I most certainly agree with the first part of the Reddit post. It is not okay to belittle men just because they conform to certain stereotypes. That is not up for discussion. On the other hand,...
I most certainly agree with the first part of the Reddit post. It is not okay to belittle men just because they conform to certain stereotypes. That is not up for discussion.
On the other hand, regardless of the soundness of the argument (and I'm not saying it is sound or not), comparing men's issues with women's predicaments, especially when the later is in a better position, is something that should only be done very carefully. It's not that you shouldn't ever do it, but in a place like Reddit the risk of pleasing the wrong crowd is just too great. In other words, sexist and misogynistic groups and individuals will cease the opportunity to put forth their bigoted agenda.
Ultimately, one should ask: is the comparison with women absolutely essential for the point I'm trying to make? If the answer is no, strike it out.
I don't think I agree with the sentiment of this post. It feels like the two main points are: There is nothing wrong with being a neckbeard, particularly regarding physical traits. Women aren't...
I don't think I agree with the sentiment of this post. It feels like the two main points are:
There is nothing wrong with being a neckbeard, particularly regarding physical traits.
Women aren't considered losers and aren't subjected to the same level of judgement.
Regarding point one, I think there is a larger issue at play than just "people make fun of men that look and smell weird." I agree with thread consensus that many of the physical characteristics of a neckbeard can be associated with poor mental health (autism, depression, previous trauma...), but hygiene and physical appearance are only one aspect of the traditional neckbeard or a loser archetype. I think the larger component lies in the 'neckbeards' treatment of others, particularly women. There are lots of programs, groups, and forums, generally comprised solely of men, that take sad men and turn them into aggressive, entitled men. I got cajoled into sitting through a 'Real Social Dynamics' meeting by a friend who would fall into the neckbeard category. A short detour from grabbing a pint turned out to be a 2 hour lecture in a room with about 200 other men and 3 women on how devious women are and how badly you need to treat them in order for them to show you affection. It was mind blowing. The man on stage was selling misogyny and the audience was eating it up. Nearly every single man in the room fell into the loser/neckbeard appearance category.
This kind of seems like a chicken/egg scenario: Young men get called losers and are belittled due to abnormal appearance and behavior. Sad young men become embittered at society and find echo chambers for their experience. With their negative beliefs in society reinforced they present the prototypical 'neckbeard' personality traits: aggression towards women, intellectual superiority, and in a lot of cases a weird brand of racism. These behaviors and personalities get associated with the common physical characteristics and hygiene of neckbeards, society responds harshly, and we return to step one. To be honest, typing that out put in two minds. To the point of the original thread, if we cull the poor treatment of these types of men would it stop them from finding solace in misogynistic groups? Possibly, but if we are centering a cultural groups needs, I'm not sure if neckbeards is the group I would place highest priority on. While there are obviously some issues we need to address as a society like mental health and our treatment of obese people, targeting male specific groups feels off. Which leads to point 2 of the thread: Women aren't considered losers and aren't subjected to the same level of judgement.
I'm almost not sure where to start with this one. Women can't be losers? Woman losers are the subject of so many films, across so many eras. She's All That, Never Have I Ever, Never Been Kissed, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion... the list goes on and on. These movies obviously resonate with women because they feel the same treatment as men. This narrative in the thread feels like an erasure of women's perspectives, from a group that is exclusively male, that views women as not enduring similar issues. And that perspective takes us back to the point above, neckbeards have a very shallow understanding and negative perspective on women in general. If mainstream media isn't convincing, maybe we can point to the female neckbeard: the social justice warrior or the crazy cat lady. Both are associated with similar body image and hygiene characteristics and are disparaged by mainstream society. They are the female losers. They aren't on 4chan, they have Tumbler. It feels like only men without mixed gender social circles wouldn't identify the female loser.
While I agree we should identify and stop bullying in youth and adult circles, the thread in and of itself feels like it sums up the issues with neckbeard culture. They systematically ignore women's lived experience in favor for some idealized fantasy and co-opt issues that aren't solely theirs. They ignore or minimize the problematic parts of neckbeard culture and place blame on society at large.
