Claim: A woman gets her own back on the fellow who sent her a
Status: Undetermined.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]
This is an email that a wonderful friend of mine received the other day from a guy she knows nothing at all about. She met him while out dancing and gave him her email address. When he emailed her, she emailed him back with a few get-to-know-you I know that dating in this city is difficult and scary for women. But keep in mind it's that way for the guys, too. Most of all, remember that you're competing with thousands of women who don't insist that that the man do all of the work of establishing a connection. And they live closer. Now, maybe you'll find someone who's so taken by a single dance with you that he's willing to negotiate by email for a chance to trek to your suburban hideout to plead his case. But you might not. And if such a person does exist, and you do happen to cross paths with him — what do you imagine a guy that desperate would have to offer? Bryan Winter In the hopes that this email might get back to him after being seen by countless thousands of young women along the way |
Origins: The infamous Bryan Winter
E-mail is a faceless medium, and sometimes its being so brings out the worst in people. Brian's arrogance and forthrightness would be terribly out of place in a face-to-face environment, but it is becoming more the norm in online society. Probably since the day the first
communication takes place through a computer and thus there's no face to see a reaction register on, it becomes easy to become more persona than person. Which, it appears, was Bryan's crime. So lost in himself and all his dating possibilities, he forgot to be polite.
The fact of a faceless medium encourages the desire to gain revenge in a way that real-life contacts do not. If Bryan Winter is objectionable for being a cad, then the woman who sent his
But the culpability doesn't end there. The faceless medium of
Which brings us to the next point: Who is Bryan Winter?
There certainly is a Brian Winter in Madison, Wisconsin, but he's adamant he didn't write this letter. We should believe him too because the scoundrel in question is said to inhabit the Washington DC club scene. Madison is more than a casual
The fellow in question is not Brian Winter, the soon-to-graduate Georgetown medical student even though he fits the suspect profile as a single 27-year-old living in the right area.
"It's a good thing I have a girlfriend, otherwise I'd be persona non grata around this town," he said. "Everyone hears the name and says, 'Are you the guy?'"
He's definitely not Bryan Winter, the 40-year-old stylist at Georgetown's Ipsa for Hair. As the only same-spelling Bryan Winter in the District phone book, he has already received numerous ("hundreds," he says) harassing phone calls at his home. "It's gone from funny," says this Bryan Winter, "to pretty scary."
After a few days of harassment, he started screening his phone calls and put a new message on his answering machine:
"But if you would still like to leave a message for me — or my wife, Deborah — please do so after the tone."
"This is Bryan Winter," it begins. "I buy my coffee at Safeway, I only dance in my kitchen, and I don't even have an
Gossip is bad enough when it slaps the face of the person it was intended for. In this case, however, it doesn't even have that to excuse it.
As Amy Argetsinger of The Washington Post says:
Bryan Winter's name was sullied not through mass media but through a characteristically small-town strain of old-fashioned gossip, of the kind that once could shame someone into exile from the community.
Yes, but which community; Washington, or all of the Internet? Maybe shaming was a somewhat good idea when towns were small and everyone knew everybody else's business and thus had some idea of who deserved a kick in the pants. But what about now, when an Internet slap-down of one guy ends up throwing mud upon three innocent men who by coincidence have the same name? Each of these fellows already has had to deal with harrassment —
Is there a Bryan Winter? If he exists, The Washington Post couldn't find him. An army of amateur cybersleuths have also failed to turn him up. As for the anonymous woman whose revenge the online community is being asked to participate in, no one knows who she is either.
Could the whole thing be a hoax, a little test of us all to see what we will and will not forward? If so, we failed. Badly.
As Lane Gentry of Salon said:
Thousands of people who have never met this guy (or the woman to whom his
Perhaps this letter is naught but an outlet for the frustration felt by a number of women in the adrift in the dating world. Bryan Winter is the archetypical pompous male, utterly convinced he's God's gift to womankind. His arrogance and emotional detachment are perhaps too perfect to be believed, making him more likely the fictional embodiment of those angers than a real person; more bogeyman than man, so to speak.
Is it difficult to meet
The forwarding of the Bryan Winter
As Linda Tripp showed us, we live in an era when even those considered close friends tape record intimate conversations. Setting aside the rose-colored glasses of what should be right and wrong, we should keep in mind that
Barbara "for yore eyes only" Mikkelson
Last updated: 3 July 2007
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