The latter part of your argument puts me in mind what I think of as "The Other Reader" problem, from Joseph Harris's 1993 essay of that name in the Journal of Advanced Composition. He's talking about advertising, but I've found it useful in thinking about bad-faith readings we encounter daily in online discourse.
Harris:
"My point is that before we can have effective criticism of advertising, or of any other part of popular culture, we need to admit that all of us respond to it in ways that are often at once both pleased and skeptical, amused and doubting, open and resisting. What won't help is speaking in the name of someone who fails to see what we do, or who falls for things that we don't."
some added thoughts from admittedly someone on the outside looking in of all this as a perpetually single person:
-To extend your point about irony/jokes to her post about the manosphere, "simp" and incel language generally has gone mainstream not because people genuinely think it is embarrassing to have desires, but because incel language is so absurd that it is extremely funny. people use the language *specifically to mock the ideas and concepts behind the language*.
-imo she misses the economic dimension. Economic shifts are like more responsible than cultural shifts for the declining rates of dating, sex, and marriage. A bigger problem than dating apps having stuff like "hetero cis males must try harder" in bios is the fact that the dating apps now pretty much only work if you invest a lot of money in them (unless you happen to have a very well-crafted profile that boosts you in the algorithm, but even that can cost money; one of the most common tips people give is to post photos *not* taken with a phone, which has a focal length that is unflattering, but with a real camera. And *real* cameras [or hiring someone with a real camera] is expensive). Dates cost money, activities where you meet people cost money, and the Death of Third Spaces make both of things rarer (and more expensive). Neither Andrew Tate nor I Drink Male Tears mugs are keeping people from dating; their actual material reality is!
this is not that relevant to your comment but it's kind of crazy what an ancient piece of slang "simp" is… i ran across it in a 2008 crossword puzzle and it's in who's afraid of virginia woolf lol. though i think its connotation of "white-knighting" is new
I read MT's article and commented there that it sounds online, and in the world (verbatim) "chicks seem chill".
30 second portrait mode video is definitely the worst expressive medium humans have invented, there's no context and I imagine it has to SUCK for some dude deep in the throes of puberty to see this nonsense constantly. If it 's an endless stream of hot influencers telling him he's garbage - each of which puberty guy is praying will just materialize in his bedroom in the middle of the night - that's awful. At least I did that, straining to conjure Brooke Burke or Christina Milian who were both ON FIRE in 2004.
I think every group simply looks idiotic online and it taints perception of that group. I would be lost as an aspiring conversationalist were I convinced people truly started discussions with "Seriously, can we talk about this?"
this comment caused me to go look and the comments on that post are getting wild. i looked at them when i first saw it but they have exploded since. when I looked at it before the weirdest comment was somebody indignantly listing misandrist pop songs like… "flowers"? anyway don't envy her having to deal with that lol. but your comment was pretty on the nose I thought.
she appears to have an online readership eager to use an article's lede to make their own tangential and strident points.. which is itself a very online form of expression
BDM this is an excellent article & I will need to contemplate it more to engage intelligently, but/and I hope you realize how disorienting it is to read a piece of yours that repeatedly refers to "Taylor" but the reader must recall that it's Not THAT Taylor.
> I don’t actually think it’s reasonable to expect men to be good sports about jokes about how much you hate them
As a man, I kind of figure that if a woman expresses a joke about how much they hate men around me, I take it as a compliment: they felt comfortable enough with me that they didn't need to self-censor.
On a related note, I think that most men are really bad at remembering that they aren't always the intended audience of things. One of the facets of privilege that lots of people don't really focus on is that the privileged position is considered the default - and in turn, when you're the default most of the time, it's hard to be practiced at reacting to situations where you're not. (I've sometimes considered getting a bumper sticker printed that says something like "shutting the hell up can be a form of allyship"; I wouldn't actually do this, because I'm not a bumper sticker guy, but it is something that I try to live by.)