I think we can keep things simple by saying it's a form of name-calling and this is usually bad, whatever form it takes. People aren't consistent about how they use words and this applies...
I think we can keep things simple by saying it's a form of name-calling and this is usually bad, whatever form it takes.
People aren't consistent about how they use words and this applies especially to insults. Getting deep into how a word is defined, how it's used, and how it should be used, is missing the point.
Insults can be creative but they're not supposed to be accurate, they're supposed to hurt.
When we want to talk about people in any serious way, first you have to say who you're talking about and using an insult for that is a bad start. You might as well talk about a cartoon character.
This is especially true online when talking to strangers or near-strangers who probably use words differently. Whatever you're imagining as "neckbeard culture" is unlikely to be what I'm imagining.
How could we bridge that gap? Sharing stories might help. (Or, to avoid doing too much work, sharing links to stories.)
That's a fair assessment. I don't endorse insulting these communities, I feel like two things are being conflated: overweight/unhygienic folks with poor/misogynistic behavior. In my own...
I think we can keep things simple by saying it's a form of name-calling and this is usually bad, whatever form it takes.
That's a fair assessment.
I don't endorse insulting these communities, I feel like two things are being conflated: overweight/unhygienic folks with poor/misogynistic behavior. In my own experience, I know many overweight, unshaven, chronically unhygienic men who have amazing personalities, lead fulfilling lives, and tend to be social butterflies. To me the original post felt like it read as the "neckbeard" or 'loser" labels applied carte blanche to the overweight or under-showered. I was heavy handed in my use of those terms and I'm sorry.
I guess my question is, what do you call someone who falls into the group that actively disparages women without it becoming an insult? I completely agree with your point ->
When we want to talk about people in any serious way, first you have to say who you're talking about and using an insult for that is a bad start.
But when you talk about a group with negatively perceived traits from mainstream society, originally benign labels often become an insult: Incel, baby boomer... I realize 'neckbeard' has always been an insult so it's a bad example, but what do we categorize groups with this behavior set as? Or am i missing the point completely and we just shouldn't categorize so readily.
Happy to share stories. Checking in that you're looking to bridge the gap between what each of us is imagining as 'neckbeard culture'.
I think “misogynist” or “men who disparage women” might work, if that’s who you want to talk about. (And also make fairly lame insults.) But this isn’t something that I’m actively curious about,...
I guess my question is, what do you call someone who falls into the group that actively disparages women without it becoming an insult?
I think “misogynist” or “men who disparage women” might work, if that’s who you want to talk about. (And also make fairly lame insults.)
But this isn’t something that I’m actively curious about, or not yet anyway. We’re just talking about word usage because it came up. If you are curious, asking an interesting question in ~talk might convince people to share their stories and start a good discussion?
That was also my initial reaction but thinking about it I'm not sure it's that simple. There's a constant struggle in society between informal groups to impose their worldview as legitimate, a...
it's a form of name-calling and this is usually bad
That was also my initial reaction but thinking about it I'm not sure it's that simple. There's a constant struggle in society between informal groups to impose their worldview as legitimate, a cultural/political war. These names are part of a marketing battle of sort; how you name things influence how you think about them, so you need to think about them in that context.
Thing is "neckbeards" are pretty harmless politically (although there's must be some friction there for them to even emerge as a perceived group, probably something related to masculinity), but anti-vax ("covtards"), climate change deniers, or white supremacists, maybe we should name-call these. The question is rather if that's an efficient strategy, than being "bad" in a more moral sense (afterall there's also a chain of explanation that make a covtard a covtard, but they are still nefarious).
I think another interesting question on top of what you're talking about is how do you prevent benign labels from become an insult? (ie. Incel, anti-vaxer, white-supremacist). I think one issue we...
I think another interesting question on top of what you're talking about is how do you prevent benign labels from become an insult? (ie. Incel, anti-vaxer, white-supremacist). I think one issue we have with discourse around these topics is that the label takes power away from the argument. I felt like as soon as Trump blew the dog whistle and called it the "China-virus" and conflated it with racist talking points legitimacy was taken away from the real line of questioning: why was there suppression of information when it was first discovered, what ramifications does that have, and what foreign policy do we need to we prevent that in the future? Conversations about real issues got lost in the noise of racism, bad faith arguments, and conspiracy theories.
