By David Futrelle
The Daily Mail is famous for its uniquely British mixture of judgy prurience and good old-fashioned xenophobia. So naturally the comments section of its online edition is home to some of the worst takes the internet has to offer.
The other day I was introduced to a Twitter account that catalogs the worst of these terrible takes. Specifically, to this tweet, which I obviously needed to share with you all:
Bad science and racism, two terrible tastes that taste extra terrible together! And the misspelling of “testosterone” as “tostesterone” is … chef’s kiss!
Also, I’m pretty sure most French people aren’t vegan.
But this tweet is only the top of the iceberg. Here are some other, well, illuminating insights on assorted gender-related issues that The DM Reporter has plucked from the vast wasteland of the Daily Mail comments.
This final tweet really doesn’t have anything to do with gender but I feel sort of bad for the Daily Mail’s Russian Misery correspondent
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I’m glad you are not alone in trawling through the open sewers of the worst parts of the internet.
Sigh….
While it is true males past puberty have more testosterone…. mostly dedicated to reproductive health… everyone produces testosterone precursors from the adrenals. One can increase this production…with heavy lifting exercises like squats and deadlifts, with a balanced diet that includes protein.
But protein alone won’t do it.
Also, one must log off of 8chan and leave basement and actually exercise to defend the Vaterland or whatever.
France consumes some of the largest amount of meat per capita in Western Europe. I don’t think vegans are exactly taking Paris by storm, here.
The rest is garbage. I wouldn’t use the Daily Mail to line a birdcage, the amount of shit would invariably overflow just with the Mail in there.
Okay, look, I know the follow up comment was “eating meat = testosterone” but the intro was “vegans”. So… they’re asserting that the French don’t eat cheese?
Could anyone reading a British newspaper online really be that stupid?
Now, all we need is some self-righteous crapitalist moaning about millennials and their fondness for “avocado tostesterone” and how it’s keeping them out of the housing market, and the banquet of barf will be complete!
This reminds me of the 90s when the ‘progressive’ media gave Camille Paglia a lot of attention which she used to repeatedly trash women, particularly lesbians. Of course the press didn’t dare to do it directly so CP was ideal because she was a lesbian herself.
The Daily Fail has always been extremely right wing, at one point they supported Hitler. They have always preferred to let others do their dirty work.
One gets the creeping suspicion that if these Daily Mail commenters had been alive during the Battle of Britain they would have been pulling for the Luftwaffe.
French food is all cream, butter and cheese, but okay. Veganism run amok.
I checked official statistics. For 2017, the five nations which had the most immigration to the UK were China, India, Romania, Australia, and the USA. Not exactly nations known for being third-world Islamic countries the “Daily Mail” is worried about. How many Romanian ISIS members could there be?
There’s a trans panic story shown in the last tweet, so also somewhat gender related.
Crip Dyke:
I figure that for DM readers, anything less than red meat counts as a vegan dish. Besides, I don’t think there’s necessarily implication that France has been taken over by veganism, if we assume the Frenchmen are just naturally more effeminate compared to Englishmen.
(More seriously, I see everywhere in food related discourse this simplistic dichotomy between “veganism” and “eating lots of red meat”. I think it’s largely strawman construction from the masculine meat eaters. The politics of eating meat is a rising culture war issue, and I predict it will be huge 10-20 years from now.)
About the title of this article: I wouldn’t use the word “barmy” to refer to Daily Mail comments, because of our comments policy. In British English, “barmy” is essentially a synonym for “crazy”, and any WHTM commenter who used the latter would be rightly called out for it.
Not for nothing is this rag also known as the “Daily Heil”; it’s always been rabidly extreme-right. (throughout its history afaik, e.g. supporting Hitler as Ellesar points out).
I haven’t read through them all yet, but I just wanted to take time to note how atrocious the Daily Mail writing is – the second tweet highlights a sentence where the person employed to write (I don’t think they qualify as a journalist) wrote “she worst was feared.” Do the Daily Mail not employ a single sub-editor? Or even a single person with a functioning understanding of grammar?
Wait, i am not sure to understand all the links in the first picture : what link exists between a fire started by accident and a conga line beginning with veganism and finishing by infiltration ? What links exist in the conga line itself ? I have seen persons of both gender undertake the Dukan diet, and none of them look more manly after some weeks of that diet…
Maybe they imagine veganism => soy, with all the connotations it bears in some circles well known here ?
As a French, maybe we are soon going to be called Surrending Vegetable-eating Monkeys ?
Ooh, FACT in capital letters. Debate over.
Maybe she’s upset because immigrant meat is stealing meat jobs from British meat?
Immigrant meat is a real concern in the UK! Post-Brexit, a trade deal with the US may force us to accept imports of food produced to lower standards than those imposed in the EU. There’s much talk of American “chlorinated chicken” coming over here and displacing hardworking British dead poultry.
In related and somewhat surprising news, it seems that the Mail’s far less successful mid-market rival the Daily Express has been quietly reforming itself, thanks to getting a new editor a year ago whose first decision in the job was to stop demonising immigrants.
(For a useful snapshot of what a typical month in the life of the Express looked like, at least to people who wouldn’t be seen dead actually reading it and so only saw the front pages, go here.)
Their track record since then hasn’t been flawless (even under the new editor, they’ve run a couple of blatantly anti-trans pieces), but the change has been noticeable enough for the Stop Funding Hate campaign to reclassify them as “under review”, whereas previously the Express was one of their major targets.
@anonymous
Youre checking the stats now? When did that happen? And youre believing those stats too!???!! Then why wont you believe usa immigration stats instead of defending putting children in cages???
@Wetherby, I don’t believe this bit of the story for a moment:
So, he worked for the Mirror, but was unaware of what one of the Mirror’s rivals had become? And it was only after taking the job that he discovered the kind of stories it had been running? Not credible. I don’t know why he’s pretending to wide-eyed innocence.
I hope that Reach, in addition to softening the Express’s stance, improve their staffing levels. Part of the paper’s problem under Desmond was that he laid off a lot of journos, and they just didn’t have enough bodies left to run a credible daily. Hence the reliance on press releases, made up shit, and the “Express bingo” of recycled stories. But I don’t know who is still reading it at this point. Probably just old people who stuck with it out of inertia.
Apparently there are nearly 4 million vegans in the UK now. And I am one of them. Vegan’s also have higher testosterone levels than meat eaters. True, and hilarious, fact.
As a vegetarian who just got back from France I wish it was more overrun by vegans.
@Moggie But just look at what American fast food chicken has done for the testoblerone levels of Dear Leader!
…I’m not sure about the correlation between eating meat and being attacked, but there may be one between eating meat and feeling attacked (see: Jordan Peterson).
Oppositethumb –
The”daily hail” is a new one for me; I’ve always heard it was nicknamed the “daily wail”…
It seems an ubiquitous feature of online version of print media for their comment sections to be rife with bigotry. Why any of them maintain comment sections is beyond me. But what really baffles me is who spends their free time trolling newspaper comment sections spamming the same hateful nonsense over and over. I see this with the HuffPost boards as well, and I do try to push back, but these people have way more time on their hands than me. Are they retirees? Is this what retirement looks like now? They aren’t bots, at least not the ones I’m thinking of, but what happened to doing all those things you wanted to do with your retirement years?
*sigh* Just depressing…