I think that's a wise / healthy attitude, I just don't think it's reasonable to expect people to be wise and healthy and never take things personally, if that makes sense. Everybody's dealing with their own shit.
Oh definitely! I make a pretty strong attempt to not hold others to the same standards I hold myself to, because circumstances are fundamentally incomparable. (Which is maybe just the same thing as "Everybody's dealing with their own shit", now that I think about it.)
The flip side of that is that I generally try to reason my ethics out "out loud" - not as a thing where I think others should behave the same way that I do, or come to the same conclusions, but because I think there's value in socializing how one thinks such things through. (And honestly, where I land on a lot of this stuff is probably wildly inconsistent! To a degree that would probably look kinda crazy to an outsider! Which I consider fine, because I'm not a public figure, but would worry about a lot more if I were, like, a rock star or TV personality.)
Which ultimately is something I really value about your newsletter, incidentally. It's really neat to get a glimpse of how someone else's brain works!
I cringe to even bring up the idea, but I do wonder whether these "ironic jokes" are in fact ironic. I don't get the sense that "wow, Gender A sure is useless, am I right, fellow Bs?" means to get across an opposite or even orthogonal meaning. I'm not sure they're really ironic jokes if the laugh they're intended to solicit is the laugh of semi-unwilling partial agreement to a controversial statement. "Oh, they sort of are, aren't they? But you're naughty for saying it that way!"
well, I do think there is a form of this that is not ironic that expresses real antagonism! but the very over the top, almost cartoony stuff, I think that is rarely sincere. though ofc sometimes it is (valerie solanas).
I always think of irony as a mode that allows you to hold and highlight the way in which something is true and the way in which it is not true at the time. why it's a register that shows up again and again in all the important works of gender theory (screwball comedies)
"true and yet not true" is irony, but "true and yet not _that_ true" is hyperbole, and as the worst sort of pedant, I have to insist on the difference. hyperbole is not to be taken literally, but it's exaggerated, not contradictory.
right, like "eat the rich" is hyperbolic, but "eat the irish children" is ironic? or am I weird? (don't answer that)
I also think it’s fine to have weird little romantic icks and attractions. It’s fine to not like men in shorts. It’s fine to not like nose rings on women. It’s unreasonable to expect everyone to base their behavior on your personal turnoffs, but it can be reasonable to look for broad patterns in what the people you like tend to like if you’re trying to go on more dates with those people. Also men should never wear khaki or gingham or use computers or text what’s up or wear little bracelets or surf.
I'm not really familiar enough with MT's work to comment on it so much, but yeah I'm a little skeptical of cultural analyses of dating that begin and end with Being Online! Like yeah, most of being online at this point is a performance, and it is CERTAINLY that way with dating apps (not necessarily a bad thing!), but the most important aspects of dating happen offline... I want more think pieces about that. Anecdotally I've seen ironic misandry occasionally on the apps, but it's really rare, probably because most people are on the apps looking for a date (they're performing for a different audience on the apps!), and those jokes probably don't land when your audience will either really dislike it or begrudgingly tolerate it. I'm maybe too much of a softie right now, but generally it seems like people are open-minded and hungry for connection when they're actually dating in real life, and any of the jokes that come out about gender/identity are not mean spirited, they're just flirtatiously confrontational (which is a good thing, normalize poking fun at the people you like). If people are genuinely mean spirited and insecure, then thanks for telling me, i would rather figure that out early!!
yeah flirting can be mean! and even figuring out that "this person flirts by being a little mean and i don't like that" is valuable. outside of a few things most things that people do or do not do are not objectively wrong or right, it's just information. for instance, when i asked a guy out in college and he responded that if he had to be around me for more than a few minutes on intimate terms he would want to strangle me to death, that was information,,,,,
no it's really funny. i was like (sincerely) "thank you for being honest with me" lol. i think of it all the time but not like in a bitter way. he was right! we would have been a terrible couple.
for a while after that he went and lived in a cave on the russia / georgia border and supposedly when he was surprised by the georgian military there he pretended to be a hermit who had taken a vow of silence and they respectfully escorted him to another cave. no idea what he's doing now.
