By David Futrelle
4Chan has a brand-new imaginary girlfriend, and she might look a little bit familiar to you. “Daisy Hogg” seems designed to win the hearts (and the pants-feelings) of the 4Chan demographic — she’s a young, slender hottie who loves guns, Trump, and owning the libs.
It doesn’t hurt, as far as 4Chan is concerned, that their new girl looks like she’s barely out of high school, if that, and that she enjoys posing in next-to-nothing, sometimes with assorted scary-looking guns as accessories.
The reason Daisy looks so familiar? Because this imaginary girlfriend is nothing more than a gender-swapped version of Parkland survivor and gun control advocate David Hogg, a figure almost universally loathed on the right.
Daisy was born last week after one inventive 4Chan anon thought to run some pictures of David Hogg through FaceApp’s female filter, transforming him instantly into a more-than-passable young woman — and a rather attractive one at that.
Other 4Chan anons went to work at once, photoshopping Daisy’s new face onto the bodies of bikini models, porn stars, and, in one case, Nancy Pelosi. Many anons can’t quite decide whether to mock David as Daisy, or whack off to her. For others. the decision hasn’t been hard, because something else has been.
Some of the anons who aren’t cranking it to Daisy are devoting their energy instead into photoshopping her into 4Chan’s horny, semi-ironic version of a patron saint — and chastising those who are “tainting” her purity with their lusts. 
Not every anon is quite so agog. This being 4Chan, some have been quick to deride the fascination with David-as-Daisy as “gay” and, ahem, “n***er tier.” Meanwhile, more-paranoid anons are suggesting that the new meme is somehow an elaborate false-flag “psyop” designed to … well, I’m not quite sure what these guys think the memes are supposed to be doing to their poor brains.
So what does it all mean? A few anons have taken a shot at explaining the significance of this new meme. “David Hogg just announced that he intended to run for Congress,” writes one enthusiastic anon.
and now you’ve created a character more attractive, more meaningful, and more inspiring than he will ever be..
Do you even realize how brilliant you are sometimes? His face is going to end up listed by the ADL as a hate symbol and he will spend the rest of his life seeing his likeness used to promote second amendment rights and right-wing ideologies.
You sentenced him to a fate worse than obscurity.. You’ve eclipsed him with a shining star..
And that star is called Daisy-chan
I’m not quite so sure this meme is going to prove quite so potent outside the confines of 4Chan as it has within them. Even 4Channers struggle a bit trying to explain just what exactly this new meme actually means. I mean:
That’s about as close as any 4Chan Daisy-explainer I’ve seen has gotten to a coherent explanation, and it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
I think the meme is a lot more interesting psychologically than it is politically. It seems clear enough that one of the impulses behind this forced feminization of David Hogg is a desire to degrade a young man who many channers clearly see as intimidating. By “reducing” him to a woman, they don’t have to take his ideas as seriously; they can sexualize him, transforming him into a pliable “waifu” who adores them and parrots their opinions, serving much the same function that the fictional Vivian James did for GamerGate. Even their non-sexual fantasies about her are all about ownership, if not of her body than of her mind.
But the “forced feminization” element makes Daisy more complicated than Vivian ever was. For some, the fact that “Daisy” began as David is part of her appeal. 4Channers have long fetishized trans women — or at least sexy young “traps” — as pseudo-women without all the man-hating baggage of “real” women, happy to offer up their sexuality to nerdy dudes who don’t actually like “real” women all that much. Never mind that this is as much a fantasy as Daisy herself is.
What makes it all stranger is that the conventionally very attractive “Daisy” is clearly out of their league, and the channers know it. They’ve transformed a hated ideological foe into a woman who, if she existed in real life, wouldn’t give them the time of day. Doesn’t this suggest that perhaps David Hogg is a bit out of their league as well? Some anons have tried to suggest that Daisy’s attractiveness isn’t a function of David’s chiseled features and high cheekbones but rather a reflection of his inherent sissy-tude.
I think this is what’s known as “protesting too much.”
Outside of 4Chan, some are suggesting that the fetishization of Daisy is little more than a massive political self-own on the part of thirsty anons, as one widely shared tweet explained it:
https://twitter.com/MichaelEHayden/status/1034453814311563266
True, up to a point. But there is so much other stuff going on that we can’t really reduce it to a self-own. I’m not sure what to call it, exactly. But one thing is clear: it is 2018 as fuck.
NOTE: There have been a number of threads on Daisy over on 4Chan. The quotes and pics in this post all came from the thread archived here. I learned of the existence of Daisy from Hayden’s tweet above.
@solecism
Thank you, and ugh, all of the solidarity. Glad you’re still with us, and *fuck* child abusers.
