I really, really, REALLY hate the blog Fedoras of OKCupid.
Furthermore, I hate the use of “fedora” or “Redditor” or “brony” as metonymy for “misogynist,” about half of what people say about Nice Guys ™, anyone who accuses misogynists of being virgins or not getting laid or of living in their mom’s basement, and the word “neckbeard.”
But let me talk about Fedoras of OKC.
Fedoras of OKC comes from a particular genre of Tumblr blogs where they take screenshots of people from OKCupid and make fun of them. Perhaps the most famous is the now-deleted Nice Guys of OKC, which chronicled people who claimed they were nice and then proclaimed that men should be the heads of their households and homosexuality is a sin. (Full disclosure: I used to read Nice Guys of OKC, but then I read Ally Fogg’s blog post about it and started feeling guilty. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to laugh at quotes from people being assholes on OKC. (It is, however, skeevy in the extreme to post their pictures, names, or other identifying details to accompany it.) Sometimes the most effective path is to shame and mock assholery, in order to discourage people from being assholes.
But the problem is that Fedoras of OKC mostly isn’t people being assholes! Sometimes it’s this guy:
[Long-haired slouchy guy in fedora and Led Zeppelin shirt. Captions: “I am often seen wearing a fedora.” “I can make an eggplant parm that will render chicken absolutely useless. True story.”]
This person is utterly inoffensive on every level, unless you count his belief that eggplant qualifies as a food. And yet he’s right up there next to this guy:
[Guy who is, in fact, in a fedora. Captions: “I am an unapologetic masculine man, not trying to fit in with the metro set or emulate the latest cool guy on MTV, I make it pretty simple here, I’m not selling more than what a woman who appreciates a real man could desire. I work hard, I sweat, I push heavy things, and keep moving overcoming obstacles and excuses where others may falter. I am the kind of guy you want to hug at the end of the day when you get home, to feel safe and happy that you got your arms around a big sturdy man.” “I am strong and masculine with a friendly smile.” Also he’d “take advantage of” a drunk person who wouldn’t want casual sex while sober but who was flirting with him. Yeaaaaah.]
As if Eggplant Parm Dude and Casually Admits On A Dating Site To Being Willing To Commit Possible Sexual Assault Guy are basically the same thing, because they both like the same kind of hat.
Obviously, there are lots and lots and lots of Redditors, bronies, virgins, basement-dwellers, people who are poor at personal grooming, and (yes) men in fedoras who are misogynists. I have no problem with anyone criticizing the Men’s Rights Reddit, bronies who insist that My Little Pony couldn’t possibly be a show for little girls because it’s well-written, or virgins who blame their virginity on women chasing after alpha males.
Furthermore, there is endemic misogyny within the geek community (and next-door neighbor communities like skeptics, tech people, fandom, gamers, etc). If you doubt this, please go to Geek Feminism and start reading.
But to me, it seems like a lot of people are using misogyny as an excuse to criticize a type of guy they don’t like anyway. That they dislike virgins, and socially awkward people, and people with geeky interests, and were like “hey! This misogyny gives us an excuse to criticize men in this category we don’t like and feel like awesome social justice advocates! Go us!”
(Please note that, as ever, if this is not about you it is not about you. If you have no problem with virgins, socially awkward people, and people with geeky interests, and perhaps even fall into one or more of those categories yourself, then this is not about you.)
People in our culture already like making fun of virgins, socially awkward people, and adult men who watch little girls’ TV shows. You are not fighting the power by making fun of them. You are just doing the same thing everyone else is doing, except you’ve justified it so you get to feel nice about yourself.
There’s a pattern across our culture of letting people off the hook for abuse, rape, and misogyny as long as they’re conventionally attractive, or popular, or someone we like. I feel like concentrating on misogyny within unpopular groups to the exclusion of misogyny elsewhere risks reinforcing this pattern, and that’s not okay.
It makes it seem like misogynists are identifiable, classifiable, and the kind of guys you don’t like anyway. In fact, misogyny is fucking everywhere, including in guys you think are really cool. It’s important not to get caught up in window dressing and lose sight of the actual content.
Some people will probably respond to this “but privileged socially awkward geeky dudes are not actually marginalized within our society! They do not face the problems that people of color, or trans people, or queer people, or women do. Therefore it is okay to stereotype them and make websites where we take their pictures off dating sites and make fun of them.”
To which I say: “Congrats. You’re not making fun of a marginalized group. Would you like a cookie?”
[Sugar cookie that says “not oppressive, just a bully.”]
Thing of Things 
I’m in agreement with most of what’s here, but the eggplant comment…man. Eggplant parm is the bomb! I’m an omnivore and I’ll still order it over chicken parm any day of the year. And baingan bharta (eggplant curry)? Boss.
One of the things I’ll never understand about the social justice movement is the insistence that it’s fine to pick on someone if it’s not for reasons deemed oppressive. Isn’t being regular old obnoxious a bad thing, too?
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For that matter, why is it necessary to classify some forms of shitty behavior as “oppression” and others as something-that-is-totally-different to begin with. Three questions seem to me to be important:
1. How common is it?
2. How severe is it?
3. Is it actually a violation of the recipient’s rights?
Asking whether shitty behavior is “structural” seems to me to be a poor approximation of (1), and a handy excuse for ignoring (2) and (3).
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Because oppression has a structural component, while bullying (in the sense it’s used here) is a purely personal decision. This is an extremely crucial component to all but the most bloody-minded libertarian.
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“Structure” is an abstraction. It doesn’t exist outside of human minds. All human actions are personal decisions, and virtually all of them are influenced by the actor’s belief in various abstractions. The frequency of people shitting on bronies is no more of random coincidence than the frequency of people shitting on “slutty” women. As I noted, “structural” sometimes kinda-sorta approximates “common,” and in that sense is not entirely useless (relevant to not considering anything related to commonness at all), but “common” itself is both more relevant and easier to measure.
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Focusing on the important issue here. How would you recommend cooking eggplant* to make it tasty?
*Also its an aubergine. Bloody Americans ith your different arbitary signifiers for things.
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Actually, this is you bloody limeys; “eggplant” is attested (in English) several decades earlier than “aubergine.”
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This is the curry recipe I use, though I’ll warn you that it’s barely two servings over rice. If you want to get fancy you can blend it with more yogurt (or substitute coconut milk) the way the local Indian place here does it.
Eggplant parmesan I don’t make myself because it’s a lot of work. You have to slice the eggplant, then coat it in egg and breadcrumbs, then fry it, then bake it with sauce and cheese. My ex-in-laws made a killer eggplant parm.
Also recommended: baba ghanoush. It’s a bit like hummus, but with an eggplant base, and it’s amazing.
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“*Also its an aubergine. Bloody Americans ith your different arbitary signifiers for things.”
Appropriating French terms is better?
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Eggplant parmesan isn’t bad, but you’re still using slices of eggplant, which is objectively not the best option. You know what’s better? Zucchini parmesan. If you cook it right the zucchini actually tastes like something! As opposed to eggplant, where you have the opposite goal. Eggplant curry can be good though.
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Science demands that I sample this zucchini parmesan before making a decision. Recipe?
