By David Futrelle
Remember when “cuck” was the favorite insult of every internet edgelord? Now another old insult has become a new favorite: the word “simp,” which has crossed over from incels and MGTOWs into the wider vernacular, proving more popular than “cuck” ever was.
Like “cuck,” the term is used to denote any guy who’s seen as being too nice or accommodating to the girls and women in his life. It seems to have originated in black slang before being taken over by incels and MGTOWs and assorted other misogynists.
Now the word “simp” has become so popular with misogynistic men and insecure boys that some have convinced themselves that it has the power to destroy feminism entirely. Take this post, for example, which I found in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit today.
“Simp” is indeed enjoying a weird burst of popularity right now. But the idea that 12-year-old PewDiePie fans are going to destroy feminism by calling their classmates “simps” for talking to girls seems a tad far-fetched — especially since the idea behind the “Simp” insult is hardly a new one; it’s not like PewDiePie just came up with the idea of guys impugning each others’ masculinity.
And as insults go, “simp” is a pretty ineffectual one; it seems in many cases like little more than an sour grapes attack on boys and men who actually have girlfriends and wives. Just as the word “cuck” came to taint those who threw it around more than their intended targets, using the word “simp” makes one look like an angry, jealous incel rather than a conquering alpha.
The chance someone will call me a simp for writing this? Roughly 100 percent. The chance I will care? Zero percent.
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@ WWTH
I, too, had been assuming this was short for simpleton. I have to wonder if the acronym arised independently, or if it was some sort of after-the-fact creation of folks unfamiliar with the term simpleton. Perhaps ultimately unknowable.
@moregeekthan, WWTH
That’s what I thought as well, and that appears to be the original meaning.
@Moon Custafer
Usually whenever someone declares feminism dead it’s either a) some conservative reactionary, b) some TERF moaning about how feminism is ruined by trans* people, or c) some conservative older white woman who thinks that there isn’t a need because in her view, women have all the rights or something like that.
My dad has been using that word my whole life. He even uses it as a nickname for the Simpsons (to describe Homer and Bart). And as big of an asshole as he can be, he’s definitely not an MRA, not even close.
The word Simp has also been used in the Judge Dredd universe for a long time.
“Simp” has been around for at least 50 years, and I suspect much longer.
It’s a backromyn derived from the existyword. There’s no question.
A few years ago, when “cuck” started to gain currency, there were posts claiming that it would be a devastating weapon in the war against feminism and the left. People called cuck would be destroyed! It must have been a big disappointment to these guys when this failed to happen, and the reaction instead was mostly puzzlement followed by ridicule. The lesson they appear to have learned from this is not that the world doesn’t work that way, but rather that they just chose the wrong four letters. Keep trying, boys! There are only 26^4 possibilities to test! I’m sure you’ll hit a winner eventually!
@Moggie
It’s like firing what you think is a laser blaster but is actually a banana.
Maybe it’s qlza. Or grnh. Or lwkj. Most combinations of 4 letters are unpronounceable, so if we narrow it down to just pronounceable words there are far fewer for them to try.
@Moon Custafer:
I prefer to think of it as the Daniel Jackson of social justice movements. 🙂
Troubling news: after two days of the Ontario case count growing only around 8%, it’s gone up 11% again today.
What did Doug Ford screw up to cause this setback, and how do I make him un-screw it up and not screw it up again?
@Naglfar
I hope no one ever calls me a grnh. I would have to assume it would be payback for all the grunting and huffing I did when I thought it would be neat if the orc languages in my fantasy story thingy usually wouldn’t have vowels.
Maybe these people think their four-letter words are devastating because they’re so invested in how other people see them?
For the longest time when people have called me names, if I thought it was accurate, I’d have wanted to ask them why they thought it was a bad thing. If it wasn’t accurate, I wouldn’t really pay it much attention since what do I care? (Bonus points for those who check both at once, like those who think calling me a lesbian is going to do much. I’m not a lesbian, but there’s nothing wrong with being lesbian?)
O/T, but Sanders has now dropped out of the race for Dem candidate.
Presumably that means it’s Biden now?
@Surplus
Get him out of office? I don’t know much about Canadian politics so I can’t really help.
@Masse_mysteria
I have a very similar attitude. Whenever I get called an SJW or get accused of being antifa (I’m not a member), I usually ask why it’s a bad thing to be in favor of social justice or to oppose fascists. Plus, those insults are basically admission by whoever is using them that they are against justice and fascist.
Right wingers also call me a “liberal” which I laugh off. They think liberal just means anyone to the left of them.
@Alan Robertshaw
Unfortunately, that means Biden. I really didn’t want this race to come down to two predators, but since it has I will vote for the lesser evil. I don’t like Biden at all, but he’s better than Trump.
I’m actually a bit surprised Sanders dropped out; I thought he was going to hold on until the convention (though I’m not sure if/how the convention will happen).
Fuuuuu
No doubt someone twisted his arm. Blackmail?
That was the last chance your republic had, too. Now it’s doomed to spiral into civil war and failed-statedom. The virus is only going to accelerate this. When it starts to really bite into the red states and the blue states are asked, as usual, to subsidize them after the blue states already will have near-bankrupted themselves? And with everyone knowing the red states’ own choices made things much worse there than they needed to be? Think “#CalExit”, if not more. Blue states will secede and red states will try to take by force whatever they think they are owed, which is likely to be a lot. Or they’ll just continue to not invest in themselves, while no longer subsidized, and rapidly descend the rest of the way into third-world conditions, whence commence the infighting. By this time in 2024 we’ll be looking back on coronavirus lockdowns and ugly dem-primary “centrist” political tricks with fond nostalgia, the way we’re now looking back on the Shrub Administration with fond nostalgia.