Hmm. I don’t think I ever felt like one of the boys, but def still get that weird disjunction when straight guys mistake me for one of their own. It’s about 5 minutes from loud voices and casual joshing to open misogyny, and they always manage to get my guard down a bit before the gut-punch. Blech.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
I missed that comment earlier about hatred and lust, but yeah, I feel like that is more common than people admit. Thinking of how men on the right view Hillary Clinton, and also how men on the left talked about Sarah Palin back in 2012. And especially of the term “hate fuck”, which oh dear weeping gods why does that even have to exist.
@Steampunked
Symbolic castration, basically.
My former partner’s brother, who has many years hence gone over to the “dark side”, was crying to me about a cartoon depicting a white gun toter…. I asked him if it was instructive knowing how the rest of the world has felt for centuries…. There was a moment (when I could figuratively hear the gears grinding…), then he offered; “but those were just jokes!!”
Apparently Laci Green is continuing her descent into alt-right collaboratordom.
She’s spent the morning spouting TERF talking points at Chuck Tingle
https://twitter.com/gogreen18/status/1035183641842790400
Ugh, now I regret ever giving her views. The fuck are people so invested in binaries?
Head meet desk.
I can muster nothing more.
OT: It’s news but it’s not a surprise
Gérard Depardieu Accused of Raping a Young Actress Earlier This Month
@kupo:
Site has broken CSS and, I suspect, deeper issues. I get a blank-ish page in 64-bit Firefox if I don’t turn CSS off. If I do, I get what seems to be the navigation links, header, footer, and other cruft that would surround the article, plus a headline and a bit of a blurb, but no actual article text. Google Cache shows the same nearly-blank page as visiting the site with CSS enabled, and Google Cache “text-only version” shows the same truncated page as when disabling CSS. In short, none of the usual workarounds for such bugs result in the display of the actual text of the article.
Is the article syndicated elsewhere? I’d like to read it but there would need to be a copy at a web site compatible with Firefox for me to do so, because I refuse for security reasons to surf using IE/Edge, and for privacy reasons to surf using Chrome, unless it really can’t be helped. My efforts to locate such a copy using Google were unsuccessful, but as you have knowledge of unique phrases inside the article, not only the title and author, you would be able to craft better queries that should only match complete copies and not just links back to the Firefox-incompatible instance.
Meanwhile, I’d like to take this opportunity to moan a bit about how web design seems to be a lost art these days. Putting a header, some text, and a footer onto a web page in a way that reliably works across all browsers (and even in Lynx!) is truly elementary, and embedding images that will be almost as broadly compatible (no Lynx though) likewise — and yet I run into sites every single day that do not render correctly, often fixable (uglily) by killing CSS or finding a copy hosted someplace else. The common denominator seems to be designers trying to get too fancy with CSS features, interactive JS based stuff, or other cleverness, and ending up breaking compatibility with some browsers, or with things not working if JS is disabled, or other problems as a result. Sometimes the results are nigh unusable except at a specific exact browser resolution, and any other size results in text overlapping images or other text, or other critical rendering errors.
The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain. For nearly all of these sites, a few div and img tags would have got the job done on every browser and platform combination in existence or yet to be devised, and some very basic CSS would have given everything the site’s branding via color scheme and such without screwing anything up, but noooo, we have to have images that fade in fancily as they are scrolled into view, or dropped capitals at the start of each section, or etc. — basic, static text and images are soooo 1996! Which means “legacy”, a pejorative engineering term meaning “works”.
Oh, and before I forget, there’s an element of class privilege to this too, because sites with excessively fancy CSS, JS, and the like have correspondingly excessive rendering resource consumption, so sites that could have avoided doing so and still done their jobs (and even branded themselves) adequately wind up bringing older machines to a near standstill or even crashing the browsers on them. Such sites effectively penalize, or even block, users who cannot afford the latest Ryzen/Core i7 machines and/or this year’s crop of phones and tablets. That will mean less well-off people, and disproportionately, single women, people of color, and etc., which makes such site designs IMO constitute microaggressions against most or all marginalized people.
You shouldn’t need the hardware requirements of the latest 3D games just to read a few paragraphs of text and see a still image or two!
Sorry to add yet another addendum, but it occurs to me that the microaggression is even more severe against one particular marginalized group: the visually impaired. I imagine most of the same fanciness tricks that can gum up rendering in some browsers or cause other problems will play merry hob with screen-reader software and other assistive technologies that are designed to look for a straightforward sequence of div tags containing plain text.