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ninecarpals,
If you already have a recipe for eggplant parmesan you can just make that with zucchini, otherwise the one I’ve made is here. I’m also going to try zucchini baba ghanoush soon to see if everything really is better with zucchini.
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FWIW, the SJ movement I’m most familiar with, the Fat Acceptance movement (mostly in wordpress/blogspot form; I’m not on Twitter or Tumblr) has a strong consensus that negative comments about skinny people are bad. While a significant minority say that fatshaming and skinnyshaming are equally bad, the majority opinion (which I agree with) is that both are mean and you shouldn’t do them, but fatshaming is both more common and more likely to really hurt someone (controlling for the level of meanness in the individual comment) because society is reinforcing fatshaming messages in a way it doesn’t with skinnyshaming.
As you’d expect, you do see skinnyshaming in the comments sometimes, but usually from new commenters, and they get shut right down by moderators and fellow commenters.
I’m not sure how much of this is because it’s not Tumblr or Twitter, or because skinny people are more likely to be part of the readers/audience and the readers/audience likely have skinny friends, or how much is because fat people are seen as a “loser” group as well, or if it’s something else.
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Actually, I just came across a good example. An FA person on Facebook was talking about the comments on an article about changing beauty standards throughout history. Someone commenting on the article was saying “Can we please stop using ‘boyish’ to describe thin women?” which FA person AGREED with, but someone else commenting on the article replied, “Imagine the uproar if we called fat people ‘whaleish’!” and FA person said that tabloids might not always say nice things about thin people, but thinness is generally idealized, and no one is waging a war against thinness and systematically trying to eradicate thin bodies.
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Ah. See, I don’t find that acceptable, either. Making every single conversation about your problems, even if it’s on a blog about your problems, is a pile-on, and it has a stifling effect on other groups. It is, for example, not worth my time pointing out things trans women get wrong about trans men on their blogs, because the inevitable response – even when the error is corrected – includes some variation on “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SUFFERING IS!” Why would I want to subject myself to that?
And this is how ignorance grows.
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ninecarpals: I’m not sure I follow you. If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re opposed to people having blogs that are about their problems [technically, about the problems of a group they’re in, not their personal problems specifically], unless they sometimes/often go off topic and talk about other things? IOW, part of your problem with those trans women’s blogs is that they talk too much about trans women’s problems, not just that they get stuff wrong about trans men?
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No, my problem is that when bloggers get something wrong about someone else and the other party points it out, the response is frequently hedged with a clause pointing out that the other party should remain suitably humble.
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I think he’s saying that if you say something shitty about other people (even on your own blog about your own problems), and someone else points it out, immediately turning it around to declare that while perhaps that was shitty, your own vaguely-related problems are worse . . . is asinine.
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Near-identical crosspost FTW!
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OK, I guess I didn’t correctly explain what was going on, then. The FA Person on facebook was NOT the author of the article referring to women [flappers, specifically] as “boyish”, and did not call them boyish herself. That article was not a FA/social justice article at all, it was some BuzzFeed thing. The only thing she was objecting to was when someone responded to the “don’t call women boyish” with a comment saying that calling thin women boyish was exactly the same as calling fat women whaleish.
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Reading thru again, maybe I did communicate that part effectively to you guys and you just see the two situations as more similar than I do. I agree that’s it’s insensitive to go on and on about how your problems are worse when someone points out that you screwed something up. In this case, because the FA person who objected to that comment was not the one who screwed up, and she had no objection to the comment saying “It’s bad to call women boyish”, full stop, but only objected to the other comment saying it was exactly the same, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.
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No, I didn’t read your comment correctly the first time (I was rushing out the door to get to work), and I apologize for being hasty.
I don’t like the “You would throw a fit if [x]” happened phrasing, for what it’s worth. It’s a needlessly aggressive statement that assumes a lot about the other person.
That said, where are you getting the identical part from? Surely it’s hypocritical – or at least inefficient – to push for acceptance of all bodies and then ignore some of it.
Even if the above weren’t true, the need to stake out oppression territory still bugs the crap out of me. “This is wrong; this is also wrong” isn’t difficult to say, and adding “but not as wrong as the other wrong” doesn’t add anything to the conversation except a condescending attitude.
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I don’t like the “You would throw a fit if [x]” happened phrasing, for what it’s worth. It’s a needlessly aggressive statement that assumes a lot about the other person.
I agree. At least half the time it’s wrong, too, at least in cases where truth can be determined.
“That said, where are you getting the identical part from?” I think that part is implied, but it is possible that they didn’t mean this. If so, I may be getting it from similar comments that have explicitly said that, which I have seen multiple times. And as you said, it’s an aggressive statement, so I’m kinda predisposed to read it unfavorably.
Surely it’s hypocritical – or at least inefficient – to push for acceptance of all bodies and then ignore some of it.
I don’t think of it as ignoring some of it. WRT this particular comment, the person agreed with the “don’t boyish” comment and stated that before moving on to the “whaleish” comment. In general, a lot of people will call themselves “size acceptance” advocates rather than “fat acceptance” advocates to clarify that they do also care about size-based assumptions, negativity, etc directed towards thin people, and will talk from time to time about the kinds of crappy comments, etc. that thin people get. But most people in fat acceptance/size acceptance also tend to focus more on anti-fat bias because there’s more of it and it tends to be more severe, so IMO that is being more efficient–directing the majority of resources to the worse problem.
I think, in addition to the mere fact that it’s true that they’re not equal, leaving statements about things being “exactly the same” unchallenged is not, in the long run, going to get people to unite, because most fat people are going to resent such statements and most thin people also know that such statements are not true.
the need to stake out oppression territory still bugs the crap out of me.
Fair enough; you’ve alluded to some bad experiences with it.
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I agree. At least half the time it’s wrong, too, at least in cases where truth can be determined.
Personally, I get great pleasure out of being able to deny the charge.
One time recently, in a face-to-face debate about what constitutes a “hostile work environment,” a woman said to me “Well, imagine if someone came up to you at work and said ‘Do you large cocks?’ That wouldn’t be okay, would it?” in a tone that made it clear that she was 100% certain that she’d scored a major point against me. She was (briefly, alas) rather flustered when I replied “Actually, I wouldn’t give a crap. I’d just say ‘Nah, I’m not really into dudes.'”
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Eggplants are the bestest.
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It finally happened! I found a question about which you are completely, unambiguously wrong!
Eggplant is, in fact, delicious.
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I believe that Ozy is suffering from some internalized eggplantphobia.
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… 0.o
So I pictured an eggplant sitting inside Ozy’s stomach hating itself
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It’s not fear of eggplants, or even hatred of eggplants, to be aware of the empirically firmly established facts that eggplants have an unpleasant flavor and texture. Why must people be so sloppy with language?
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If we can make every comment on this post about how great eggplant is, I think we will have taken the fist steps towards ridding the world of anti-egplantism.
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Eggplant is pretty gross, dude.
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There goes our streak. This is why we can’t have nice things.
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Yep!
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I also stand with our esteemed host on the eggplant issue, and am trying to figure out what agenda could possibly motivate someone to advocate for this alleged food.