I think the same can apply to the 'neckbeard' conversation. I'd like to be able to talk about the problematic parts of what I'm struggling to re-name from 'neckbeard culture'. It feels like there is a growing number of men who have turned to the internet as a place to build community and develop a sense of self/world view. It feels like a lot of the places (4Chan, pockets of Reddit, pockets of Youtube) push them towards misogynistic, entitled, and racist behavior. In the past I would have called these neckbeards, but as skybrain pointed out,
When we want to talk about people in any serious way, first you have to say who you're talking about and using an insult for that is a bad start.
But what can we call a group like that without it becoming an insult?
I think that any term will absorb context over time, so there's no label you can apply to the group without it eventually being considered an insult by someone. That said, describing the relevant...
I think that any term will absorb context over time, so there's no label you can apply to the group without it eventually being considered an insult by someone. That said, describing the relevant attributes (social community, political convictions, etc.) without conflating them with less relevant attributes like hygiene or shaving preferences helps to minimize the degree to which someone might consider it an insult.
Someone raised this point in the core thread in case you haven't read it. I still generally stand by the statement that, while the people that are misogynists with terrible views should be seen...
I think the larger component lies in the 'neckbeards' treatment of others, particularly women. There are lots of programs, groups, and forums, generally comprised solely of men, that take sad men and turn them into aggressive, entitled men.
Someone raised this point in the core thread in case you haven't read it. I still generally stand by the statement that, while the people that are misogynists with terrible views should be seen and treated as such, I don't think we should shame their misogyny differently because they have a specific appearance. Also, people have brought up generally comparable terms like 'land whale' for women that are often implicitly assumed to be 'SJWs' or body positivity advocates, and these terms aren't widely accepted/tolerated, or at least are less so.
Which leads to point 2 of the thread: Women aren't considered losers and aren't subjected to the same level of judgement.
I'm almost not sure where to start with this one. Women can't be losers? Woman losers are the subject of so many films, across so many eras. She's All That, Never Have I Ever, Never Been Kissed, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion... the list goes on and on. These movies obviously resonate with women because they feel the same treatment as men. This narrative in the thread feels like an erasure of women's perspectives, from a group that is exclusively male, that views women as not enduring similar issues. And that perspective takes us back to the point above, neckbeards have a very shallow understanding and negative perspective on women in general. If mainstream media isn't convincing, maybe we can point to the female neckbeard: the social justice warrior or the crazy cat lady. Both are associated with similar body image and hygiene characteristics and are disparaged by mainstream society. They are the female losers. They aren't on 4chan, they have Tumbler. It feels like only men without mixed gender social circles wouldn't identify the female loser.
Before anything else, MensLib mods and users agree that menslib is happy to have women join them and is not a safe space, although the explicit focus in "men's" issues will obviously slant the audience to be more male. (Also, I don't have the context for your movie references.)
Otherwise, I do think this is reasonable. My main opinion then is that we're far more likely to have someone like you to bring that up to us, and these issues are more likely to be known and critiqued than something like the menslib poster's thread simply because doing that to women's issues is enormously more common. I don't mean this to say this is undeserved or came cheap or anything like that because it isn't (also, MensLib generally regards itself as a feminist community), but it does mean the things you mentioned will be more likely to be examined than the things OP mentioned.
Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that comment. To me it feels like the 'neckbeard' label is something that we do pretty commonly as a society, ascribe negative personality traits to unattractive...
Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that comment.
To me it feels like the 'neckbeard' label is something that we do pretty commonly as a society, ascribe negative personality traits to unattractive physical features. It's really shitty and I'm sorry for being complicit in doing so. If I'm being honest, the online connotation that feels personality based has it has bled out into my real life where a neckbeard becomes based on physical traits. I think for me there still requires a hybrid of behavior with physical traits for it to fall into the category of 'neckbeard'. I won't see an un-showered, obese man and think 'oh a neckbeard' but I might after hearing him disparage a woman in an attempt to 'neg' her. To your point I'd probably just think 'what a prick' he was attractive.
