So the lovely people on Kotaku in Action on Reddit have discovered my post yesterday about the reactions of various Gamergaters on Twitter to Hulk Hogan’s recent legal win over Gawker.
Naturally, gators being gators, they manage to get themselves pretty worked up over a number of points I didn’t actually make. Gators remaining gators, there’s really no point in trying to correct them, as this will only give them more opportunities to misrepresent me.
Instead, let’s take a moment to look at some of the most highly upvoted comments in this edifying discussion that are, well, a bit more personal.
Here, with 98 net upvotes, is the most-upvoted comment in the thread, the comment that KiA collectively feels is the most valuable of them all:
This next comment, which garnered dozens of net upvotes, spurred a somewhat surreal discussion:
![[–]PR_WEL 56 points 16 hours ago and to no one's surprise is a fat neckbeard. lol permalinkembedsavereportreply [–]BaconCatBug 25 points 13 hours ago I am a fat neckbeard too but I am self aware enough to not try and pretend otherwise. :P permalinkembedsaveparentreportreply [–]Pakars[?] 3 points 11 hours ago I'm not fat, but I'm lazy and sometimes have a neckbeard. Do I count? permalinkembedsaveparentreportreply [–]BaconCatBug 9 points 11 hours ago It's not the fatness in your heart that counts, it's the fatness in your heart that counts!](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/neckbeard.png?resize=553%2C432&ssl=1)
I may have to put this one in the We Hunted the Mammoth press kit:
This one only got a couple of upvotes, but it’s defintely going in the press kit. Hell, I’m tempted to make it the official WHTM slogan:
This one is a bit puzzling, but I do like the suggestion that telling someone to drink bleach is basically the same as saying they need to have their mouth washed out with soap. (Note: while neither of these procedures is recommended, only one will result in painful death.)
Given that to Gators will happily upvote insults and nonsense, you may wonder how exactly one might go about getting downvoted.
Here’s how:
It may be a little hard to see, because the text is small and light grey, but this comment has negative 26 points.
Gators will forever be gators, I guess.
Never had very prominent leg hair. Now I have leg-pattern baldness. At most, I am a leg-chinstrap. Or calfstrap. Toes are still hairy. Don’t know why.
@Kupo, I find your link about terminal hair length really interesting! You know what I don’t get, though, is how hair that’s been cut in the past but is growing out can (as far as I’m aware) reach terminal length. Shouldn’t it stop growing much earlier, as it was still in growth phase when some of the length was removed? Bodies, peeps. Fascinating.
@ ledasmom
Do any of your relatives reminisce about the time they fought a dragon and got loads of gold?
@ viscaria and kupo
In the interests of science I have now got some sticky tape and a pair of nail scissors. I’ll let you know the results.
ETA: Owww! How do you ladies wax!??? It’s bad enough on your arms!
Wax adheres much better than sticky tape does, so it would probably be more effective (and thus much less painful). The idea of waxing with tape makes me want to hurl. Your poor arms!
I applaud the lengths you will go to for science. Pun intended.
@ viscaria
I actually used gaffa tape, so I’m lucky I still have skin left.
I belong to a cycling club where it has been noted that the men shave but the women to not. It is a matter of preference in riding timed events since the shaving is not for speed but for making it easier to clean up road rash following accidents. I do not shave but my husband does, he has ever since he had it done during a booth promo while working Interbike trade show about a decade back.
RCC is known for putting on ultramarathons so the club motto is “Hill is not a four letter word”. We get upvoted by providing rides with more climbing and greater distances, but lots of fun.
http://www.redmondcyclingclub.org/
I learned in grade school that the hair on your knuckles (both fingers AND toes!) is controlled by one gene, so either you have hairy knuckles or you don’t. The shape of your earlobes is another single-gene switch: if they’re attached at the root or free-swinging.
Almost all my body hair is colorless, so I don’t bother shaving my legs even though I’m frightfully fuzzy. No one can see it anyway! My dad wasn’t so fortunate: He had a pelt like a reddish bearskin rug, right up to eyebrow level, then bald on top.
I do shave my pits, but just for reasons of hygiene. Chin, too; I’ve gotten to Wizard Puberty, that age where strange bristly hairs sprout where none were before. I’d happily cultivate a majestic beard if I could just get it to come in evenly, though.
Most people’s head hair gets to a certain length and frays, which is why you can extend the length if you use oils and conditioners. It’s not timed shedding so much as the ends decay. The timed-shedding does make sense for body hair, though, and it’s probably true that some folks tend towards shorter head hair.
Okay, so it’s both that there is an amount of time a single follicle will grow before it sheds the shaft (the “timed shedding”) AND a maximum length of the actual hair based on how much strength it has and how well the ends are handled. Hair that gets mistreated starts to fray like a rope that gets cut but not re-sealed- however only hair on your head grows fast enough to ever reach that point before the follicle sheds and starts over. Cause like almost all cells in the body, you’ll actually outlive them by a wide margin.