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And World War Eggplant begins.
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I’d really like to see that sugar cookie, but the picture didn’t come through. Is it my problem or yours?
Anyway, I have to go cook some eggplant. Your post inspired me THAT MUCH.
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About half of the images on this post don’t display for me at all.
Also, eggplant is far too easy to cock up. You can somehow end up with a tasteless vegetable that’s both slimy *and* rubbery. Eugh.
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are there actually any bronies who don’t think MLP is aimed at little girls? the closest i’ve heard is that it’s written to be enjoyable for adults as well so parents can watch it with their kids.
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Virtually any stupid opinion that can be put into words (and arguably some that can’t—Time Cube, anyone?) has someone who believes it, and there are a lot of bronies out there, so probably. I doubt there are very many, though.
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“aimed at” =/= “for”
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I remember reading this the first time around and thinking “wow this Ozy person is awesome but I bet they are too cool to be my friend” and now we are dating. The moral of the story is that fedoras can get you dates in a very roundabout way.
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I feel like most people who object to a show they watch being called “for children” are not really objecting to the obvious fact that that is who it is marketed towards, but are objecting to the common insinuation that they should then not be watching it, or that that makes the show bad.
Also, I don’t know about MLP because I’ve never seen it, but in ATLA, Korra and Adventure Time’s case, It’s obvious that they were writing for older audiences as well, or at least trying to indulge themselves as story-writers, so calling it “for children” is not really accurate.
(Korra in particular is pretty obviously written with young adults in mind)
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As a feminist, and as a minimally decent human being, I feel compelled to oppose anything of the “bro-” kind, or at least to approach it with great suspicion.
But as a (trans)feminist, a minimally decent human being, a gender-non-conforming person, and a person who reads as male and thinks that MLP is a pretty good show, I can’t help thinking that shaming men for engaging in a stereotypically feminine activity is a probably not the best way to smash the patriarchy.
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As a feminist, and as a minimally decent human being, I feel compelled to oppose anything of the “bro-” kind, or at least to approach it with great suspicion.
Um, what now?
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The so-called “bro” culture in our society is toxic and problematic in like forty-seven different ways. Is this even remotely news?
Cf. “brogrammer”, “bros before h*es”, the longstanding association of the term with frat culture, the urbandictionary entry for “bro”, etc.
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Is the use of “bro-” as a prefix for things that don’t have to do with frat culture news?
Because bronies and frat culture . . . apart from both being male, they don’t have very much in common.
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“Frat culture”? Like our Super Smash Brothers marathons or cheese nights, or the part where I’m an openly trans male member of mine?
There is no “frat culture” – there are a multitude of cultures and a single stereotype non-members like to apply to all of us, but I can assure you that there is no unified bro code of any kind to keep us in line.
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This seems a bit circular. You’re defending the non-awfulness of using “bro” in “brony” by arguing that the use of “bro” doesn’t always invoke the toxic “bro” culture, and your example is … bronies. Have I got that right?
Look, I’m not saying actual bronies are hateful. Certainly, if you define ‘brony’ as synonymous with ‘male MLP fan’, that is a perfectly awesome thing to be.
I’m saying trying to repurpose a hate-word for their name was at best a dumbass public relations move, and that I’m more than a little suspicious of whoever thought that was a good idea.
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@ninecarpals: I happily concede that it is #notallbrothers. I apologize for my imprecision.
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@R Stuart Cohen. Fair enough, and thank you. That kind of stereotyping has direct repercussions for us, so I appreciate it when it’s retracted.
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I don’t think “brony” was a hate word when the MLP fandom coined it.
I mean, I’ve never been involved in that fandom, so I’m not sure. But I was hanging around a lot of very nerdy people when the show launched, including some who made it into both sides of the dispute, so I would have been in a position to — and I only heard it in a derogatory context a year, maybe two, after I heard it in a neutral one.
“Bro” itself seems to have followed a similar arc, if that’s what you were talking about.
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I’m going to add my chorus to the confusion here. I’ve never heard the prefix bro- being called a hate word before, and I if I’m honest I’d be suspicious of why anyone would try to transform a positive word into a slur.
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I was under the impression was that ‘bro’ was to a certain segment of the patriarchy roughly what ‘comrade’ is to a certain segment of the communist-ish left.
I think the vote is in and my impression was probably just mistaken.
I apologize for any distress I may have caused.
Although I still don’t see why we need to slather gender-signifiers all over the name of a fandom, instead of just having something neutral (which would avoid problems with both gender-segregation issues and the the exclusion of nonbinary fans).
(And, which was a big part of the original point, I still think shaming male consumers of femme-targeted entertainment is a pretty ridiculous thing to do in the name of feminism, no matter what dumb name they’re associated with.)
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@R Stuart-Cohen
I’ve been told I’m weird for this, but you can add it as a data point: Where I’m from, ‘bro’ is gender-neutral, or at least it can be. We have the more stigmatized male-exclusive meaning, too, but it’s also used as a term of endearment. When I got married my wedding party – two women and one man – called themselves my ‘groomsbros’ to account for the mixed gender makeup, and one of the women and I have an acknowledged bond of brohood. (The other woman is my sister, and the man is one of my brothers from my fraternity, so the brohood was already implied for them.)
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People don’t like to be misgendered. Liking My Little Pony is (regardless of the actual fandom demographics) a strong signal of being a (very young) woman. The term exists to counter that and prevent misgendering.
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>I still think shaming male consumers of femme-targeted entertainment is a pretty ridiculous thing to do in the name of feminism, no matter what dumb name they’re associated with.
The people doing the shaming swear up and down that being a male consumer of female-oriented entertainment is totally cool and they’re only upset with male bronies because they’re making it “unsafe”, or words to that effect, for the young female target audience of the show, e.g. by producing lots and lots of porn.
Speaking as someone who was around during the (largely female-fronted) Harry Potter erotic fanfic meltdown, though, that line of argument sounds pretty post-hoc to me.
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Especially since . . . how much of that porn is in otherwise safe spaces anyway? If you’re letting your 11-and-under kid have unsupervised access to any of the *booru’s (never mind paheal), then they’re going to end up seeing adult content sooner or later anyway.
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Um, what now?
This thread is pretty bizarre in general — have y’all ever met any actual bros? Given that one of the brogrammers I know is succeeding in getting a lot of the other ones into Against Me entirely because of their latest album…
Also, the bros at my college were bisexual anarchists and shit. They’d go on for half an hour about how big corporations co-opted straightedge. There aren’t that many bros who listen to hardcore, but it’s more of them than you think.
As for notch culture, the nerds I’ve met are much more degenerate on that count than the bros.
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Notch culture? I’m not familiar with the term, and the Google results seem to be dominated by the phrase “top-notch culture.”
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I’m guessing “notch” as in “notch on the bedpost”?
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Right. Casual sex as status-powered social ~obligation.
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@nydwracu: So, I’m in the middle of reading the entirety of Ozy’s tumblr, and around the current page 350 ze says something to the tune of “I’ve had sex with four new people this week, this is the median number of sex partners for American women, I think they should step up their game”. How, as a third party observer, do you differentiate between casual sex for funsies and casual sex as an obligation?