I've been thinking this all through as I reply to comments and I'm trying to distill what I think on the topic. Everyone is bringing up great points. I might be generalizing, but it does feel like there is a subset of men that fall into the category of unhygienic, chronically online, and misogynistic. I want to be able to talk about the problematic effect they have on online and our culture at large but I don't think there is a good label for it. I don't really use the term 'neckbeard' in real life or online, but when it gets brought up it definitely doesn't make me bristle. Which lends credence to your point that the female perspective is more known and critiqued.
I find that point at odds with other part of the original post though:
Unfortunately this is a term that is used everyday to belittle people, most commonly men. It is not technically a gendered insult but let’s be real, it’s almost always used against men and rarely (if ever) used against women.
It’s a term used to establish a toxic dominance hierarchy among men (and only men, as women are exempt from this imposed competition).
Let men have intrinsic value just like women do and let’s value them and free them from this toxic expectations and hierarchies!
It feels like these excerpts exclude the female perspective you bring up. Not that it's less accepted to say land whale than neckbeard, but that land whale isn't a thing. That women don't have a toxic hierarchy. That women might feel like they don't have intrinsic value. I'm not trying to tear down the MensLib community, it's good to have an outlet to air these issues and generally I agree with most of their points. You're right it's not exclusively a space for men, but I would be pretty shocked if there were more that 10% women on that subreddit as Reddit as a whole already skews pretty hard towards males.
I think some of this kind of feels like the PragerU videos. There are enough kernels of truth within them that I agree with that it's easy to then use those arguments to justify more radical stances. I'm not saying that's what going on here, but I'd be disappointed if I didn't see a critique of that line of thinking brought up to steady the ship. Any the comment you linked is a great example of that critique. I have a friends who will say "Ugh, it's so hard to be a man" in a cheeky voice whenever conversation tend to head this direction and it's a light way of checking us if we're missing perspectives.
(For the movie references, they're just examples of movies where the main character is a woman that is perceived as a loser. If you haven't seen them and have the chance, I'd say She's All That is the most commonly referenced but Romy and Michele is definitely the funniest).
MensLibs is 100% a great sub. It is also not private, so the entire Reddit population can read and comment. That's were the problem resides in my opinion.
MensLibs is 100% a great sub. It is also not private, so the entire Reddit population can read and comment. That's were the problem resides in my opinion.
I doubt very much that treating women badly is a relevant criteria most people uses when they call someone a "neckbeard". Most of the time that can't even be assessed. Attention to nuance is not a...
I doubt very much that treating women badly is a relevant criteria most people uses when they call someone a "neckbeard". Most of the time that can't even be assessed. Attention to nuance is not a common trait among in bullies. You just have to look the part according to some subjective criteria. That's of course not exclusive to the case at hand.
Disclaimer? This thread advocates for words without explicitly exclusionary etymology or use to be classified as slurs according to most people, which I believe makes it just like the ableism...
Disclaimer?
This thread advocates for words without explicitly exclusionary etymology or use to be classified as slurs according to most people, which I believe makes it just like the ableism threads. Blink twice to ping Deimos and nuke the thread?
No man should be called a “neckbeard” or belittled for being overweight, unkempt, socially awkward, and possibly dependent on his parents. Those might not be ideal traits for someone to have and people like that should be constructively criticized and advised to improve their current condition (and maybe even help them if possible) but they’re human beings who don’t deserve to be dehumanized, demonized, outcasted, and belittled by anyone.
Women who have the traits of “neckbeards” are not generally belittled, mocked, or treated poorly by anyone and people are more understanding to why they become like that. It should be the same for men.
Now let’s move to the term “loser”.
Unfortunately this is a term that is used everyday to belittle people, most commonly men. It is not technically a gendered insult but let’s be real, it’s almost always used against men and rarely (if ever) used against women.