So we’re actually all constantly losing hair, you only go bald when the rate at which it sheds starts to outstrip the rate at which it grows. Interestingly, something about the hormonal cycle in pregnancy stops the cellular shed. Which is why women in late-term pregnancy tend to have spectacular, thick hair. And why they tend to have a “oh my god I’m going bald” panic after they give birth, cause the cycle suddenly catches up all at once and you dump all the extra hair.
The only difference cutting it makes is that the tip of the hair shaft is now really blunt, so it feels rougher (like stubble) and tends to fray faster (like the aforementioned rope).
Why no, I didn’t study biology and marry a cosmetologist, why do you ask? 😀
Remember when you where told drinking strong coffee would put hair on your chest? Well they where right, caffeine has been shown to both increase growth and lengthen the growth phase.
What will get the MRAs goats is that female follicles are more sensitive to caffeine stimulation.
http://www.alpecin.de/en/research/studies/differential-effects-of-caffeine.html
Fred the Dog,
I was a diver. You’d think we shave our legs too, but nope! Before meets we always let stubble grow because if you try and hold a tuck with wet freshly shaved legs, you’ll slip out. Divers little secret.
@Zatar
Why the animosity toward roller derby? Well, I think it’s pretty obvious:
1. There’s a lot of hate and animosity toward all female athletes – to wit recent comments from Raymond Moore -that female tennis players should be ‘on their knees’ thanking male tennis players for subbing them.
2.Roller derby is a violent sport and there seems to be even more animosity toward women in violent sports. Maybe because it’s seen as a ‘male’ thing. Don’t go and look at the YouTube comments for elite women’s rugby and soccer. It’s vile. “Gash rugby” for example. Although I kind of liked that one in a perverse sort of way.
3. Roller derby is also about image and spectacle and a lot of women who play seem to take the piss out of traditional notions of feminine behaviour and appearance. Others seem to not give a fuck. It’s part of the joy of the sport. That’s gotta be offensive to the type of people who think ‘women should be like X and look like Y”
4. Roller derby seems to me – from the outside – to be a very accepting community – as long as you can skate and elbow, etc. and are willing to play hard, then you’ll be accepted by the RD community for whoever you are, for your imperfect, but wonderful self. That’s also offensive to people who want to confine women to narrowly defined roles.
Re: legbeards: Is the misogynist definition of “lazy” /really/ “doesn’t shave”? Because I’d love to keep my legs shaved but razors are expensive and I prefer eating occasionally to being smooth (plus the one time I tried getting them waxed, it turned out my skin is so delicate because of my EDS that I had goosebumps for longer than it took for the hair to grow back. Not a great look.)
Pffffft. I’m just kidding. I know it’s a woman’s job to be constantly perfectly groomed to the tastes of random men. Not being conventionally attractive, like being poor or disabled, is sheer laziness. Disgraceful! It can’t be a choice, either. Why would people CHOOSE not to look exactly like random men on the internet want them to?
(In fairness, I’m also unsure about the use of the word neckbeard as a general rule – many lovely men I know are sadly incapable of growing hair on the front of their chins and are thus sentenced to neckbeardery whenever depression or business prevents shaving – but it’s not like men’s beards are policed like women’s body hair)
(Also hi. I’ve been reading WHTM for years and it kind of feels weird that my first post isn’t…really about MRA-type thought. But. Hi.)
Alan
::winces::
Classic gamergate, only able to respond with pathetical excuses after they realize that they made themselves look bad along with some childish insults and bizarre claims that you’re somehow ‘illogical’ without any explanation of what’s so ‘illogical’.
Although there seems to be a strange lack of sexualized insults and accusations that David isn’t a ‘real’ gamer, I wonder why that is.
When I was richer I and lived in hotter climes I used to get professionally waxed. It is surprising how much the pain varies in different spots – and not in the places one might have expected. Armpit hair was much worse than anything sub-navel. I’ve never tried it on my arms but… ouchie!
Since I finished chemotherapy 18 months ago it’s all been regrowing: leg hair appeared first but nothing like what it used to be; head hair is entirely back and the same colour as before, though a bit thinner than it was – but curly!
Eyelashes are up to strength, which is good as my eyes look like those in potatoes without them. Armpit hair seems to have given up for good (yay!) and my eyebrows are feeble ghosts of themselves.
The single wire-hard whisker which popped up on my chin every few months since I turned 40 and used to irritate me until I got annoyed enough to pluck it has not returned. I hope it’s gone for good.
ETA: Hallo DreadVampy!
I think they hate roller derby because you have to be aggressive, tough, and confident. It scares the crap out of them when women have those qualities.
Great. Now I have this earworm: “and the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate and the ‘Gaters gonna gate gate gate gate gate”!
@Zatar
They hate women’s sports and athletic women generally, and roller derby is stereotypically associated with lesbians. Also what rugbyyogi said.
@Alan
Ninja’d a bit, but since I typed all this out, I’m posting it anyway.