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To my view “bro-” is in general a minor kinda slur with a meaning in the same range as “douchebag.” So if I call some group of men “tech-bros,” I kinda mean to imply that they are not-so-nice and playing their masculinity cards in gross ways.
For some broader context on the term, see this.
Now, whether or not “bronies” deserve to be lumped into the mess, well, I tend to think they do not. Mostly. It’s complicated.
(It seems to me some geeky guys end up wannabe bros. Which, it doesn’t work very well.)
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Bad things about “brony”, as opposed to “MLP fan” or “friend”:
– seems to signal “please don’t lump us in with girls, that would be horrible!”
– adult female fans get clunky names like “pegasisters”
Good things about “brony”:
– funny
– defends a less restrictive idea of masculinity
Speaking of masculinity, I would certainly prefer a better treatment of male characters in MLP.
Also, less of “other races” = “other species” and no harassment of donkeys for their own good, please.
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I think it’s more “please don’t misgender me based on which cartoons I like.”
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Is “brony” a word for male MLP fan? I always see it used for adult MLP fans regardless of gender.
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It’s mostly gender neutral. However you do see attempts to have specific words for adult female fans like “pegasisters”.
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My impression is that it started as a name for fans who were both older (whether actually adult or not) and male, and then largely generalized to older fans generally. I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard of a male fan within the target age group being referred to as a “brony”; then again, I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard of a male fan within the target age group at all, although I imagine there have to be a few of them out there. I wonder if there are some interesting social dynamics going on there, or just the fact that small children are less likely to have unrestricted internet access.
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From some intensive googling, I think the brony-hate crowd are using the term to mean a particular ostensibly cohesive and predominantly male subculture, and don’t think they’re referring to all adults, or even all adult males, who happen to be in some sense fans of the show. If this is what they mean, they are not doing an excellent job of being clear about that.
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@R Stuart
Regional slang might have something to do with how we’re all responding as well. ‘Brony’ at my college was entirely gender-neutral, and used as a self-identifier. I accept the possibility that different populations may use it differently.
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@Forlorn Hopes
Wait a second. Calling a man an “MLP fan” is misgendering them, but calling a woman a “brony” is not misgendering because it’s gender-neutral?
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@Nita
What’s odd about that? Whether a word leads to misgendering is entirely arbitrary because words themselves are entirely arbitrary and only work because of shared cultural assumptions.
Before Friendship is Magic got popular people assumed that a MLP fan would be female and so male fans called themselves Bronies to avoid giving other people the impression that they were female; which would lead to them being misgendered.
At a later point in time female fans of Friendship is Magic began calling themselves bronies, but by that point the existence of a male MLP fandom has been recognised so there was no more need for a special male identifier to prevent misgendering.
But ultimately. People agree that the word brony is gender neutral. People used to agree that “MLP fan” implied female; this was true dispite the fact one literally has the bro- prefix.
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Uh, I guess we just have different linguistic/social intuitions (in other words, your definition of “people” doesn’t seem to include me). To me, “MLP fan” can lead to misgendering, but “bro-” is misgendering (“bro” is far less arbitrary than “dude” or “guy”, so I don’t envision it becoming gender-neutral in the mainstream culture any time soon).
My intuition is that many girls don’t mind being “one of the guys”, but most guys, even the sweet and cuddly MLP fans, would very much mind being “one of the girls”. What do you think?
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@Nita: but would the girls who don’t mind being “one of the guys” object to the explicitly gendered “one of the boys”?
For the sake of argument: “fan” and “fangirl” have been clawing steadily toward synonymity in recent times, especially as “fangirl” is discarded for being perceived as immature and low-status. Following that, overly sensitive or not, people who didn’t want to be misgendered might find an excuse for avoiding “fan” in an especially female-aimed context like MLP.
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@Leit
Good point on “fan”->”fangirl”, although to me personally Star Wars fans, Apple fans and sports fans are still very salient.
Apparently, some of us don’t? But I wonder about the difference in attitude between the genders. On the other hand, “brony” was invented by 4chan, which has its own “tough guy” dynamics and probably isn’t representative.
As a cis-by-default, low 2D:4D ratio female MLP fan*, I don’t feel like “brony” can refer to me unless I change my gender. To me, the word splits the fandom into “little girls” and “bros” — and I’m neither.
Internet trivia: Knowyourmeme says bronies are male, Urbandictionary is divided.
* casual, although I have watched the main series and been to two small meetups
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@Nita: to further muddy the waters, let’s consider the term ‘fanboy’. What connotations instantly spring to mind? To me, the first things that occur are partisanship, stubbornness and once again immaturity – cf. X-box fanboys, Apple fanboys, etc. It’s a term that gets applied in an adversarial context. So there’s a male equivalent to ‘fangirl’, with equally terrible connotations, but men attempt to abandon the ‘fan’ flag altogether, leaving it for the ladies. One wonders why.
Sports fans are intersecting more with online fandoms, and while I instinctively feel they’re part of a different discussion, you’ve got a good point when you mention them alongside Star Wars. Older fandoms may have been more male-oriented, or may be more respectable thanks to their old-money longevity – sports fandom may fall into the same category as SW.
I’d hazard a guess that in context as a Star Wars fan or a Man United fan the subject actively draws gendered associations. This points to ‘fan’ as a general descriptor with the fandom filling in its own assumptions – and the conclusion that bronies came to was that ‘fan’ in the context of MLP would lean too far toward female associations.
This is all muddled and rampant speculation, though, and while it’s been interesting to think about, I’m going to bow out here until further consideration. Please don’t take it as a dismissal.
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I’m sorry, but I have to defend “brony” as a term for male MLP fans. It obviously derives from the word “bro,” which is short for “brother.” The reason people made up a special term for men who like the show is because it’s obviously not a show originally aimed at men. I don’t see a need to make up a corresponding term for female fans because female fans are just fans of a show that was aimed at them to begin with. Do you need a special term for male fans of GI Joe?
As for older vs. younger, yes, it is obviously aimed at young girls, so adult women who enjoy the show are also, in some sense, not the target audience, but that seems to be a completely different question, and, as some mentioned, very young male fans of the show are probably very few due to peer pressure, etc.
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That said, if someone who identifies as female really wants to call herself a “brony” for whatever reason, then more power to her, but I dispute the claim that the term itself is gender-neutral. “Bro-” is masculine.
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“My intuition is that many girls don’t mind being “one of the guys”,”
My intuition is that Ann Coulter probably minds being called “Man Coulter” a lot. 🙂
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[Abject Rage] A good many of the people described as fedora-wearers are NOT wearing fedoras they’re trilbies.
‘The London hat company Lock and Co. describes the trilby as having a “shorter [viz., narrower] brim which is angled down [snapped down] at the front and slightly turned up at the back” versus the fedora’s “wider brim which is more level [flatter].”‘
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby [/Abject Rage]
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I think most people commenting on fedoras actually know that. In fact I’ve heard several times that pointing out the difference between a trilby and a fedora is the most fedorable thing you can do.
