7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Crimson847 » Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:07 pm

I'm not sure how people seem to be getting from "Wong was sexist at this point in his life" to "Wong is advocating sexism and entitlement".

It seems like the same problem I saw in the comments of the How Modern Men Are Trained To Hate Women article--people see someone describing a mindset and trying to show people what it's like from the inside, and some of those people respond by acting like he's endorsing that mindset with no apparent evidence besides personal indignation. In other words, the same attitude I hear from hardcore drug warriors when discussing addiction, or from hardcore law-and-order types when discussing causes of crime: if you try to humanize the devil and explain why he acts the way he does, clearly you must be on his side.



That aside, I can relate to a lot of what he says in the article. A few pieces were different, though.

The truly popular kids at my school (like, the ones who were elected Prom King and Queen) weren't particularly cruel at all in my experience. I knew a few of them, and they'd always been cool to me and the people I knew. Most of the bullying I got (or heard about others getting) came from wannabes; people who were desperate to break into the popular clique but never quite made it. So I never got the impression that cruelty was being rewarded much--when I looked at the people who bullied me, I couldn't help noticing that a lot of them were really sad people, not people I felt much desire to be like. This gave me the impression early on that assholes are more appealing to people than socially awkward doormats, but people who are just plain enjoyable to be around will always win the popularity game.


This may have affected the nature of my violent fantasies as well. Like Wong, I fantasized about school shootings, but I was always in one of two roles depending on how grim I was feeling: the hero, who takes down the shooter through clever strategy; or the martyr, who bum-rushes the shooter and knocks him down with his last breath after the shooter empties his clip into him, allowing others to get the gun away. I was angry and lonely, sure, but I didn't think my classmates were bad people for wanting to be around someone who's fun rather than someone who's boring and depressing, and I didn't think the most popular kids were bad people for being more fun to be around than I was. Hell, I liked most of the people I knew at school, including the popular kids, and I wanted them to like me too, but it hardly ever seemed to work out that way at the time no matter what I tried.

At the same time, I was close enough to the "fuck the world" mindset Wong describes to be able to see it without needing a telescope, so to speak. A lot of the people I knew were that way, and I crossed over into that kind of thinking occasionally...it was something I consciously rejected, and I felt the need to reject it in the first place because it was a very real presence in my life and the risk of succumbing to it felt very real. So overall, even the parts of the article that I didn't personally identify with were very, very familiar.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Twistappel » Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:47 pm

It's true in our friends, sexual partners, and idols. You think Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock is at his sexiest when he's delivering withering insults to everyone around him -- that's when you most want to bang him or be him. It's the same with Tony Stark and the same with Dr. House. All of our heroes don't just win; they also make everyone else look foolish in the process, including their allies. It's attractive because, deep down, you want to be that one person who's not in their line of fire and to have that cruel strength on your side, working for you.

I've tried not to jump on the Wong-bashing* bandwagon too enthusiastically, but if he's just going to softball 'em in like that, the bitch in me has to ask: If nasty people are so popular, why he doesn't he have more friends?

Extended Rant
Also, I can't help but notice that the examples he has given for his cruelty = popularity theory are all fictional characters who, let's face it, act as a sort of wish fulfilment: We enjoy watching them because they say the things we could never get away with. They would all be deeply unpleasant to be around in real life.

Even in their fictional universes, a they are hardly popular. House and Sherlock could probably count the people willing to put up with them for any length of time on one hand. While Stark is at first glance, more popular, most of his so-called "friends" only put up with him because he is filthy, stinking rich.

The closest he can come to a real-life example is kids who were probably using alcohol and bravado to mask their own awkwardness

Like Crimson, I can totally relate to a lot of what he's saying (high school was pure hell for me), but seriously, the guy could use a healthy dose of perspective.


* Phrasing.
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Tesseracts » Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:53 pm

I don't think he is advocating sexism. I think he's fully aware sexism is wrong and bad and he's very much against it. What bothers me is he is constantly preaching feminism despite the fact that he seems to lack empathy for the female point of view. It's irritating to see somebody acting like an authority on a subject they don't understand and it comes across as hypocrisy. Sometimes, the things people are so vehemently against are the faults they have in themselves. For example, my father often complains bitterly about how stupid gambling is and gets upset if I buy a single lottery ticket, but he lacks self control in his own risky investments. Wong insta bans anyone who says anything slightly positive about gamergate and often heaps vitriol on MRAs, yet he wrote a forum post comparing rape to walking on broken glass.

