Hey, do you need an instant karma boost on Reddit? Here’s how to get yourself hundreds of upvotes in four easy steps!
1) Make or find a misogynistic meme graphic that suggests women are terrible and makes light of domestic violence
2) Post it to the AdviceAnimals subreddit with the headline “I know I’m going to get downvoted into oblivion, but its true….”
3) There is no step 3
4) Enjoy your hundreds of upvotes!
Huh. I guess that’s really only two steps.
Graphic after the jump because — trigger warning — it makes light of domestic violence, as do several of the other comments I’m going to quote.
It’s funny because it’s true!
(Note: That last statement is completely false.)
In the comments, one clever fella piggybacked off of the OP’s misogyny to win a couple hundred upvotes of his own with this hilarious comment:
And this guy won himself a couple dozen upvotes with a nice little list about how awful women are — and got his comment linked to in r/mensrights for allegedly providing great insight into “how Women are set on a pedestal in today’s society.”
Oh, but don’t worry, some brave Redditors stood up to defend women from these not-so-nice generalizations. Like this guy:
Huh. I guess that isn’t much of a defense after all, considering that it blames domestic violence on “immature bitch[es].”
Reddit: Where “chivalry” means suggesting that not all women are “immature bitches” who deserve to get punched. Just some of them.
The Advice Animals subreddit: amazingly, often worse than r/mensrights. It’s not clear if this is because the denizens of r/adviceanimals are actually more baldly misogynistic than the r/mensrights regulars, or if it’s just that the folks in r/mensrights know that really obvious outbursts of misogyny tend to make them look bad.
Yay!
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcaqlluY6X1qzr8l8.gif
Take care, Wordspinner 🙁
I don’t have the collector gene either. But for some reason, people at work have decided that I love penguins* and have started bringing me penguin dolls (beanie baby type things). I don’t know how to make it stop without seeming mean.
*I had to get a humidifier because I have a painful static electricity problem during the winter, but only at work for some reason. So I got one that looks like a penguin because (a) it was cheap, and (b) it was pretty cute. The steam comes out of his beak and it looks like he’s smoking. BUT SERIOUSLY I DON’T NEED ANY MORE PENGUINS.
Just wait, you will succumb to blockquote fail eventually.
My take-home message for this conversation would simply be that there are lots of reasons that may contribute to one’s like or dislike of an object and these are highly idiosyncratic to the individual and one generally shouldn’t judge the factors that matter to others.
p.s. I did bring one of the penguins home to see if the cats would like it. Buster carried it around for a few hours and then lost interest.
I collect things (especially action figures/dolls and other toys), but I’m really picky about it. The things have to be fun and while I understand at an intellectual level that other people find signatures fun, it is just scribbles on a piece of paper. It seems boring.
See, for me, if I just met the author at a book signing or such, that wouldn’t really add emotional value because I talked to zir for 10 seconds; it’s not really a meaningful interaction. If zie writes “to Katz with love,” zie doesn’t actually love me, so why should that be special? If you were actually friends with the author and zie wrote a nice note based on your actual relationship in a book, that would add emotional value to me, but that rarely happens.
But signing does add rarity and monetary value, which alters the book as a collectible. I sometimes get things signed with the author’s name only because I tend to think of collection-as-project and what adds up to a better whole, in my estimation.
None of this to criticize other people’s preferences, just to illustrate the different ways people think about these things.
This looks interesting.
How will MRAs react? 0_0
Only the abstract is available online at this point:
On a certain level, I do think that’s happening. There actually seem to be some deeply rooted processes involved in this:
Hood doesn’t seem to be saying that people think it’ll turn them into serial killers, but why would people “physically recoil from the few people who say they are willing to wear the sweater” if all it is is that people don’t like being reminded of serial killers? Morality and disgust appear to be bound together, and it’s easy to see how genuine superstitions can develop out of that.
@WordSpinner
That’s awful, stay safe and lots of hugs if you want them.
This is why I say there’s a collector gene*. Some people have it, some don’t. It would just never occur to me to want something more because it’s signed, and the idea of collecting stuff because of its monetary value doesn’t appeal either.