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Which is an awful state of affairs, because unlike trilbies, fedoras are actually useful items of clothing in certain weather conditions and not just fashion accessories.
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The only person I know in meatspace who owns a fedora bought it to do geological mapping in the Alps in summer. He swears it’s absolutely awesome.
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Might be because “fedora” wasn’t originally a label applied by the people wearing these hats. The trilby was largely popularised in gamer circles by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, and it got to the point where he doesn’t wear them any more because a) it became his defining feature and b) so, so many other people were wearing them, and as a misanthrope that made him very uncomfortable.
Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, habitually wears a very fine wide-brimmed fedora. I would *love* to see the reaction if he noticed the “fedora” label and questioned its general application.
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I can speak as someone steeped in anti-fedora culture: yes everyone is aware of the difference between a fedora and a trilby. No one cares all that much.
Myself, I think the fedora looks way better than the trilby. So there’s that.
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They are associated with mras for some reason. I have no idea whether mras actually wear fedoras more often than non mras, or how this association came to be, but I am disproportionately annoyed by this.
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People who argue about sexual politics on the internet tend to wear fedoras more than people who don’t. Since it’s a major faux pas it’s easy to tar your opponents with association to them. MRAs stereotype feminists as fedora wearers just as much as the opposite.
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@JE
Hold up. There’s a stereotype of feminists wearing fedoras? And I thought I’d seen it all.
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I think it might be like this.
Redpillers and assorted internet “alpha” guys use the “white knight” / “supplicating AFC” stereotype:
http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/attachment.php?attachmentid=850990&d=1386464523
Fedora-hating “feminists” use the “cryptomisogynist” / “asshole Nice Guy” stereotype:
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@JE: I’m gonna second ninecarpals here. I’ve only ever seen fedoras as a MRA/Nice Guy/PUA/Redpill/Redditor/neckbeard/nerd/virgin/”Those people that it’s somehow okay for SJWs to shit on despite a lot of them not actually having done anything wrong” stereotype.
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Well, there’s this:
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@JME
Consider me enlightened. Also, I want to be Old Guy’s friend.
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Well have you spent much time in anti-feminist spaces? Cause that is my experience with them.
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@osberend
Check out the comments on this, ahem, controversial video:
Fedoras Are Awesome
Featuring gems like:
‘liberalism is a mental disorder’
‘”gender identity” HAHAHAHAHA’
‘SJW loving BETA MALES have turned the Fedora into a sigh of male weakness’
and
‘Tumblr: the video’
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@osberend: Guessing you don’t spend a lot of time outside of blue circles. “Fedora” is a pretty common epithet for SJWs and the like in redpill and fitness (perhaps as a side effect of redpill) circles.
It still carries the same connotations of “unattractive, socially inept, obsessive loser”, hilariously enough.
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@Leit,
Seriously? Wow. Learn something new every day. The closest I’ve been to Red Pill spaces were casual perusals of places like that now defunct blog In Mala Fide (mostly out of sheer morbid curiosity) and the Hooking Up Smart comment section, which is absolutely silly with man-o-spherism and Red Pillism.
I’ve also been quite active in fitness circles in the past. Twice I’ve moved to a new city and met or cemented new friends at the gym. These were guys who were heavily into “bro science”, seemed mostly apolitical but if pressed would probably be kind of Gray-ish, to use Scott Alexander’s color-classifications, and seem like they’d be the type of people you’d be referring to. Never heard “fedora” used to mean SJW. (I’ve heard them used the term ‘social justice’ in a disparaging manner but never ‘fedora’ in any context.)
Back when I was paying attention, fedoras (sorry, trillbies) were associated with Jason Mraz and thus a certain type of metro-ish, ultimately Blue guy. I never wore one but I learned “I’m Yours” on the guitar like all guys at the time. It didn’t really carry any political connotations. For that matter, I knew social justice as essentially a code word for economic inequality issues. For instance, when Glenn Beck told his conservative listeners to oppose churches that push “social justice”, I understood he meant those that focus on helping the poor. Not sure when this was, but I’m pretty sure it was after Obama’s election at the least. I have no idea when it suddenly came to solely connote a movement of upper-middle-class white college kids with a singular focus on identity politics issues. For that matter, I knew Tumblr’s reputation with regards to this “social justice” thing before I was even sure what Tumblr was, exactly.
Suddenly these terms have acquired goddamn infrastructures and I have no idea how it happened.
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They are associated with a stereotype of a creepy, socially dysfunctional nerd with Red Pill or MRA opinions and delusions of being a chivalous holdout of the Old School.
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“In fact, misogyny is fucking everywhere, including in guys you think are really cool.” And of course in non-guys, because it wasn’t hard enough to figure out already.
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My understanding is that the hats are evocative of Indiana Jones or Humphrey Bogart; masculine men from a bygone age.
My further understanding is that feminism has reached a kind of critical threshold of membership, such that there are a large number of feminists who care more about the group’s social positioning than its ideals, and then there you go; feminists make fun of a segment of the population who oppose their ideals and wear fedoras, many in that population double down on both, and because there are a relatively small number of fedora-wearers, there are very few voices crying out in the wilderness “Screw your politics, I just want to wear my goddamn hat.”
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Your framing of the issue reminds me of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
Given Pournelle’s politics, this observation of his is probably motivated, but it’s still perfectly true. The observation of the same dynamics in feminism (and a wide variety of social movements generally) suggests that the law could be further generalized.
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Huh. That is an interesting point. I’m not sure if I’d call it 100% certain. But I do think that it’s one of those asymptotically-converging things as time increases. Organizations can achieve their actual goals, declare victory, and dissolve themselves so their members can go on and do other things. Heck, I wouldn’t even say that this was particularly rare with my experience in various fandom organizations. But, for obvious reasons, the organizations that did this aren’t around any more.
I wonder if this could be extended to a discussion of competing organizations in the same ideal-space. I mean, it seems pretty clear that organizations that go full self-sustaining do occasionally draw interest once they’ve strayed too far from their original goals, and do get shut down or abandoned. Maybe there’s a Steel Law that says that organizations converge on the right ratio of idealism to self-promotion according to the population around them.
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Suppose you enjoy making fun of people’s fashion choices, or their sexual experience level, or their taste in TV shows, but you don’t post identifying information or harass them. You just think fedoras look silly, or that anyone who stuck with MLP after Magical Mystery Cure is the equivalent of a Ba’athist dead-ender, or that virgins (after, say, 18 or whatever) are dorky losers. Ideally, you share a few pictures of goofy-looking fedora-clad guys with your friends, have a laugh, and the fedora’ed gentlemen never find out.
1) This is wrong, for some kind of virtue-ethics reasons, cultivating forms of entertainment based on derision and mockery that aren’t good for the soul?
2) This isn’t exactly wrong, and you’re entitled to finding fedoras gross/risible, but, guess what, other people are entitled to find your fedora-hating obsession gross/risible too?
3) People are going to wind up hurt anyway, find out that they’re being mocked, and the anticipatable effects. regardless of intentions, will be tantamount to more open bullying? (see the Star Wars Kid video, or the dubious effectiveness of TumblrInAction style rules of the “please don’t use our links to harass people” sort.)