Thing is, we (as in the rest of this miserable, benighted rock) could have really used some sort of actual leadership on climate change. Looks like that won’t be happening anytime soon, and we are out of time.
Is it too much to hope for that both Trump and Biden get the virus, and are incapacitated enough for long enough that the “establishment” there is forced to make someone else president? I heard noises somewhere about Biden considering Warren for his running mate …
I want to go back in time a couple of months, to when Sanders had just won Nevada and had a commanding lead in the polls and in delegates, and COVID-19 was just an internal problem of China’s, and then find a different path from there. This is wrong. What choices did decent people make that made them deserving of this instead of some other path from that point???
Now I’m basically sitting here waiting to die. Nominally my COVID risk profile is moderate rather than high, but there’s the minor little problem that if I do come down with it I’ll be expected to stay out of public places for 14 days. Since grocery stores are public places and I don’t have a credit card to order things delivered with, that means 14 days without food, while trying to fight off a serious disease. Not a good recipe for survival. I haven’t heard anything to suggest the government has any plan in place to assist people who get quarantined who don’t own credit cards, either.
And if I dodge the COVID bullet, I get to live less than 200 miles from a nuclear-armed failed state descending rapidly into civil war. Oh, joy!
And so many more people have it even worse, starting with the 350 million people living in that soon-to-be-failed state, and every single person over the age of retirement. And everyone living hand to mouth whose job just evaporated.
How the fuck did this happen in just a couple of months? We clearly took some sort of a major wrong turn. If there’s anyone “up there” I think they ought to immediately halt the simulation and reload it from an earlier fucking checkpoint. There are easily hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, who have the right to a do-over of the past three months. And for a lot of them it’s not just right, it’s necessary, starting with all of the COVID dead.
@Surplus
I feel like on some level the failed state level will occur before the election; just the virus on its own is moving that way.
Re: state secession
That would likely be an extremely violent prospect, seeing as Trump has access to nukes and wouldn’t think twice about torching blue areas. DC is extremely blue and surrounded by blue areas, so Trump could end up trying to move the seat of government to Mar-A-Lago.
The US has had 3 of the 4 main characteristics of failed state for decades now:
The Fund for Peace characterizes a failed state as having the following characteristics:
* Loss of control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force therein
* Erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions
* Inability to provide public services
* Inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community
The first one is the only one the US can even partially claim hasn’t been in force for the entirety of this century.
@Surplus
I think the main point is that this didn’t happen in a couple of months so there never was a major turn for the wrong. The global system usually does more for money than it does for people. Usually the threats are just slower and easier to ignore.
So I don’t think that we could fix this by going back a few months. Just like all the people gloating over all the simps, Stacies or trans* people dying from Covid didn’t become horrible over the last few months, they were there already, being horrible about other stuff.
This is just an example of how slang evolves over time.
The concept they’re describing is, “A man who is too concerned with a woman’s happiness, to the point where it becomes an unhealthy obsession that subsumes his own identity.” Back when I was in high school (1970’s) the slang word for such a man was “whipped”. Before that I think people said “henpecked.”
Of course there were always people who stretched the meaning of the word like the author of the MGTOW post. Instead of using those words to call out unhealthy behavior, they’d use them to call out the normal give-and-take of a healthy relationship. (“I can’t go out drinking tonight because I already promised my girlfriend I’d take her to see that new sparkly vampire movie. How about tomorrow night instead?”)
And when people stretched the meaning too far, it was pretty obvious that they were motivated by jealousy. In the 1970’s we called people like that “losers”, and they didn’t have a lot of influence on social mores. I think today they’re called “incels”.
@Masse_hysteria:
Reminds me of the time when one of the ‘Sad Puppy’ types publicly called John Scalzi gay, and was rather non-plussed when Scalzi just shrugged. Then when the guy vaguely apologized, Scalzi’s response was ‘I’m not the one you need to apologize to; you need to apologize to everybody you insulted by treating being gay as an insult’.
Never piss off a writer.
@Dalillama:
And given the kowtowing to the militia movement in the U.S., for folks like Cliven and Ammon Bundy who rather blatantly believe the government is illegitimate to start with (and both of whom actively took over public land and were pretty much treated with kid gloves the entire time), the first one on your list isn’t looking so good either.
Sorry, @Masse_Mysteria. Fingers were working with insufficient input from brain.
@Jenora Feuer
I always had a sneaking suspicion it was too stupid of a pun, so I count it as a win if your fingers did that on their own.
Does Paul Joseph Watson of Prison Planet not know that “so much for the tolerant left” is now a meme mocking the right, not a slogan? He tweeted this earlier. I can guarantee that if any ranking member of any liberal or left wing party were to be hospitalized he would be talking about how much he hopes they die.
@Jenora Feuer
I seem to recall a similar incident with John Green where he gave a similar response.
It would have been a very different story if they weren’t cishet white dudes.
Fascism is always the problem. COVID-19 will hopefully pass but until people refuse to acknowledge authoritarianism as a necessary evil or even ever a necessity, we will have almost no effective antidote to the eternal virus that plagues human society.
@Naglfar
Trump wouldn’t, but the people that actually fire the nukes might. There may be US Petrovs. The enlisted men (and they are all men, although the only officer I know personally is a woman) I know in the military are from 3 red states and 1 blue state, yet all were voting Bernie. This may be selection bias as my friends, but I actually think not, as I avoided talking to 2 of them about politics for literally 8 years because I was afraid of what I would find out.
Of course any civil war would be bloody, but I doubt it would be nuclear. I think I would fear be-gunned white supremacist bands of raping neighbors in militias more than anything. Wars never go well for women, especially women of color.