Men should be good sports about ironic misandry, for all the reasons laid out here. "The irony is a way of getting anger out so it doesn’t poison you," is not hard to understand. It's a low bar.
I agree its a low bar, but I think its easier to understand when its laid out as lucidly as it is here, and also when you are secure as a person generally, if you are an insecure 20yo guy on TikTok (I put twitter at first, but its definitely TikTok now) I think the lack of context and your own feelings of self-loathing can make it much harder. I'd say its maybe 80/20 a personal problem vs how the content is presented.
yeah and i think if you express to somebody you know that this kind of thing is hurtful (even just like as a general thing, not in response to something she said) and she says "get over it!" she's being an asshole. for the record!
i mean if i had a friend who was a man and was like "you know when you make those jokes it makes me feel shitty" i would do my best not to make those jokes around him. that's mostly what i mean.
I would respect it if he asked me to cut it out because he found it hurtful, but not if he tried to tell me that they were objectively wicked, ruining society, equivalent to men joking about domestic violence, etc.
not really relevant to the topic of conversation but nothing sets me off more than somebody acting like i've violated "an objectively wrong thing we all agree is wrong" than done something that hurt their feelings lol. cussedness levels go to one hundred.
The latter part of your argument puts me in mind what I think of as "The Other Reader" problem, from Joseph Harris's 1993 essay of that name in the Journal of Advanced Composition. He's talking about advertising, but I've found it useful in thinking about bad-faith readings we encounter daily in online discourse.
Harris:
"My point is that before we can have effective criticism of advertising, or of any other part of popular culture, we need to admit that all of us respond to it in ways that are often at once both pleased and skeptical, amused and doubting, open and resisting. What won't help is speaking in the name of someone who fails to see what we do, or who falls for things that we don't."
Jstor link if you're interested and have access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20865826
(If anyone happens to be interested and without access, I'm happy to email a pdf)
I don't have access but I'd love to read it! barbara dot mcclay at gmail dot com :)
It's on its way!
some added thoughts from admittedly someone on the outside looking in of all this as a perpetually single person:
-To extend your point about irony/jokes to her post about the manosphere, "simp" and incel language generally has gone mainstream not because people genuinely think it is embarrassing to have desires, but because incel language is so absurd that it is extremely funny. people use the language *specifically to mock the ideas and concepts behind the language*.
-imo she misses the economic dimension. Economic shifts are like more responsible than cultural shifts for the declining rates of dating, sex, and marriage. A bigger problem than dating apps having stuff like "hetero cis males must try harder" in bios is the fact that the dating apps now pretty much only work if you invest a lot of money in them (unless you happen to have a very well-crafted profile that boosts you in the algorithm, but even that can cost money; one of the most common tips people give is to post photos *not* taken with a phone, which has a focal length that is unflattering, but with a real camera. And *real* cameras [or hiring someone with a real camera] is expensive). Dates cost money, activities where you meet people cost money, and the Death of Third Spaces make both of things rarer (and more expensive). Neither Andrew Tate nor I Drink Male Tears mugs are keeping people from dating; their actual material reality is!
this is not that relevant to your comment but it's kind of crazy what an ancient piece of slang "simp" is… i ran across it in a 2008 crossword puzzle and it's in who's afraid of virginia woolf lol. though i think its connotation of "white-knighting" is new
oh yeah, it would've meant something like "chump" in WAoVW, right? Or "simpleton," maybe?
I read MT's article and commented there that it sounds online, and in the world (verbatim) "chicks seem chill".
30 second portrait mode video is definitely the worst expressive medium humans have invented, there's no context and I imagine it has to SUCK for some dude deep in the throes of puberty to see this nonsense constantly. If it 's an endless stream of hot influencers telling him he's garbage - each of which puberty guy is praying will just materialize in his bedroom in the middle of the night - that's awful. At least I did that, straining to conjure Brooke Burke or Christina Milian who were both ON FIRE in 2004.