I agree with these 2 claims, generally. Someone raised the criticism that the term neckbeard also has connotations with misogynistic views, which I agree with, but I still think attaching those views to a fairly specific look some now very small but once larger share of men have is bad.
I most certainly agree with the first part of the Reddit post. It is not okay to belittle men just because they conform to certain stereotypes. That is not up for discussion.
On the other hand, regardless of the soundness of the argument (and I'm not saying it is sound or not), comparing men's issues with women's predicaments, especially when the later is in a better position, is something that should only be done very carefully. It's not that you shouldn't ever do it, but in a place like Reddit the risk of pleasing the wrong crowd is just too great. In other words, sexist and misogynistic groups and individuals will cease the opportunity to put forth their bigoted agenda.
Ultimately, one should ask: is the comparison with women absolutely essential for the point I'm trying to make? If the answer is no, strike it out.
I don't think I agree with the sentiment of this post. It feels like the two main points are:
Regarding point one, I think there is a larger issue at play than just "people make fun of men that look and smell weird." I agree with thread consensus that many of the physical characteristics of a neckbeard can be associated with poor mental health (autism, depression, previous trauma...), but hygiene and physical appearance are only one aspect of the traditional neckbeard or a loser archetype. I think the larger component lies in the 'neckbeards' treatment of others, particularly women. There are lots of programs, groups, and forums, generally comprised solely of men, that take sad men and turn them into aggressive, entitled men. I got cajoled into sitting through a 'Real Social Dynamics' meeting by a friend who would fall into the neckbeard category. A short detour from grabbing a pint turned out to be a 2 hour lecture in a room with about 200 other men and 3 women on how devious women are and how badly you need to treat them in order for them to show you affection. It was mind blowing. The man on stage was selling misogyny and the audience was eating it up. Nearly every single man in the room fell into the loser/neckbeard appearance category.
This kind of seems like a chicken/egg scenario: Young men get called losers and are belittled due to abnormal appearance and behavior. Sad young men become embittered at society and find echo chambers for their experience. With their negative beliefs in society reinforced they present the prototypical 'neckbeard' personality traits: aggression towards women, intellectual superiority, and in a lot of cases a weird brand of racism. These behaviors and personalities get associated with the common physical characteristics and hygiene of neckbeards, society responds harshly, and we return to step one. To be honest, typing that out put in two minds. To the point of the original thread, if we cull the poor treatment of these types of men would it stop them from finding solace in misogynistic groups? Possibly, but if we are centering a cultural groups needs, I'm not sure if neckbeards is the group I would place highest priority on. While there are obviously some issues we need to address as a society like mental health and our treatment of obese people, targeting male specific groups feels off. Which leads to point 2 of the thread: Women aren't considered losers and aren't subjected to the same level of judgement.
I'm almost not sure where to start with this one. Women can't be losers? Woman losers are the subject of so many films, across so many eras. She's All That, Never Have I Ever, Never Been Kissed, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion... the list goes on and on. These movies obviously resonate with women because they feel the same treatment as men. This narrative in the thread feels like an erasure of women's perspectives, from a group that is exclusively male, that views women as not enduring similar issues. And that perspective takes us back to the point above, neckbeards have a very shallow understanding and negative perspective on women in general. If mainstream media isn't convincing, maybe we can point to the female neckbeard: the social justice warrior or the crazy cat lady. Both are associated with similar body image and hygiene characteristics and are disparaged by mainstream society. They are the female losers. They aren't on 4chan, they have Tumbler. It feels like only men without mixed gender social circles wouldn't identify the female loser.
While I agree we should identify and stop bullying in youth and adult circles, the thread in and of itself feels like it sums up the issues with neckbeard culture. They systematically ignore women's lived experience in favor for some idealized fantasy and co-opt issues that aren't solely theirs. They ignore or minimize the problematic parts of neckbeard culture and place blame on society at large.
I think we can keep things simple by saying it's a form of name-calling and this is usually bad, whatever form it takes.
People aren't consistent about how they use words and this applies especially to insults. Getting deep into how a word is defined, how it's used, and how it should be used, is missing the point.
Insults can be creative but they're not supposed to be accurate, they're supposed to hurt.