4) Something else?
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To clarify, I don’t talk about fedora/brony/whatever mocking as any sort of edifying, good, or feminist project, or attempting to link misogyny with trilbys, or anything like that. I’m talking about pure entertainment, with no illusions of being any more noble than a Sacha Baron Cohen film. Although maybe Sacha Baron Cohen films are awful too? (At least the “reality” ones like Borat, much moreso than, say, The Dictator,)
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Fedoras of OKC is a public website; people can and do find themselves on there getting laughed at. It is bullying and therefore wrong.
If you are doing it with your friends in private, the harm is reduced (assuming your friends aren’t virgins or MLP fans), but I still question why you find bullying people enjoyable and I would certainly not want to hang out with you.
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>I still question why you find bullying people enjoyable
It doesn’t need justifying, they just do. (Of course, the moral value of bullying is outweighed by the harm it causes to others.) On this blog, of all places one must not forget that people have their own preferences. N.B. This comment is worded more harshly than i’d ideally like it to be.
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…this blog?
I’m a hedonic utilitarian, not a preference utilitarian. It is totally ethically consistent for me to say that people can have a preference but it is a morally wrong preference and they should stop.
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@ozymandias: How does hedonic utilitarianism change Lambert’s basic point? It seems to me that it just replaces “people have their own preferences [including to mock fedora-wearers, bronies, and/or virgins]” with “people having their own things-they-derive-enjoyment-from [including mocking fedora-wearers, bronies, and/or virgins].”
If anything, preference utilitarianism makes a better case against mockery that they target never hears of (which doesn’t really strike me as bullying), in that people can have a preference against the mere fact of their being mocked (even if they don’t know about it), but cannot lose pleasure or suffer pain from the mere fact of their being mocked (if they don’t know about it). However, these both seem kinda weak compared to both virtue ethics and (*sigh*) deontology.
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Preference utilitarianism usually doesn’t account for the fact that one can change their bloody preferences. And I suspect that preferring that others suffer mockery is a net negative preference to have even if you are exercising it in a harm-reduction fashion. (I think this is basically what the virtue ethicists are getting at.)
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Preference utilitarianism usually doesn’t account for the fact that one can change their bloody preferences.
Really? That surprises me. Admittedly, the only utilitarian philosopher (as opposed to summary thereof) I’ve read at any length is JS Mill, who was at least nominally (and in the abstract) a hedonic utilitarian.
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Yeah, having preferences that it’s unethical to actually pursue is still a thing in preference utilitarianism. For example, when I’m stuck in traffic, I may prefer to run the person in front of me over with a tank. The person in front of me may instead prefer not to have their car crushed with them inside it. Preference utilitarianism doesn’t dictate that these are both totally kosher and equal in weight, though, because one’s an idle road-rage-induced whim and the other is a strong, stable preference. Also because both utility functions have a lot of other stuff going on.
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Assuming there are no “spillover” effects then hating on bronies/feminists/ratonalist/republicans/etc is perfectly fine. In fact if the people involved enjoy it then its actively a moral good to mock X-outgroup however harshly you want.
The issue is that, as you describe, spillover is likely. People might easily find out. Even if people do not see themselves directly mocked if they see people like them being mocked they may rightly wonder if someone is mocking them specifically. Also its pretty hard to tell how on board everyone is. I can do a very convincing impression of being a mainline feminist (which I do if I happen to want to discuss certain issues with certain people). If people started mocking X-feminist outgroup I am probably going to feel insulted. Even if most people who didn’t know my views assumed I was a normal feminist. I used to be a libertarian though I am not now and am pretty critical of libertarian’s economic policy. But if people say “libertarians are heartless/sheep/racist white people/etc” I am going to feel badly attacks, this was me a few years ago!
The other possibility is that there is some “virtue ethics”s tyle effect. Where mocking X-outgroup causes you to treat them worse. But ignoring any “spillover” I think one should accept that hatefully mocking people is morally good as long as the people involved enjoy it.
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That seems like a curiously consequentialist version of a “‘virtue ethics’ style effect.” The real virtue ethicist objection in terms of effects, as opposed to causes*, is that cultivating enjoyment of mocking people over things that are not fit grounds for mockery increases your propensity to do the same, which is vicious. Consequently, even if you damage nothing else, you are damaging your own soul**.
It is also true, of course, that such filling your soul with vice increases your propensity to damage people as well. But that’s a conditionally resultant evil, while the cultivation of vice itself is intrinsic.
*The objection in terms of causes being that engaging in such mockery manifests the vice that already blights your soul.
**For purely atheistic versions of virtue ethics, feel free to substitute “character.”
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I am consequentalist so I am not personally convinced by things like “cultivation of vice” being inherently evil. Hence I used “virtue ethics style effect.” If an action causes you to be more likely to later take actions that have bad consequences then the action is bad.
This doesn’t require accepting any of the virtue ethics framework. Though of course virtue ethics people are on to something. Even if I think they have the wrong perspective.
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Some combination, I think? As one of the few people commenting here who identifies as a virtue ethicist*, here are my tentative thoughts:
There are three (overlapping) kinds of behavior that are at least arguably “bad”: Those which manifest or cultivate a vicious character (or which prevent the manifestation or cultivation of a virtuous character), those which violate the rights of others, and those which cause material or psychological harm to others**.
A love of mocking things that other enjoy, without good cause—mocking vice or wickedness is plausibly virtuous—is clearly vicious, and cultivating such a love is therefore wicked. It is not, as such, a violation of others’ rights, although it easily can be, most frequently by being defamatory. Whether it causes material or psychological harm depends on whether the mockery is found by anyone . . . relevant, including not only the target of one’s mockery, but also those who love them and would be upset by such mockery, those who would be inspired by one’s mockery to treat the targets poorly, and who have the opportunity to do so, etc.
*Although perhaps with a bit of a consequentialist admixture.
**The least frequently bad of the three, but still bad often enough to be worth noting.
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Seconding this.
It’s the same thing as people who like to fry ants with magnifying glasses: ants are generally recognized as morally negligible (and even if you consider them the moral calculus, their preferences are probably outweighed by the pleasure derived from frying them), so you can’t raise utilitarian objections, but actively seeking them out to kill them is a sign of bad character, so it shouldn’t be done anyway.
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Normally reading social justice stuff sends me crazy but yeah all I was really able to absorb from this is that you don’t like eggplant. Even just slicing it up and frying it in oil with salt and pepper is amazing
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reason the intersection of bronies and fedora boys is targeted – bronies have created pornography, including rape fantasies, of female characters and voice actresses for a tv show targeted at young girls. this pornography is easily accessible to said young fans since not all bronies tag or wall their nsfw. geek fandom etiquette is to protect younger fans from atypical violence or sexual content. there’s a split over how sexist the mlp fandom is compared to other fandoms, but a lot of female fans fled as the nasty came out.
putting aside whether ppl should be fantasizing about raping princess celestia, i hope we can all agree that young female fans should protected from stumbling on this when they’re looking for coloring pages or whatever else 7 year old girls do these days
there have been a couple campaigns, mainly through tumblr, to tag nsfw content or to upvote sfw material to the top of searches in order to protect fans
i have 0 idea of how effective these have been since i’m a casual who gtfo as things got crazy.
a bit of fandom history to clarify why bronies are so reviled by some
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I think the problem here is allowing 7-year-olds (why young female fans specifically? should girls’ viewing materials be more restricted/”protected” than boys?) to have unsupervised access to tumblr and/or image boards. If you want a safe space, build a safe space, don’t use a general-purpose space and hope that certain tags will be left alone.
