Dodgy Forum Experience

Why is it that you always encounter really rude people on internet forums? They always seem to be American, maybe that has something to do with it. What am I saying?! Obviously that's the problem. Get rid of the Americans and a forum immediately becomes civil and healthy debate flourishes rather than trading blows.

I was recently engaged with a moron (19 years old, American, avatar was a Marilyn Manson image, it was a pagan forum, the guy was clearly a wannabe) on the subject of women and the remaining inequalities in our society (rich world). He denied there was an existing inequality, or rather he felt that the scales had tipped and that women were in a better position than men (wtf?!). I mentioned in a post that I'm a feminist and his response was to highlight that word alone in the middle of his lengthy response to the rest of my post and simply state "I see". Now maybe it's just me, but that seemed awfully condescending, it was like "well, now I know not to take anything you say seriously".

Wanker. I'm all for people having different opinions to mine, but when people cling to these weird perceptions and ignore or brush off statistics as unreliable, I just want to scream. For instance, he had no trouble putting down such statistics as women earn 77% that of men in the USA. He actually had the gall to say that wages are decided by complex factors such as quality of work, implying that women's quality of work is lower than men's!!! I wonder what he would have said if I'd pointed out how few women there are in American politics. He also questioned whether it's right to want equality, giving examples of a strong, fast individual being superior to a less physically fit person and suggested that disabled individuals in wheelchairs ought to not be given job opportunities based solely on their disability.

How do people end up like that? I hope it is just his age and that as he gets older and has more contact with the world he will grow out of such awful views.