When we want to talk about people in any serious way, first you have to say who you're talking about and using an insult for that is a bad start. You might as well talk about a cartoon character.
This is especially true online when talking to strangers or near-strangers who probably use words differently. Whatever you're imagining as "neckbeard culture" is unlikely to be what I'm imagining.
How could we bridge that gap? Sharing stories might help. (Or, to avoid doing too much work, sharing links to stories.)
That's a fair assessment.
I don't endorse insulting these communities, I feel like two things are being conflated: overweight/unhygienic folks with poor/misogynistic behavior. In my own experience, I know many overweight, unshaven, chronically unhygienic men who have amazing personalities, lead fulfilling lives, and tend to be social butterflies. To me the original post felt like it read as the "neckbeard" or 'loser" labels applied carte blanche to the overweight or under-showered. I was heavy handed in my use of those terms and I'm sorry.
I guess my question is, what do you call someone who falls into the group that actively disparages women without it becoming an insult? I completely agree with your point ->
But when you talk about a group with negatively perceived traits from mainstream society, originally benign labels often become an insult: Incel, baby boomer... I realize 'neckbeard' has always been an insult so it's a bad example, but what do we categorize groups with this behavior set as? Or am i missing the point completely and we just shouldn't categorize so readily.
Happy to share stories. Checking in that you're looking to bridge the gap between what each of us is imagining as 'neckbeard culture'.
I think “misogynist” or “men who disparage women” might work, if that’s who you want to talk about. (And also make fairly lame insults.)
But this isn’t something that I’m actively curious about, or not yet anyway. We’re just talking about word usage because it came up. If you are curious, asking an interesting question in ~talk might convince people to share their stories and start a good discussion?
That was also my initial reaction but thinking about it I'm not sure it's that simple. There's a constant struggle in society between informal groups to impose their worldview as legitimate, a cultural/political war. These names are part of a marketing battle of sort; how you name things influence how you think about them, so you need to think about them in that context.
Thing is "neckbeards" are pretty harmless politically (although there's must be some friction there for them to even emerge as a perceived group, probably something related to masculinity), but anti-vax ("covtards"), climate change deniers, or white supremacists, maybe we should name-call these. The question is rather if that's an efficient strategy, than being "bad" in a more moral sense (afterall there's also a chain of explanation that make a covtard a covtard, but they are still nefarious).
I think another interesting question on top of what you're talking about is how do you prevent benign labels from become an insult? (ie. Incel, anti-vaxer, white-supremacist). I think one issue we have with discourse around these topics is that the label takes power away from the argument. I felt like as soon as Trump blew the dog whistle and called it the "China-virus" and conflated it with racist talking points legitimacy was taken away from the real line of questioning: why was there suppression of information when it was first discovered, what ramifications does that have, and what foreign policy do we need to we prevent that in the future? Conversations about real issues got lost in the noise of racism, bad faith arguments, and conspiracy theories.
I think the same can apply to the 'neckbeard' conversation. I'd like to be able to talk about the problematic parts of what I'm struggling to re-name from 'neckbeard culture'. It feels like there is a growing number of men who have turned to the internet as a place to build community and develop a sense of self/world view. It feels like a lot of the places (4Chan, pockets of Reddit, pockets of Youtube) push them towards misogynistic, entitled, and racist behavior. In the past I would have called these neckbeards, but as skybrain pointed out,
But what can we call a group like that without it becoming an insult?
I think that any term will absorb context over time, so there's no label you can apply to the group without it eventually being considered an insult by someone. That said, describing the relevant attributes (social community, political convictions, etc.) without conflating them with less relevant attributes like hygiene or shaving preferences helps to minimize the degree to which someone might consider it an insult.
Someone raised this point in the core thread in case you haven't read it. I still generally stand by the statement that, while the people that are misogynists with terrible views should be seen and treated as such, I don't think we should shame their misogyny differently because they have a specific appearance. Also, people have brought up generally comparable terms like 'land whale' for women that are often implicitly assumed to be 'SJWs' or body positivity advocates, and these terms aren't widely accepted/tolerated, or at least are less so.
