1993 and is set in 2032, seven years from now. The comical, satirical society it presents is a bloodless world of bannings and, yes, cancellations. Alcohol, sugar and cigarettes are illegal. A central computer fines you for swearing. Everyone is nice and polite and kind, so they're ill-equipped to deal with the cryogenically frozen criminal Simon Phoenix (sample dialogue: "Jeffrey Dahmer? I love that guy!") coming back to life. This is how we saw the future, this is the Star Trek future. We got better, we became wiser and kinder. We embraced diversity on an interplanetary level. We all joined up, we all rubbed along, we bloomed. 

That's not what happened. We seem to be getting uglier, stupider, nastier. We do our own research. We're rude to each other. We rage, we foment, we target and torment. And we do it casually. It's barely sport. 

What's happened to us, guys?