Extremely common. In gaming, twitch, YouTube comments, forums, 9gag comments, Reddit… The presence of women has been minuscule for a long while, and that’s translated as hostile to women.
some people in certain communities get high on their own farts by thinking everything there is sexist, any anyone who participates must also be sexist. and then also participate.
you can’t fix stupid. i remember being part of dating communities in the past and everyone thought the community was sexist against their own sex, mostly when people challenged their sexist assumptions about the other gender being another but awful and horrible. like all the women who said men were shitty and awful sex fiends thought the community was pro-male. it was hilarious. and vice versa for all the women haters.
what it was was shitty people being shitty and engaging in self-fulling prophecies, for the most part. and it would be funny when they dated someone who didn’t fit the ‘x is awful’ trope… they would complain how ‘boring’ and ‘weird’ the person was. the funny thing about the people who weren’t sexist as hell… was they never really whined about things being sexist.
It’s definitely common and it’s been around forever. We’ve always been here, but the vast majority of guys on the internet are so fucking toxic we just hide it. It’s true for me, at least. There are reasons I avoid PvP games like the plague, avoid toxic places like the Steam Forums, and refuse to use voice chat unless it’s a private game among friends. It gets hammered into you the first time you make the mistake of thinking you can participate with a group of boys, and that goes back before the internet. The internet creates an illusion of anonymity that makes those bad traits infinitely worse. So we mask and hide, but we’re here.
My experience has been the same and I’ve been on the internet since the mid-90s. I have always avoided voice chats unless with friends or trusted guildies and avoid things that will identify me as a woman because people can get so toxic. This happens in real life too, especially in gaming spaces. I’ve been laughed at when I said I taught my male partner how to play MTG until he confirmed it. I used to hear I’m “not a real woman” because I’ve been playing video games since I was a kid, it’s a lot better now, but it’s still there.
The womensstuff space is a huge breath of fresh air and I love having a space to speak about topics with fellow women. Quite a number of men have commented there and are very polite when they are corrected.
It seems like it started before 4chan. 4chan probably amplified it and helped spread it though. All the bad things either start there, or it’s users violently clutch and hang on to it until it seems like it started there.
That is were I heard it first though so you are right in calling me out. It’s been a while, longer then just a decade ago thankfully, but I spent a bit of my teen years on there. It really feels shameful to admit. Overall, just a gross place.
I spent a couple of my teenaged years there too. I remember I printed out the “rules of the internet” post, which includes that “rule” and had it on my desk in high school. “For the lulz”. It’s important to grow and change, both as individuals and as a society. My friend group back then was a bunch of supposedly straight cis teens who threw around all kinds of slurs, and we thought it was okay as long as we weren’t actually being mean to other people and we kept it amongst ourselves. Largely, it was. But a lot of the same people who loved to throw the F slur around back then have boyfriends now. At least one person transitioned.
But my broader point is that it’s very easy to convince ourselves that something common in our own bubbles is ubiquitous across the internet and across time. Other people close to my age had very different experiences with the internet because they were in different communities. I’m sure that the youth today, with TikTok and Roblox and whatever else they are doing, have an entirely different culture. The older people on Facebook have a very different culture. I’m sure non-English speaking communities have different cultures.
And that’s also part of why I’m against segregated spaces. They create an echo chamber and reinforce societal divisions.
Any time some bigoted anti-trans law about bathrooms is proposed, progressive people advocating inclusivity point out that it’s impossible to define what a “woman” is in a manner that both excludes all trans-women and includes all cis-women. And I fully support that, which is why I have a hard time supporting exclusionary policies on the internet too.
Your teenaged nephews may do the same thing, but my teenaged nieces do not. The internet is a gigantic place, and it’s dangerous to extrapolate our own limited perspective onto the whole.
Was it a common saying or were you just on 4chan too much?
Extremely common. In gaming, twitch, YouTube comments, forums, 9gag comments, Reddit… The presence of women has been minuscule for a long while, and that’s translated as hostile to women.
Really? I don’t even remember the last time 9gag was known for anything other than being uncool and irrelevant.
