These are the stock characters of the American gender wars. Whoever you are, if you have anything to say to Americans about the matter of gender, you will be depicted as one of these.
1. The Troll.
According to prevailing mythology, trolls are "static electricity" , whom we are supposed to ignore. Trolls appear on various sites and begin ordering women not to act "like a female stereotype". They assert the allegedly illogical and fallacious nature of individual women's opinions.
A troll is not capable of doing any harm, even when issuing rape threats. Trolls may even serve a developmental purpose in helping to toughen you up, in case you ever want to serve as a World War 2 fighter pilot or something similar. Trolls appear on the Internet because the Internet is a male preserve, created by males for males. If a woman ventures there and is not prepared to take troll harassment she should go back to where she came from. It's nobody's fault but her own.
A troll is "an anonymous stranger", who cannot do you any harm. Sometimes whole comments sections are filled with trolls, but you are supposed to ignore all the "static", because there might be one or two good individuals to talk to. Trolls are like the common cold: they allegedly behave without discrimination, although one suspects they often have a very specific agenda.
Most importantly, absolutely nothing can be done about them.
2. The Leader
The leader leads the ideological charge. Others adopt his or her postures, positions and attitudes, although they may not always interpret these correctly or know exactly what the leader meant to say in every situation.
Types of leaders are as broad as the range of social movements. Some are feminist leaders, others leaders of skepticism or atheism. Still others are leaders of the Men's Rights Movement.
The job of the leader is to justify the moral perfection of his or her particular ideological stance. Ideally, the ideology in question must be structured like a ramrod, to destroy other ideological stances.
The dear leader has to be defended by those who love him or her very much. It is an offence for anyone to criticize one's leader, so the other team must pay heavily if they go there.
3. The Fluff
This is always a woman, who supports convention and the status quo. She will state:
"I don't really understand the terms of reference, but I think [the one who goes against the status quo] is just being silly."
She will be met by heaps of applause and adulation, for seeming to see the point, without seeing anything at all. She is, of course, modest and admittedly air-headed, so what possible ax could she have to grind?
4. The male video-maker
He likes a lot of high intensity visuals and sound effects in his videos -- he's very passionate. He commonly enjoys a motif of a cartoon woman crying. He lapses into this representation suddenly and without warning, before continuing the passage of his narrative. He demands to be taken seriously, because his videos are very noisy, quite extreme in sundry ways, but above all very, very 'logical'. You can't dispute logic and that's why the videos are intended to be understood as only an expression of binary logic -- never 'emotion'. The character of the woman crying is "emotional": she is crying to remind you of the harshness of the masculine critique, which is so strong-minded that a cartoon woman cannot take it.
5. The feminist
The feminist is likely to be called Sunbeam, or Tulip. She's a result of her parents' lax hippy ideals. She's certainly not realistic. She hugs puppies or frolics in the marigolds, but she cannot stand loud, hardheaded logic, of the sort that tells her what it really thinks. She lays down all sorts of laws for men and boys to obey, to cope with her fragile emotional state. She also tries to get power and money by playing the victim. There's nothing she likes better than this, for no reason at all.
6. The White Knight or "Mangina"
This is a male who isn't really a male. He comes to the rescue of the feminists, who are necessarily foundering on the high seas of male supremacy. This male is a betrayer of his gender and of what he really knows -- which is that men are resolute and purposeful and women who think they have the right to enter a male terrain are flakes. If women want to enter male spaces, they should do so in a quiet way, without stepping on male toes, which is hurtful. These men make it too easy for women to say what they really think, without experiencing too much suffering.
1. The Troll.
According to prevailing mythology, trolls are "static electricity" , whom we are supposed to ignore. Trolls appear on various sites and begin ordering women not to act "like a female stereotype". They assert the allegedly illogical and fallacious nature of individual women's opinions.
A troll is not capable of doing any harm, even when issuing rape threats. Trolls may even serve a developmental purpose in helping to toughen you up, in case you ever want to serve as a World War 2 fighter pilot or something similar. Trolls appear on the Internet because the Internet is a male preserve, created by males for males. If a woman ventures there and is not prepared to take troll harassment she should go back to where she came from. It's nobody's fault but her own.
A troll is "an anonymous stranger", who cannot do you any harm. Sometimes whole comments sections are filled with trolls, but you are supposed to ignore all the "static", because there might be one or two good individuals to talk to. Trolls are like the common cold: they allegedly behave without discrimination, although one suspects they often have a very specific agenda.
Most importantly, absolutely nothing can be done about them.
2. The Leader
The leader leads the ideological charge. Others adopt his or her postures, positions and attitudes, although they may not always interpret these correctly or know exactly what the leader meant to say in every situation.
Types of leaders are as broad as the range of social movements. Some are feminist leaders, others leaders of skepticism or atheism. Still others are leaders of the Men's Rights Movement.
The job of the leader is to justify the moral perfection of his or her particular ideological stance. Ideally, the ideology in question must be structured like a ramrod, to destroy other ideological stances.
The dear leader has to be defended by those who love him or her very much. It is an offence for anyone to criticize one's leader, so the other team must pay heavily if they go there.
3. The Fluff
This is always a woman, who supports convention and the status quo. She will state:
"I don't really understand the terms of reference, but I think [the one who goes against the status quo] is just being silly."
She will be met by heaps of applause and adulation, for seeming to see the point, without seeing anything at all. She is, of course, modest and admittedly air-headed, so what possible ax could she have to grind?
4. The male video-maker
He likes a lot of high intensity visuals and sound effects in his videos -- he's very passionate. He commonly enjoys a motif of a cartoon woman crying. He lapses into this representation suddenly and without warning, before continuing the passage of his narrative. He demands to be taken seriously, because his videos are very noisy, quite extreme in sundry ways, but above all very, very 'logical'. You can't dispute logic and that's why the videos are intended to be understood as only an expression of binary logic -- never 'emotion'. The character of the woman crying is "emotional": she is crying to remind you of the harshness of the masculine critique, which is so strong-minded that a cartoon woman cannot take it.
5. The feminist
The feminist is likely to be called Sunbeam, or Tulip. She's a result of her parents' lax hippy ideals. She's certainly not realistic. She hugs puppies or frolics in the marigolds, but she cannot stand loud, hardheaded logic, of the sort that tells her what it really thinks. She lays down all sorts of laws for men and boys to obey, to cope with her fragile emotional state. She also tries to get power and money by playing the victim. There's nothing she likes better than this, for no reason at all.
6. The White Knight or "Mangina"
This is a male who isn't really a male. He comes to the rescue of the feminists, who are necessarily foundering on the high seas of male supremacy. This male is a betrayer of his gender and of what he really knows -- which is that men are resolute and purposeful and women who think they have the right to enter a male terrain are flakes. If women want to enter male spaces, they should do so in a quiet way, without stepping on male toes, which is hurtful. These men make it too easy for women to say what they really think, without experiencing too much suffering.
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