Before anything else, MensLib mods and users agree that menslib is happy to have women join them and is not a safe space, although the explicit focus in "men's" issues will obviously slant the audience to be more male. (Also, I don't have the context for your movie references.)
Otherwise, I do think this is reasonable. My main opinion then is that we're far more likely to have someone like you to bring that up to us, and these issues are more likely to be known and critiqued than something like the menslib poster's thread simply because doing that to women's issues is enormously more common. I don't mean this to say this is undeserved or came cheap or anything like that because it isn't (also, MensLib generally regards itself as a feminist community), but it does mean the things you mentioned will be more likely to be examined than the things OP mentioned.
Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that comment.
To me it feels like the 'neckbeard' label is something that we do pretty commonly as a society, ascribe negative personality traits to unattractive physical features. It's really shitty and I'm sorry for being complicit in doing so. If I'm being honest, the online connotation that feels personality based has it has bled out into my real life where a neckbeard becomes based on physical traits. I think for me there still requires a hybrid of behavior with physical traits for it to fall into the category of 'neckbeard'. I won't see an un-showered, obese man and think 'oh a neckbeard' but I might after hearing him disparage a woman in an attempt to 'neg' her. To your point I'd probably just think 'what a prick' he was attractive.
I've been thinking this all through as I reply to comments and I'm trying to distill what I think on the topic. Everyone is bringing up great points. I might be generalizing, but it does feel like there is a subset of men that fall into the category of unhygienic, chronically online, and misogynistic. I want to be able to talk about the problematic effect they have on online and our culture at large but I don't think there is a good label for it. I don't really use the term 'neckbeard' in real life or online, but when it gets brought up it definitely doesn't make me bristle. Which lends credence to your point that the female perspective is more known and critiqued.
I find that point at odds with other part of the original post though:
It feels like these excerpts exclude the female perspective you bring up. Not that it's less accepted to say land whale than neckbeard, but that land whale isn't a thing. That women don't have a toxic hierarchy. That women might feel like they don't have intrinsic value. I'm not trying to tear down the MensLib community, it's good to have an outlet to air these issues and generally I agree with most of their points. You're right it's not exclusively a space for men, but I would be pretty shocked if there were more that 10% women on that subreddit as Reddit as a whole already skews pretty hard towards males.
I think some of this kind of feels like the PragerU videos. There are enough kernels of truth within them that I agree with that it's easy to then use those arguments to justify more radical stances. I'm not saying that's what going on here, but I'd be disappointed if I didn't see a critique of that line of thinking brought up to steady the ship. Any the comment you linked is a great example of that critique. I have a friends who will say "Ugh, it's so hard to be a man" in a cheeky voice whenever conversation tend to head this direction and it's a light way of checking us if we're missing perspectives.
(For the movie references, they're just examples of movies where the main character is a woman that is perceived as a loser. If you haven't seen them and have the chance, I'd say She's All That is the most commonly referenced but Romy and Michele is definitely the funniest).
Just included almost everyone with a smartphone. Being online 24/7 is no longer exclusively an obbessed nerd thing.
MensLibs is 100% a great sub. It is also not private, so the entire Reddit population can read and comment. That's were the problem resides in my opinion.
The term is almost exclusively used derogatorily.
I doubt very much that treating women badly is a relevant criteria most people uses when they call someone a "neckbeard". Most of the time that can't even be assessed. Attention to nuance is not a common trait among in bullies. You just have to look the part according to some subjective criteria. That's of course not exclusive to the case at hand.
Disclaimer?
This thread advocates for words without explicitly exclusionary etymology or use to be classified as slurs according to most people, which I believe makes it just like the ableism threads. Blink twice to ping Deimos and nuke the thread?In the text there's also this r/menslib post from a while back detailing why they feel the term "neckbeard" is bad and should not be used.
I think these are most important pieces of text:
I agree with these 2 claims, generally. Someone raised the criticism that the term neckbeard also has connotations with misogynistic views, which I agree with, but I still think attaching those views to a fairly specific look some now very small but once larger share of men have is bad.