I happen to make my living writing on the Internet. It’s a meager profession, and I have to sell my body on the side to make ends meet, but generally speaking, it comes with very little risk. The only workplace hazards I face regularly are: masturbating too many times in a row until it starts to kinda hurt, taking too long of a shower and turning into a lifeless prune, and choking to death on an egg roll because I don’t have a strapping, muscled boyfriend to perform the Heimlich on me. But I would take any of those things over the real danger I face every day: the cutting insult from a mean-as-hell teenage girl.

Because I’ve chosen to write about my interests, which happen to include attractive young men, pop music, boy-band stars, and television programs featuring all of the above, I’ve somehow attracted a regular audience of intensely feral teenage girls, who collectively make up a stronger offensive force than all of the world’s militaries combined. Seriously, if teenage girls decide to organize one day, there’s literally nothing we can do to stop them. Just go on the Internet and look up pictures from any Justin Bieber concert. There are girls bursting through steel barricades, dismembering security guards, and feasting on one another’s flesh. And this is all before we’ve even allowed them to vote.

When they like you, of course, there’s no problem. In fact, I’ve had plenty of perfectly rewarding interactions with teenage girls on the Internet, which is a sentence that would normally land a grown man like myself on Dateline, but it’s OK, because we’re preying on Zac Efron and not one another. But say one wrong thing, however innocuous yet hilarious you think it may be, and you become Teenage Girl Enemy Number One. And let me tell you, teenage angst knows no borders. I’ve been yelled at in more languages and from more countries than I knew existed. All for daring to say that a boy-band member (who shall remain nameless because I value my life) should perhaps cut his hair an inch shorter, and possibly consider using shampoo.

And teenage girls don’t hold back. I’m chubby, gay, pale, and a whole decade older than most of them, which means I might as well wear a sign that says, “Hello, fellow Internet users, please destroy my entire life.” I’ve been called an un-toasted marshmallow; an old loaf of Wonder Bread; a slice of unbuttered toast (a lot of their insults are carb-based); a balding, middle-aged menace; someone who should go ahead and kill himself already; and my personal favorite, “Casper the faggot ghost,” which would be offensive if it weren’t so clever and nostalgic. (Kudos to today’s youth for honoring a classic nineties movie. Also Human Casper was adorable, so fuck you, teens.)