The point of this isn't to drag his name through the mud or argue he's a bad person. I'm trying to clarify what I find so unconvincing about his perspective. I don't take any issue with people who describe the mind set of a sexist, but I take issue with people who are trying to give me advice about things they don't get. Cracked has devoted a lot of time into 1) assuming that because I'm a cracked reader I'm a sexist male 2) telling me to not be a sexist male.
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 12:22 am

Sister Morphine wrote:I've tried not to jump on the Wong-bashing* bandwagon too enthusiastically, but if he's just going to softball 'em in like that, the bitch in me has to ask: If nasty people are so popular, why he doesn't he have more friends?


To be fair, he does have thousands of fans, which is more than a lot of his readers probably have.

Of course, there's some irony to be mined from that argument as well.

Also, I can't help but notice that the examples he has given for his cruelty = popularity theory are all fictional characters who, let's face it, act as a sort of wish fulfilment: We enjoy watching them because they say the things we could never get away with. They would all be deeply unpleasant to be around in real life.

Even in their fictional universes, a they are hardly popular. House and Sherlock could probably count the people willing to put up with them for any length of time on one hand. While Stark is at first glance, more popular, most of his so-called "friends" only put up with him because he is filthy, stinking rich.


I call it the Maher-O'Reilly effect: watching someone be an asshole to someone else can be fun in a schadenfreude-ish sort of way, but it's less amusing when you're on the receiving end. This is why Ted Cruz has several endorsements from state officials and House members, but none from the Senate where people have to work with him.

Personally, I don't think being loved from a distance and hated up close is a great way to live. But some people seem to either not realize that this is the usual result of advanced-level dickotry (or bitchotry if you like), or they realize that but they don't see a better alternative.


Tesseracts wrote:I don't think he is advocating sexism. I think he's fully aware sexism is wrong and bad and he's very much against it. What bothers me is he is constantly preaching feminism despite the fact that he seems to lack empathy for the female point of view. It's irritating to see somebody acting like an authority on a subject they don't understand and it comes across as hypocrisy. Sometimes, the things people are so vehemently against are the faults they have in themselves. For example, my father often complains bitterly about how stupid gambling is and gets upset if I buy a single lottery ticket, but he lacks self control in his own risky investments. Wong insta bans anyone who says anything slightly positive about gamergate and often heaps vitriol on MRAs, yet he wrote a forum post comparing rape to walking on broken glass.


I always felt that the Shadow was one of the more useful ideas that came out of Jungian psychology. Translated from the language of bullshit prescientific psychobabble, the basic idea is that there are certain psychological traits people have that they are not consciously aware of. These traits are usually negative, but can sometimes be positive as well, which is correlated with low self-esteem. Even though those traits are unconscious, they are still a part of the personality, and if anything affect the person's judgment even more thanks to their invisibility. A known flaw can be accounted for and corrected, and a known strength can be recognized and taken advantage of. Neither can happen if the trait is unknown. Negative traits fester in the dark, while positive ones go largely to waste.

One effect of this is that, for reasons they don't understand, the person gravitates toward certain types of people in relationships, whether social relationships like friendship or instrumental relationships like a business partnership. "I'm not like that, so why do I keep running into people like this?", they might wonder. One possible explanation in such situations is that the unconscious preference everyone has for people who are "like me" is attracting such people to them and vice versa, but they don't recognize that this is happening because they don't realize they have that particular trait.

Another effect is that the trait is often exaggerated in their assessments of others. For instance, if I'm an unusually kind, sweet person who doesn't realize that I'm unusually kind and sweet, I'm more likely to interpret people being nice to me as a sign of their inherent kindness, ignoring the effect my own behavior has on them (people tend to reciprocate both good and bad treatment, after all). Likewise, if I'm an abrasive asshole who doesn't realize it, I'm likely to interpret other people's frostiness and hostility as a sign that they are abrasive assholes, again discounting the effect of my own behavior. Unsurprisingly, outsize emotional reactions to seeing signs of the trait in other people are common.

The point of this isn't to drag his name through the mud or argue he's a bad person. I'm trying to clarify what I find so unconvincing about his perspective. I don't take any issue with people who describe the mind set of a sexist, but I take issue with people who are trying to give me advice about things they don't get. Cracked has devoted a lot of time into 1) assuming that because I'm a cracked reader I'm a sexist male 2) telling me to not be a sexist male.


Oh, I think they know their readers are mostly female and feminist-aligned. They're the ones staring the analytics in the face, after all. I think they've been telling sexist men to stop being sexist for the same reason they published those articles telling rich people to stop being out of touch. They're not talking to the sexist men, just like they weren't talking to the rich folks--Wong even made a couple jokes in his "Things Rich People Need To Stop Saying" article about how nobody that he's ostensibly talking to in the article is probably reading it. What these articles are is validation for their readers, who are generally young female college students with decidedly liberal and anti-establishment politics. Set up a straw man in the shape of the enemy, knock it down, wait for applause.
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Last edited by Crimson847 on Fri Feb 05, 2016 12:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Feb 05, 2016 12:29 am

Most of their readers are men and their content is aimed at the male demographic.
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 12:36 am

You sure about that?