Sounds like you’re in a bubble of a lot of sexist communities. That’s real unfortunate- you should maybe try to get out of that.
Why are you saying I am in those spaces now? You asked in past tense, I answered how it was 15 years ago.
I left most of those a long time ago and several have changed. It’s important to remember history, 15 years is pretty recent.
some people in certain communities get high on their own farts by thinking everything there is sexist, any anyone who participates must also be sexist. and then also participate.
you can’t fix stupid. i remember being part of dating communities in the past and everyone thought the community was sexist against their own sex, mostly when people challenged their sexist assumptions about the other gender being another but awful and horrible. like all the women who said men were shitty and awful sex fiends thought the community was pro-male. it was hilarious. and vice versa for all the women haters.
what it was was shitty people being shitty and engaging in self-fulling prophecies, for the most part. and it would be funny when they dated someone who didn’t fit the ‘x is awful’ trope… they would complain how ‘boring’ and ‘weird’ the person was. the funny thing about the people who weren’t sexist as hell… was they never really whined about things being sexist.
It’s definitely common and it’s been around forever. We’ve always been here, but the vast majority of guys on the internet are so fucking toxic we just hide it. It’s true for me, at least. There are reasons I avoid PvP games like the plague, avoid toxic places like the Steam Forums, and refuse to use voice chat unless it’s a private game among friends. It gets hammered into you the first time you make the mistake of thinking you can participate with a group of boys, and that goes back before the internet. The internet creates an illusion of anonymity that makes those bad traits infinitely worse. So we mask and hide, but we’re here.
My experience has been the same and I’ve been on the internet since the mid-90s. I have always avoided voice chats unless with friends or trusted guildies and avoid things that will identify me as a woman because people can get so toxic. This happens in real life too, especially in gaming spaces. I’ve been laughed at when I said I taught my male partner how to play MTG until he confirmed it. I used to hear I’m “not a real woman” because I’ve been playing video games since I was a kid, it’s a lot better now, but it’s still there.
The womensstuff space is a huge breath of fresh air and I love having a space to speak about topics with fellow women. Quite a number of men have commented there and are very polite when they are corrected.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet
It seems like it started before 4chan. 4chan probably amplified it and helped spread it though. All the bad things either start there, or it’s users violently clutch and hang on to it until it seems like it started there.
That is were I heard it first though so you are right in calling me out. It’s been a while, longer then just a decade ago thankfully, but I spent a bit of my teen years on there. It really feels shameful to admit. Overall, just a gross place.
I spent a couple of my teenaged years there too. I remember I printed out the “rules of the internet” post, which includes that “rule” and had it on my desk in high school. “For the lulz”. It’s important to grow and change, both as individuals and as a society. My friend group back then was a bunch of supposedly straight cis teens who threw around all kinds of slurs, and we thought it was okay as long as we weren’t actually being mean to other people and we kept it amongst ourselves. Largely, it was. But a lot of the same people who loved to throw the F slur around back then have boyfriends now. At least one person transitioned.
But my broader point is that it’s very easy to convince ourselves that something common in our own bubbles is ubiquitous across the internet and across time. Other people close to my age had very different experiences with the internet because they were in different communities. I’m sure that the youth today, with TikTok and Roblox and whatever else they are doing, have an entirely different culture. The older people on Facebook have a very different culture. I’m sure non-English speaking communities have different cultures.
And that’s also part of why I’m against segregated spaces. They create an echo chamber and reinforce societal divisions.
Any time some bigoted anti-trans law about bathrooms is proposed, progressive people advocating inclusivity point out that it’s impossible to define what a “woman” is in a manner that both excludes all trans-women and includes all cis-women. And I fully support that, which is why I have a hard time supporting exclusionary policies on the internet too.
things aren’t any different today dude. my teenager nephews do the same thing.
Your teenaged nephews may do the same thing, but my teenaged nieces do not. The internet is a gigantic place, and it’s dangerous to extrapolate our own limited perspective onto the whole.
Relevant xkcd.