I think every group simply looks idiotic online and it taints perception of that group. I would be lost as an aspiring conversationalist were I convinced people truly started discussions with "Seriously, can we talk about this?"
it's all fake!
this comment caused me to go look and the comments on that post are getting wild. i looked at them when i first saw it but they have exploded since. when I looked at it before the weirdest comment was somebody indignantly listing misandrist pop songs like… "flowers"? anyway don't envy her having to deal with that lol. but your comment was pretty on the nose I thought.
she appears to have an online readership eager to use an article's lede to make their own tangential and strident points.. which is itself a very online form of expression
BDM this is an excellent article & I will need to contemplate it more to engage intelligently, but/and I hope you realize how disorienting it is to read a piece of yours that repeatedly refers to "Taylor" but the reader must recall that it's Not THAT Taylor.
this happened to me editing it ðŸ˜
> I don’t actually think it’s reasonable to expect men to be good sports about jokes about how much you hate them
As a man, I kind of figure that if a woman expresses a joke about how much they hate men around me, I take it as a compliment: they felt comfortable enough with me that they didn't need to self-censor.
On a related note, I think that most men are really bad at remembering that they aren't always the intended audience of things. One of the facets of privilege that lots of people don't really focus on is that the privileged position is considered the default - and in turn, when you're the default most of the time, it's hard to be practiced at reacting to situations where you're not. (I've sometimes considered getting a bumper sticker printed that says something like "shutting the hell up can be a form of allyship"; I wouldn't actually do this, because I'm not a bumper sticker guy, but it is something that I try to live by.)
I think that's a wise / healthy attitude, I just don't think it's reasonable to expect people to be wise and healthy and never take things personally, if that makes sense. Everybody's dealing with their own shit.
Oh definitely! I make a pretty strong attempt to not hold others to the same standards I hold myself to, because circumstances are fundamentally incomparable. (Which is maybe just the same thing as "Everybody's dealing with their own shit", now that I think about it.)
The flip side of that is that I generally try to reason my ethics out "out loud" - not as a thing where I think others should behave the same way that I do, or come to the same conclusions, but because I think there's value in socializing how one thinks such things through. (And honestly, where I land on a lot of this stuff is probably wildly inconsistent! To a degree that would probably look kinda crazy to an outsider! Which I consider fine, because I'm not a public figure, but would worry about a lot more if I were, like, a rock star or TV personality.)
Which ultimately is something I really value about your newsletter, incidentally. It's really neat to get a glimpse of how someone else's brain works!
I cringe to even bring up the idea, but I do wonder whether these "ironic jokes" are in fact ironic. I don't get the sense that "wow, Gender A sure is useless, am I right, fellow Bs?" means to get across an opposite or even orthogonal meaning. I'm not sure they're really ironic jokes if the laugh they're intended to solicit is the laugh of semi-unwilling partial agreement to a controversial statement. "Oh, they sort of are, aren't they? But you're naughty for saying it that way!"
well, I do think there is a form of this that is not ironic that expresses real antagonism! but the very over the top, almost cartoony stuff, I think that is rarely sincere. though ofc sometimes it is (valerie solanas).
I always think of irony as a mode that allows you to hold and highlight the way in which something is true and the way in which it is not true at the time. why it's a register that shows up again and again in all the important works of gender theory (screwball comedies)
"true and yet not true" is irony, but "true and yet not _that_ true" is hyperbole, and as the worst sort of pedant, I have to insist on the difference. hyperbole is not to be taken literally, but it's exaggerated, not contradictory.
right, like "eat the rich" is hyperbolic, but "eat the irish children" is ironic? or am I weird? (don't answer that)
I also think it’s fine to have weird little romantic icks and attractions. It’s fine to not like men in shorts. It’s fine to not like nose rings on women. It’s unreasonable to expect everyone to base their behavior on your personal turnoffs, but it can be reasonable to look for broad patterns in what the people you like tend to like if you’re trying to go on more dates with those people. Also men should never wear khaki or gingham or use computers or text what’s up or wear little bracelets or surf.