Also, MLP voice actress porn? I’m not saying that doesn’t exist, but I have literally never seen or heard of any of it.
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Also, Rule 34: pubescent and post-pubescent fans have created porn of every media property. And why shouldn’t they?
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@Osberend
This one, right here. My middle school friends (all girls) loved to giggle about Balrog porn. MLP may be half of all feral porn but Pokemon is at least an additional quarter, and every other movie Disney’s made is in there somewhere. (Well, okay: I haven’t seen Flounder/Sebastian porn yet, though I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.)
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NSFW: And now you have! (Warning: Parent site has a lot of pop-up ads, and in the past (rarely), some of these have attempted to install malware. Link itself is safe (computer-wise), though.)
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@Osberend
I didn’t mean to pull a Let Me Google That For You moment. But thank you anyway for taking the time to educate me. 😦
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Always a pleasure. 😀 Actually, that was a Let Me Paheal That For You, but the same principle applies, just a little more specifically.
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@Osberend
And now I know what Paheal is! Double education!
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I believe that most adult fans want to do that. But if you google “snape and harry”, you’re going to get some erotica right in the image search results. So, despite the best intentions, it doesn’t seem to work that well.
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The thing is, when you say you hate “bronies”, people not familiar with this background don’t necessarily realize you mean the fandom as a space. They think you just mean males who enjoy watching the show, many of whom have never even heard of all this stuff because most people who enjoy, or even obsessively enjoy, a show don’t spend a lot of time bouncing around its fan communities on the internet, and who are likely to take offense or feel that they are being treated unfairly.
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Eep, formatting troubles 😦
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Serious question: do people actually “dislike” virgins? My understanding was that nobody gives a shit about anyone’s virginity except the virgins themselves, and people use it as an avenue of mocking only because they think it will hit hard. I don’t care if people are short, but, hypothetically, if someone is really self-conscious about their height, and I want to make fun of them, I might comment on their height, not because I “dislike” short people, but because I know my comment will offend them.
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I don’t know how many people dislike male virgins as such, but there are certainly plenty of people who find them contemptible, either for perceived weakness or for perceived character deficits.
In particular, I’ve seen a recurring (massively ableist) argument among feminists who are opposed to legalized prostitution that it’s not all hard to get laid for free if you’re a remotely decent human being, so obviously any man who wants to be able to pay for sex is a man who wants to be able to dehumanize and abuse his sexual partners. While I haven’t explictly seen that extended to “obviously any virgin who is unhappy with his state wants to be able to dehumanize and abuse his sexual partners, but is too cheap or cowardly to hire a prostitute” it would seem to be the natural implication of that chain of “logic.”
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I always thought the the stigma against being a virgin (particularly if you’re a dude) had more to do with the cultural meme that dudes always want sex, and thus, by implication, a dude who’s never had sex with anyone must be desperately unattractive in some way–since if you endorse this point of view, the only reason a dude wouldn’t have sex is because literally no one wants to have sex with him.* Like, in high school I knew a fair number of boys who were saving their virginity for marriage/a committed relationship/etc, and they were roundly mocked for it, even though, by False’s reasoning, no one should have had any reason to think that they’d be sensitive about it.
*FYI, I endorse zero parts of this statement, I am just noting that it is a mindset that exists.
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Is that really distinct? It seems to me that the feminist mindset I’m describing is just “a dude who’s never had sex with anyone must be desperately unattractive in some way” + “the only thing that that unattractive is undisguised misogyny.”
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Nope, it’s not super distinct–I’d say they’re perfectly compatible with each other! I just think that it’s something that feminists who make that argument are getting from the broader cultural sphere. Kind of like the “Misogyny is awful! Especially when it’s coming from men who are bad at conventional masculinity!” thing.
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I don’t think you guys understand the SJW mindset very well. I think “False” had is basically right (which was an ironically fun sentence to type). SJ feminists attack men for being virgins because they think it will hurt them. The *reasons* they are attacking these men varies. Sometimes they have good reasons, as the Internet is thick with shitty nerd-bros who hate women, but often their reasons are not so good, as illustrated in Ozy’s post. But that is neither here nor there. The *reason* “fat neckbeard virgin loser” comes out is because the SJ people want to *hurt these men* and this is the only tool they can think of.
I think this is very unfortunate and not good feminism. On the other hand, often the targets are callous anonymous chan-trolls. I can sort of understand the desperation when faced with such horrible people.
A similar dynamic comes out in the “nice guys” discussions, which is the “you cannot get laid cuz you’re a shitty misogynist” line. Often the men in this discourse are indeed shitty misogynists. However, it is foolish to think that is why they cannot get laid. Again, this is a bad argument (often) made against valid targets. (And as often made against men who *should not* be targets, as we’ve seen in the Scott Aaronson backlash.)
All that said, I very much wish my allies would stop using these tactics. They hurt the wrong targets.
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While the dynamic you describe is clearly both real and common, I don’t think it’s complete. As I noted, I’ve seen the argument “only men who are blatantly misogynistic and/or whose sexuality revolves around abuse would find it difficult to get laid without paying for it” deployed by feminists arguing against legalizing prostitution, even when their opponents were heterosexual women. That’s clearly not just about trying to hurt the people they’re arguing with. I find it hard to believe that (a) this meme is actually held by some asshole feminists and (b) essentially the same meme is deployed by asshole feminists against lonely virgins, but (a) is not a cause of (b).
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I’m sure that meme exists, but I don’t think it is what you find among the SJ Feminist crowd, who tend toward the sex-positive side of the fence. In any case, I basically ignore the SWERFy and TERFy types of feminists, so I cannot say what they believe. I *do* see much of what I describe, which is feminists who are furious with -chan culture and are lashing out.
Anyway, this is fairly recent I guess. I’m not sure how much this applies to the older debates, things pre-elevator-gate.
(Actually, was the original “Nice Guy” debate before or after elevator gate? I think it was before, but I’m bad at putting stuff in historic order, which is probably a byproduct of my dyslexia.)
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I think these two statements are mutually contradictory, and also combine to become something horrible.
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Hurting people (proportionately) in retaliation for their doing sufficiently wicked things is just, honorable, and in some circumstances socially useful, insofar as deters others from imitating them.
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@Forlorn — Do you honestly not understand what I am saying?
Short version: The targets of this stuff are often genuinely horrible people who *should* be called out for being horrible. However, attacking them *for being virgins* is inappropriate, as that is not what is actually wrong with them and it smears many men who are virgins but are not horrible people.
This seems like a simple concept to me.
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@osberend — On hurting bad people, I maybe sorta agree sometimes. I dunno. There is the whole “cycles of violence” thing to keep in mind. By which I mean, whatever our moral values, we enact them in the causal fabric of the world, and unless we outright destroy we enemies they will be there in the aftermath with resentment to spare.
