MRAs can now shampoo away the grey in their neckbeards in just five minutes with Just For Men’s Rights Activists special neckbeard formula gel! Now with a new, angrier formula!
I found this faux trading card on Reddit’s AgainstMensRights subreddit, which is devoted to skewering the MensRights subreddit. The OP says his girlfriend got it at an art show, but alas I do not know where that show was or from whom she got it.
Click on the pic for a bigger version, in which you can see that this formula comes in Fedora Brown, and was “voted best for neckbeards by a panel of elder misogynists.”
Ironically, the beards depicted on real Just for Men boxes aren’t much more believable than the one on the parody box.
Also ironically, I am sporting a bit of a neckbeard today. No bulging veins in my forehead, though.
Bright red bowler, cool!
I love hats too. One more reason to look forward to cooler weather: more hat options!
It’s probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever found on Etsy. There are some amazing hats in the vintage section. It looks a bit off though with my pink hair, they blend together a bit.
@Kim: I agree, it’s a problematic insult. Making fun of men for not grooming properly is no better than making fun of ungroomed women. Sure, if someone doesn’t groom himself but thinks all women have an obligation to do so, then he’s a douchebag with double standards, but then one should insult his douchebagginess, not his lack of grooming. A person can be ungroomed and decent or well-groomed and a douchebag too.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this post of Ozy’s: http://ozyfrantz.com/2013/02/09/against-fedoras-of-okc/
depp and indiana *melt*
@ Dvärghundspossen
I found the blog entry against Nice Guys of OKC that changed Ozy’s mind completely unconvincing. I agree that there are a lot if problems with physical characteristics (be they part of the person like neckbeards or not like fedoras) standing in for mental characteristics. I mentioned earlier that the boyfriend is often, as aworldanonymous said, one if those guys who “can’t be bothered to shave.” He is not a “neckbeard,” though, even as he has one. I think the hypocrisy of wanting or expecting a well-groomed woman is part of the definition of “neckbeard.”
I don’t personally use the term because I think there are ways of lumping entitled men together without shorthanding with physical characteristics, but it doesn’t bother me (or the boyfriend, if it bothered him, it would bother me) to see other people use the term. It is just part of the general cultural focus on appearance, but doesn’t stand out as uniquely bad. I think that Nice Guy(TM) is in many ways as inexact. It is better in that it leaves out how people look, but still problematic.
The article Ozy linked evidently takes Nice Guy(TM) to mean something different than I do and different from how the Nice Guys of OKC used the term. That is going to be true of any shorthand and inevitably, some people will have the term applied to them who others feel don’t deserve to be. So, while it is better to leave physical appearance out of it because continuing to associate outer appearance with behavior is a sucky thing to continue, the bigger problem with the term is the same problem with any shorthand term.
I have a tendency towards poor grooming thanks to living in dorms I despise and wanting to avoid contact with the other people in them as much as possible. It does bother me because having prickly hair on my neck area gets itchy and unpleasant, and on top of that I would very much like to present in a more feminine way, which I’m working on. However making fun of someone for their looks is rather tasteless, and while I’ll admit to doing it in the past, I cease now.
Re: fedoras. Why must everything I love by co-opted by douchebags?
Well, I’m taking a stand. Suit vests will continue to be hot no matter who tries to claim them, and you can take my cargo pants from my cold dead hands!
Is everyone else missing the “most recents comments” section on the rhs or is it just me? How can I keep up with all the active threads & necrothreaders without it?
The RSS comments feed is still active. And you can tweak it to show a lot more than the last ten or twenty.
leftwingfox: re “cargo pants” Have you seen Blackhawks, “warrior wear”. I get mine from LAPG, and they are great.
@titianblue
It is gone for me as well and there was a bit if talk about it being gone in the Seth MacFarlane thread. Hopefully, it will come back soon.
@SomeGal: to be clear, her post is about the related (but not the same) Fedoras of OKC, which has quite a few guys in Fedoras with no Nice Guy characteristics at all. (for example: [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.”])
It’s splash damage. It might be splash damage against, y’know, a privileged and insulated guy, but it’s still splash damage. Highlighting a guy for his hat, when there’s no evidence of an entitled attitude to go along with it.