How I hate the men who surf. All chill, they ask? All cool? While you are gazing out over the sea. No!
you have surfboard envy clare
why don’t they do something useful like fish
they're afraid of catching a selkie bride
And I do not I have a kayak
I'm not really familiar enough with MT's work to comment on it so much, but yeah I'm a little skeptical of cultural analyses of dating that begin and end with Being Online! Like yeah, most of being online at this point is a performance, and it is CERTAINLY that way with dating apps (not necessarily a bad thing!), but the most important aspects of dating happen offline... I want more think pieces about that. Anecdotally I've seen ironic misandry occasionally on the apps, but it's really rare, probably because most people are on the apps looking for a date (they're performing for a different audience on the apps!), and those jokes probably don't land when your audience will either really dislike it or begrudgingly tolerate it. I'm maybe too much of a softie right now, but generally it seems like people are open-minded and hungry for connection when they're actually dating in real life, and any of the jokes that come out about gender/identity are not mean spirited, they're just flirtatiously confrontational (which is a good thing, normalize poking fun at the people you like). If people are genuinely mean spirited and insecure, then thanks for telling me, i would rather figure that out early!!
yeah flirting can be mean! and even figuring out that "this person flirts by being a little mean and i don't like that" is valuable. outside of a few things most things that people do or do not do are not objectively wrong or right, it's just information. for instance, when i asked a guy out in college and he responded that if he had to be around me for more than a few minutes on intimate terms he would want to strangle me to death, that was information,,,,,
:O sorry, i laughed... that is the kind of information you want right away lol. unbelievable for a person to say that tho
no it's really funny. i was like (sincerely) "thank you for being honest with me" lol. i think of it all the time but not like in a bitter way. he was right! we would have been a terrible couple.
for a while after that he went and lived in a cave on the russia / georgia border and supposedly when he was surprised by the georgian military there he pretended to be a hermit who had taken a vow of silence and they respectfully escorted him to another cave. no idea what he's doing now.
wow, i am astounded by this character lol, someone get him a substack
for all i know he IS on substack… but really impossible to predict what the subject matter of it would be
Men should be good sports about ironic misandry, for all the reasons laid out here. "The irony is a way of getting anger out so it doesn’t poison you," is not hard to understand. It's a low bar.
I agree its a low bar, but I think its easier to understand when its laid out as lucidly as it is here, and also when you are secure as a person generally, if you are an insecure 20yo guy on TikTok (I put twitter at first, but its definitely TikTok now) I think the lack of context and your own feelings of self-loathing can make it much harder. I'd say its maybe 80/20 a personal problem vs how the content is presented.
if somebody's mean to one of the lads who read notebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btPJPFnesV4
yeah and i think if you express to somebody you know that this kind of thing is hurtful (even just like as a general thing, not in response to something she said) and she says "get over it!" she's being an asshole. for the record!
(more seriously I think it makes sense to be a good sport about it but it's still unreasonable to expect)
^---MAN telling WOMAN what to SAY…
I'm just making an unsolicited remark in a space that a woman created. If a man can't do that, I don't see why we invented them in the first place.
It can be more fun when they’re not good sports tbf. It’s annoying to be reasoned with but it’s fun to make people mad.
i mean if i had a friend who was a man and was like "you know when you make those jokes it makes me feel shitty" i would do my best not to make those jokes around him. that's mostly what i mean.
I would respect it if he asked me to cut it out because he found it hurtful, but not if he tried to tell me that they were objectively wicked, ruining society, equivalent to men joking about domestic violence, etc.
not really relevant to the topic of conversation but nothing sets me off more than somebody acting like i've violated "an objectively wrong thing we all agree is wrong" than done something that hurt their feelings lol. cussedness levels go to one hundred.
oh yes for sure.