Head hair does too, it’s just that the length in question is considerably longer (how much varies by individual). The reason is pretty straightforward: each hair has a growth (anagen) phase, a pause (catagen phase) and a dead phase (telogen phase), after which it falls out an a new one (usually) grows in its place. How long the anagen phase lasts determines how long the hair in question will get. The length of the anagen phase varies with individual body parts, usually being longest on the head (although not always; some people never grow more than a couple inches on their heads), and is genetically determined in each individual. As to why the anagen phase is so much longer for hair on the head, the answer appears to be basically ‘because it is’. (People often forget that genetic drift is a thing that affects evolution too. A trait doesn’t have to be adaptive to spread, it just has to not be maladaptive; a classic example being why pandas are that colour: because they don’t need to hide from anything or sneak up on anything, so natural selection doesn’t care what colour they are. The ancestral population were black bears with white markings, and eventually genetic drift gave us giant pandas.
As with the similar myth re: fingernails, this has to do with the flesh receding rather than anything growing.
It does. It’s just that at any given time, only a small percentage of the hairs on your body are at the ‘falling out’ stage, so you don’t notice them go missing amidst all the other hairs.
@Viscaria
No, because there are new hairs coming out all the time, some of which weren’t long enough to be cut off during the haircut. So, the actual follicles that are cut off don’t reach full length, but the ones that were a centimeter too short to be cut do, and as with the body hair, it’s hard to distinguish which are which.
@DreadVampy
I’ve been having good luck with chemical depilatories (nair specifically, veet smells godawful); I sometimes get a minor itching/reddening but it fades in a few hours. (While I do not at this time have a formal diagnosis, I am 99% certain that I also have EDS, FWIW). It winds up cheaper than razors too.
wwth
I think this is awesome! A new nitpick to annoy the goobers? Yes!
Also, I hereby grant that all who want to be legbeards can be such, regardless of their actual hair situation. Katie has granted me this power, so long as I change my handle.
And so it is done.
I have toe hair and one pointy ear. Vistigial hobbit traits.
Totally stuck in my head now, too. I quite like it at the moment but it may get old.
Why do these guys believe that Gawker is the SJW HQ? Or that they own this site? It’s a strange conspiracy.
So, about the frequent use of “these people are so childish”, seen here and in other blog entries by Futrelle. It reminds me of how they use “you’re the real racist” style arguments against critics. This kind of counter argument to being called entitled and immature can be stripped down to: nyeh, nyeh, I know you are, but what am I!? Which doesn’t actually deny the original claims. And while there are immature people who self-label as feminists, no one is as consistently, unambiguously immature as the misogynists covered on this site. Yet, in their minds, they’re the “real” adults and so everything they do is an example of being a “real” adult. If these men are what “real” adulthood looks like, I’d rather be fake.
@ WWTH and LindsayIrene
So, clearly, if a woman has no piercings, no tattoos, no dyed hair, no body hair (except for head hair), and were slender, they’d have zero problems with them, right? That’s exactly what Futrelle’s research proves, right? …Right?
And, again, it doesn’t refute any feminist arguments. It just says, sure, you could listen, but they’re so ugly, bro! Which, ironically, proves the existence of the double-standard of a woman’s worth being entirely appearance based.
Besides, feminists are all about grillaxin’ and then feeling sorry about grillaxin’. That’s what fighting toxic masculinity means, right? Feeling emasculated for liking cars, sports, and BBQ?
@ SFHC
I wouldn’t bet against that. They treat it like actual slurs: they can use it because they’re “reclaiming” it. But if anyone else uses it? Misandry!
To be fair, one also sees “neckbeard” used by some nerds to show their superiority to other nerds. That’s not usually considered problematic among nerds. Katherine Cross made the point that the neckbeard insult originated within gaming/geek culture, not feminism.
Interestingly enough, it’s not just misogynists who argue that “neckbeard” is a hurtful insult. Take this Everyday Feminism blog. In it, the dude argues that it’s hurtful because it’s body shaming. I don’t know about that. One can wear a metaphorical neckbeard or literal one. It’s not the same as saying a woman has nothing to offer because she has tats, piercings, and dyed hair. But I also agree that misogynists are not just dudes with poor hygiene in basements. Fair point.
It reminds me of this other critique of the word “neckbeard”, which also feels inadequate. Feminist men seem to get hypersensitive about this word, when they think it means critiquing their nerdiness rather than, you know, misogynistic nerds. It’s no longer solely used by “cool” nerds to mock “inferior” ones.
@ dallillama
I genuinely did wonder if there was some selection pressure at play on the grounds that pandas are so damned cute just looking like that meant people wouldn’t hunt them.
Welcome, TheDreadVampy!
Regarding why goobers hate gawker, I think it’s because of the “Gamers are dead” thing? I assume so, anyway, because they referenced taking away advertisers from gawker, and that’s the only incident I can recall where goobers went after advertisers and succeeded.