* Please note that I don’t think this is an actual gene that the human genome project discovered.
@cloudiah
Cool! Unsurprising, but nice to see. 🙂 I’d be interested in knowing exactly what masculine- and feminine-coded traits they looked at. Especially because some (like girls being poor at Math) have been shown to be more culturally-influenced than innate. Thanks for sharing.
I disagree that sex is taxonic (unless they are looking at chromosomes and acknowledging more than two categories), but in order to show what they needed to show (which is pretty necessary in our culture) I can accept that it might need to be assumed to be. Kinda sucky though.
Ok, from my searches there appears to be a term to describe this notion that objects that are used by people are changed by it. It is a part of the concept of Sympathetic magic, called the Law of Contagion, that says that:
This may also be related to the concept of Animism, the belief that:
@CassandraSays
I think if it more as a continuum of acquisition. Some people acquire just what they need to live, others collect more (I suspect this is most people and also a lot of variation), and some collect too much (hoarders).
Actually I guess that’s why I was less upset about the transition to digital than a lot of music geeks. I don’t really feel any need to own a physical copy of an album unless it’s unusually pretty or cool looking as an object, or if the music itself is rich and layered enough that you can really hear the loss of quality involved in digitizing it. If it’s kind of plain I’m just as happy with a digital copy, I just hope that the transition to lossless formats happens sooner rather than later.
But what on earth makes you then jump to “unconscious belief in invisible serial killer particles?” There’s nothing in there that suggests anything like that; it’s a purely constructed explanation. It’s just like jumping from a survey finding that women are more likely to like pink to “berries in the forest.” Why can’t people just recoil from something because they don’t like it, just as they might approach something because they did like it?
@Myoo
I think you’ve found it! Bravo!
I followed a link from the Wikipedia article and found belief in such contagiousness referred to as “magical thinking”. Is this better, worse, or the same as referring to it as “superstition”? (I am not a believer in sympathetic magic, but don’t want to accidentally insult someone who does believe.)
A way to get at what was going on might have been to somehow frame it as “it is terribly cold, and if you don’t put on a sweater you might die, and this is the only sweater available, but it so happens that it used to belong to Fred West”. If people still felt repulsed by the fact that others were OK with wearing it I’d be more inclined to think that they really did think it was somehow intrinsically contaminated.
^That’s a good way to frame it and I do think the results would be very different! There are so many other factors in the classroom setting, like the performance aspect.
@katz
I think that, in our culture (and maybe others?), you just aren’t allowed to simply not like things that are normally liked or like things that are normally disliked without giving a reason. (I’ve been asked a lot why I don’t like certain foods and that should really be the most obvious and literal place to apply what we all know: tastes differ.)
Apart from anything else, knowing that a serial killer owned something might make people think of corpses, and in West’s case rape too. That’s enough to produce a recoil reaction in a lot of people, and it would be hard to stop your mind from going there, especially for Brits who were in the UK when the whole thing hit the news.
Also, it’s a sweater. What are the mental associations with “sweater”? Comfort, warmth – it’s an object that feels like safety. What are the mental associations with the name Fred West? Fear, paranoia that you might be living next door to someone like that and never know, uneasiness about the bad things that families can sometimes do to each other. The exact opposite of safe, in fact. So I can see how “here is a sweater” followed by “Fred West” could easily produce a strong physical reaction, because it’s like flooding the brain with warm safe happy associations and then dumping it in a bucket of fetid ice water.
(BTW, not snarking on non-Brits with the first comment above, it’s just that the coverage of that case in the UK was incredibly lurid and hard to avoid, so there’s a stronger disgust response than with some other serial killer cases.)
Too right. The trouble I’ve had when visiting California because I do not like hot, spicy food! (Won’t go into that at length again, just wanted to say I totally get that example.)
Also! If anyone who’d unfamiliar with the Daily Mail wants to know why people who are familiar with it hate it so much, try to find their coverage of the West case. Just not while having eaten recently.