IMO, web designers should make sure their sites are usable in Lynx, or (if sufficiently image-centric that that could never fly) in Mosaic. If it isn’t, it probably isn’t usable by a blind person with assistive software … and it probably isn’t usable by googlebot, either, and there goes your search engine traffic. (Exceptions for highly interactive sites, like Flash games, and video hosts like Youtube, though even there there are ways to assist the disabled, such as closed captioning, they’re just separate ways. But the focus here is on pages that exist to present text articles, such as here and Medium and the New York Times.)
@Surplus: Strange, it works fine in my Firefox (61.0.2 (64-bit)). It’s a really annoying layout, though.
@Surplus
Yeah, that site’s terrible. Here’s a pdf version. And as a web dev whose area of interest is accessibility, I agree that more web developers need to make sites accessible to screen readers. Haven’t looked at the html on this one to check, but the article is from 2012 and sadly hardly anyone wrote anything accessible at that point.
https://gabriellacoleman.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Coleman-Weirdness-Free-May-Magazine.pdf
@Weird Eddie
“White gun toter”? Why would this guy be offended of a depiction of a white character with a gun? Or is that some slang I’m missing here…
A PDF? Why on Earth? Is there no simple HTML version accessible (that works)? I prefer to avoid file formats that may pose security risks (which makes .doc a complete no-go and makes me at least look askance at PDF).
*shakes head at web so-called “developers” and their strange decisions*
@Valkyrine:
I know my name’s not Weird Eddie, but I suspect that the white gun-toter is presented as a threatening stereotypical trope–you know, like the Scary Black Man or the Latinx Gangbanger. That’s one reason that Get Out was so jarring to white viewers: when you’re accustomed to being steeped unquestioningly in narrative centered upon your viewpoint, that’s what it’s like to realize that, in someone else’s story, you’re the Monster at the End of the Book (and a good deal less benign than Grover.)
Because you requested a readable version and the site I linked before wasn’t working for you. I’m trying to be helpful. You said you wanted to read it, and this is a way to do so. I’m not going to spin up a new website for you that’s compatible with Lynx to host someone else’s article. That would require a lot of my labor to provide you with a resource that I’ve already provided you, twice, that isn’t mine and isn’t my responsibility to put into your preferred format.
@Valkyrine, Full Metal Ox;
Actually it was a stereotype of a “southern redneck”, drawn to mock the genre as uneducated and ignorant.
And my characterization “white gun toter” was an unacceptably bigoted stereotype as well….
Apologies, I’ll try not to do that in the future.
Kupo, I want to say I downloaded the PDF. There is no problems with it. it’s a safe file and easy to read.
@Kat : closer to “AT LONG LAST” than anything else. The man was known as a morally challenged drunkard with as much impulse control as Trump.
Hope justice will be served.
@Ohlmann
Exactly. Following up on my earlier comment, here’s a story from seventeen years ago:
L’Affaire Gerard Depardieu
By Richard Zoglin. Sunday, June 24, 2001
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,156769,00.html
@Surplus
That was a rather rude way to react to someone providing something you requested. It’s like asking a waiter for dessert and then flipping out when they bring you applepie, because you never told them you are allergic to apples (or not necessarily even allergic, you just don’t like them) 🙁
The norm on the web is for text articles to be presented as HTML, not as downloadable documents in other formats. So it’s closer to expressing surprise that instead of serving dessert on a plate the waiter brought a coupon for $2 off at Dairy Queen and gave directions to the nearest one.
Meanwhile I have downloaded the PDF and read it. It is odd that they used to support Occupy, but later basically went Nazi. Makes me wonder if after the Arab Spring and Occupy certain powerful interests did infiltrate it who were intelligent enough not to simply try to out people or undermine the “leadership” but instead to redirect the swarm by pushing particular memes. With the aid, no doubt, of Russian bots, with which they could easily have carried out a “51% attack” on chan culture to push it in any specific direction.
Surplus, in this thread you have gone on for three posts over how terrible the website that kupo posted was. (I agree with you, that layout is horrible, but it is an older site and was from when people were trying out different types of web design. Remember those flash sites? ugh.)
Then, kupo found another version of it, in a format that wasn’t that terrible site, and posted that.
You then complained about the second file format, because you have problems with it as well. Having problems with the file format is fine, that’s your right to have preferences, but you never said “I would very much like ONLY a html version of this file, nothing else will do.”
What has happened here is that someone provided something, then provided a different option of something, and you didn’t seem to recognise the effort it took to try to help you read something you had said you wanted to read.
I hope this summary helps you to be able to recognise when this sort of interaction is happening, and when you are demanding unreasonable things.
^What Rhuu said!
Agree with rhuu.
Surplus, please treat people with more respect.