And on this topic, nerd misogyny, I think few would advocate “outright destruction.” (Even the “end of gamers” articles did not advocate literal homicide.)
Punishment doesn’t work very well unless its targets accept your authority to judge. If they do not, then your actions appear to them to be an unjust attack, to which they feel justified in fighting back. Does your average -chan troll accept the authority of Twitter feminists to judge them? It seems unlikely.
Furthermore, there is a Social Justice meme that says, “When you insult someone for being fat, you do not only insult them.” The meaning is, I hope, obvious.
There are at least two problems with attacking the -chan trolls for being “fat neckbeard virgin losers.” One is that many of them probably are not. (For example, I consider Violentacrz cut from the same cloth as the -chan trolls and he was relatively successful.) You can seldom hurt people by criticizing flaws they do not have. For example, if you call me a “fat loser” I’ll laugh at you for being clueless. If you call me a “tranny” and tell me I still look like a dude, it can actually hurt my feelings. Cuz I am a tranny and I don’t pass very well.
Second, even if you do hurt some of the trolls, it is clear that you also hurt a lot of totally decent guys, you know, the other fat virgin dudes who are totally kind-hearted, but carry a lot of stigma cuz society is horrible to fat people and male status is all wrapped up in being successful with women.
Personally I know a lot of fat dudes and neckbeard dudes (sometimes both!) and similarly geeky men and *the ones I know* are lovely and brilliant and kind and decent and if some shitty GG backlash hurts their feelings then that sucks.
This kind of discourse is bad feminism.
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@False,
Wow. Um, let’s just get started.
There are certain traits and a certain “type” that tends to highly correlate with overage virginity. People of this “type” are the ones people are talking about. When “virgins” are disparaged, no one’s referring to good-looking, socially admired, effusively extroverted types who happen to be deeply religious and are joining the priesthood. Nor are they not not referring to others who fit the “type” but may not technically be virgins (though still in all likelihood sexually inexperienced for their age, given that they fit the type and all). People of this “type” most certainly face dislike and even hatred, which plenty of people evidently care very much about upholding. Bullying takes effort and an element of social risk, given that it can carry consequences; people pick their targets carefully.
“Dislike” is impossible to prove. Bigots almost always say they don’t “hate” the group under question; this is less because they see hatred of people as a bad thing and want not to be associated with it, and more because subjective emotional states are fluid and impossible to pin down, so the existence of the bigotry can never be proven. That’s why “dislike” and “hatred” are not the measures of prejudice. Observable real world disparities are. If a group of people face scorn, derision, and are looked down upon for something that’s really not anyone else’s business and isn’t doing anyone else any harm, it’s safe to say that “dislike” for them exists. You’ll never get the truth by actually asking the purveyors of that scorn, given the obvious incentives to lie.
The fact it’s the first thing people think of proves that people do in fact care – things you “don’t care” about, by definition, wouldn’t be floating around in their minds by definition – is the correct answer, and people would be saying about this already if the targeted group in question were more socially sympathetic and belonged to a protected group. You evidently cared enough to post in the first place, to not allow a “pro-virgin” message to stand without pushback. Which leads me to…
Second, I don’t know much about your personal politics, but it’s telling that the two traits that you admitted widespread scorn for exists, but you’re saying “don’t matter” and in fact it’s the victim’s fault when they’re attacked, are significantly gendered male in terms of who bears the harshest social penalties. (Your “hypothetically” aside. If I “hypothetically” did the reverse, I certainly wouldn’t get away with it.) This could be a coincidence, as two isn’t the largest number, but in a place like this, I’m suspicious. (Not because prejudice against things gendered male is endemic here; the opposite is true. But because a place like this heavily filters for people who are already well aware of gender issues and the genderedness of issues. This isn’t a place you stumble across via Yahoo! News.)
So yeah, to get back to that, would you say the same thing about people’s emotional sore spots that happen to be gendered female? You could replace “virgins” and “short people” with “sluts” and “fat people” and your statements would still hold. One can certainly imagine people not actually hating the trait, they just go for the first thing they know will hurt. (After all, most men who deride “sluts” themselves often themselves want easy sex and maintain pleasant casual relations with the women who’ll do it with them.) Your ability to agree with that statement, vs. going “NUH-UH! When people use the latter, it’s because of actual deep-rooted dislike and prejudice because I say so! Huff, huff…”, would go a long way toward establishing your basic honesty level.
Especially since, despite your implication to the contrary, short people face real world penalties outside “mockery” (i.e. social prejudice). It’s been widely proven that short people face penalties in salary compensation and executive promotion.
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@pocketjacks
I don’t think it’s fair to accuse False of dishonesty on the basis of that comment. Maybe they simply haven’t encountered the comments and attitudes that you have, and typical mind fallacy led them astray.
For instance, if 10 years ago someone told me that some women (girls?) actively dislike short men, I would be skeptical. But I can believe that now, after seeing a collection of their angry tweets.
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@Nita,
I think I’ve been fairer than I needed to be toward someone who brags about wanting to make fun of people, or for whom it’s clearly important to signal “hey gaiz! In life, I’m of the ones who mock, not the ones who get mocked!”. Sure you are there, champ. (And I get the feeling it’s a him. Just a feeling. Both genders have their foibles, but talking about “offending” people like it’s something to be proud of, is one that leans heavily male in my experience. Could be wrong, though.)
But I will keep your comment in mind, for the next time someone asks something like this but in seeming good faith.
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Virgin being used as a proxy for not conforming to many societal standards regarding: hygiene, social interactions, interests, behavior, grooming, fashion… the gamut. Uncomfortably close to being a proxy for “autistic-spectrum person”.
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Nein. Eggplant is Correct.
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Fedora-wearers and bronies get targeted for mockery by SJWs because the mockery can be plausibly defended as “punching up” (they are, at least archetypally, straight white cis men), while being noncentral, unappealing members of the oppressor class; it’s not like there’s really much to mock about, say, Robert Downey Jr.
The perennial truth of the world is that everybody loves winners and hates losers. Social justice activism isn’t about changing that, because it can’t be changed, but sometimes the lines can be redrawn a little.
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This is just one of the many reasons I loathe the dichotomy of “punching up” vs. “punching down.” Punch people who deserve to be punched, based on the actual unjust actions, even if they’re weaker than you, and for the love of the gods, stop punching people who don’t deserve to be punched, even if they’re stronger than you!
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The problem is that in everyone’s worldview, they’re “punching up”, whether it’s against the “liberal elite” or the “statists” or the Jews or the Illuminati. Everyone is an oppressed underdog, everyone is part of the protected elite. “Punching up” is like “privilege”, in theory a useful notion, in practice nobody is really interested or capable of determining who in society “has it worse”.
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That seems a bit overbroad; some people just like punching, and admit (to themselves if not to others) that they pick easy targets over hard ones, while others (those with high authoritarian aggression) openly target those who are weaker and “deviant.”
But it certainly is true that very many conflicts have people on both sides who are convinced that they’re the underdogs.
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