And then contrasts that to the next entry, who casually admits he’d commit sexual assualt.
Those are two very different dudes who ought to be treated in very different ways. Lumping them together is, well, unkind to fedoras.
Thanks pecunium. 🙂 I can usually find them locally, although not always in my size. I love the fact that I can stuff a handful of art supplies in one pocket, and a moleskein in the other.
Delurking to second – no, third… Screw it, nth the sentiment that fedoras are awesome. I personally rock mine. It’s a shame they’ve become so closely associated with douchiness.
@howardbann1ster
Oh, I agree with Ozy on the fedoras. I was just bothered with the lead-off link. Especially as it compares the splash damage from the fedora site and the OKC site. I am sorry I was unclear.
I think the fact that some people (Ozy and the other author) see Nice Guy(TM) as having the same sort of splash damage minimizes the problems with the physical descriptions as shorthand terms. The terms “fedora” and “neckbeard” are bad in two ways (don’t make fun of appearance and splash damage). By focusing on the splash damage and comparing it to the (debateable in the examples at the critique of Nice Guys if OKC) splash damage, the unique problem with the grouping based on physical appearance seems to disappear.
I hope that was more clear. If someone has a better term for “grouping based on physical characteristics,” I would love to hear it. I feel like the wordiness may have gotten in the way of what I am trying to say. Sorry.
There are very few words that tell you as much about the person using it as does “neckbeard”. A whale-positive feminist engaging in body shaming. Someone who has an aneurysm at the word “tits” engaging in misandrist gendered insults. An unwashed, hairy-twatted, amorphous blob of pudding-soft flesh mocking the unshaved male. I’d encourage all of the S.J. Warriors to continue using the term, just so the rest of us can continue to see that giant blinking sign above your head: DUMBFUCK INCOMING.
Ah, I see! That is loads more clear, and I agree totally. Some of the examples at that first link seemed to miss the underlying entitlement of the very concept of Friendzone.
So… my man’s barber takes care of his beard’s shaping and growth. Is this… not… something that white barber’s do? I’m not sure how to ask that question without being offensive. And black men, generally, tend to shave less frequently because the hair grows a bit slower and the occurence of razor bumps is more prevalent but still.
Don’t barbers generally take care of this sort of thing?
@Nobinayamu
No clue. The boyfriend doesn’t have a barber. He normally takes care of all his hair stuff on his own via the grow-it-until-it-is-too-long and shave-it-all-off periodically methods I mentioned. Occasionally, he used to tag along to Supercuts with me, but I didn’t go all that often and he didn’t always go with me and Supercuts just did the head hair part. (I don’t know if they offer more or not, either.)
@howardbann1ster
Glad I was clear. I think in my first comment I got sidetracked by my “I don’t use it, but it isn’t too awful to hear” opinion. I should have separated that more from the response to the Ozy link.
I think believing in a Friendzone is very entitled and also it posits women as something fundamentally different from men just because the guy is attracted to women. Any idea that treats women as a group different from men is probably misogynistic.
I don’t think that it is splash-damage to apply the term Nice Guys(TM) to both minor and major offenders. There will always be degrees of bad (or good) under any umbrella term. The entitled guys are different from the rapey and entitled guys, but they are all entitled and all self-identified as “nice.” (I believe.)
It is very different from grouping together eggplant-loving and rapey. That is splash damage, but it is also (and I would argue, mainly) a result of using physical characteristics to stand in for mental/emotional/personality traits. I don’t think that focusing on the physical in the “neckbeard” and “fedora” cases is that bad against the rest of oir cultural obsession with looks but it is wrong.
Nobinayame: There are some white guys who still go to a barer to have their barbe taken care of, but most don’t.
The very idea of asking a professional to cut my hair makes me uneasy. Even a little bit scared.
But I’m weird about my hair.
Thanks. I’ve dated men who aren’t black but they all went to barbers too (hmm – I’ve never really thought about that before) so I figured that they, like the men that I grew up with, kept a razor for touching up/in between hair cut maintenance. Most of the men I’ve known very well -friends, family, lovers- have had barbers maintain their facial hair.
I came back after about a month of not posting or reading this blog and this guy is the first thing I see….I’ve never seen a guy with lipstick on his necktie look so frustrated. Lol