Alexa.jpg
Alexa.jpg (43.05 KiB) Viewed 2724 times


http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cracked.com
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Taluun » Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:07 am

Crimson847 wrote:You sure about that?

Alexa.jpg


http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cracked.com


So looking at that graph that doesn't show more females visit the site then males. It shows that more females visit the site than the average website.

It looks like Males are at roughly at 50% and females are at 150%. If say 40 males visit the average website and only 10 females then you would get 20 males visit cracked and 15 females visit. Just like more people visit it from school then most websites receive and more people visit it who have had no to some college experience than most websites receive. AKA its largely teenagers it seems.
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:36 am

Taluun wrote:
Crimson847 wrote:You sure about that?

Alexa.jpg


http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cracked.com


So looking at that graph that doesn't show more females visit the site then males. It shows that more females visit the site than the average website.

It looks like Males are at roughly at 50% and females are at 150%. If say 40 males visit the average website and only 10 females then you would get 20 males visit cracked and 15 females visit.


Both genders are represented about equally online; internet browsing is not a particularly gendered activity in and of itself. Certain sites or types of sites have wildly disproportionate averages, but the internet as a whole is pretty evenly split between men and women.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Taluun » Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:42 am

So those 2 links together then mean cracked's readers are predominantly female.
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:54 am

After looking into it some more, not necessarily. Apparently there are some issues with the representativeness of Alexa's study populations (e.g. people in certain professions are apparently overrepresented) that could create a gender bias in their results, though I'm not seeing anything on that specific subject.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby DashaBlade » Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:59 am

Taluun wrote:So those 2 links together then mean cracked's readers are predominantly female.


And yet the staff is predominantly male, and they write articles assuming their audience is predominantly male. If they really do have a larger percentage of females than males reading the site, they've badly estimated their audience, is all I can say.

Personally, it's been my experience that women in general visit fewer websites than men but spend more time on those particular sites. So just saying "there are the same number of dudes as chicks online" doesn't prove that a site with more female visitors than average = more females than males.

The best way to show demographics for Cracked would be just to have them run a reader's poll, with factors like gender, age bracket, etc. I don't know how Alexa determines that it's a female visiting a site rather than a male, since my computer has no gender and it's used by more than just me, and I didn't fill out any kind of "Are you a boy or girl?" questionnaire when installing Windows. Or how Alexa knows my educational level or how much time I spend on the site as compared to how much time I just have a browser tab open to the site.
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 2:54 am

DashaBlade wrote:And yet the staff is predominantly male, and they write articles assuming their audience is predominantly male. If they really do have a larger percentage of females than males reading the site, they've badly estimated their audience, is all I can say.


I haven't really been checking Cracked for the last year or so, but from what I remember of their content I'm not sure why that would be surprising. They've been going a lot lighter on the dick jokes and "Max Fightmaster" macho stuff for a while, replacing it with articles of the formula that McKinney and Sargent pioneered. Feminist media critiques seem to be primarily a female interest, and most of their other content seems fairly gender-neutral these days. Anecdotally, most of the active Cracked readers I knew before 2011 or so were young men, but these days they've mostly been young women.

As for the staff being mostly men, most of the bigshot designers in the fashion industry are men, yet most of the people who know or care whether a dress is Armani or Versace are women. Bernie Sanders is a man, yet he's leading Hillary by a wide margin among young women. There's plenty of precedent for large numbers of women flocking to products that are made or sold primarily by men if they find the product itself sufficiently appealing.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby DashaBlade » Fri Feb 05, 2016 4:02 am

Crimson847 wrote:yet most of the people who know or care whether a dress is Armani or Versace are women.


Because it's a DRESS. Most men don't wear them. And fashion designers don't market to them the way a majority of internet sites seem to market to dudes.

Crimson847 wrote:They've been going a lot lighter on the dick jokes and "Max Fightmaster" macho stuff for a while, replacing it with articles of the formula that McKinney and Sargent pioneered.


Aside from the "Interviews with people giving their own subjective viewpoint" articles, the "weirdass history" and the endless photoplasties (all of which tend to be pretty gender-balanced), most of the other articles written by the main columnists read as "Advice for all you dudes out there."

You know what I don't need, as a middle aged woman? Advice on how to not be a shitty teenaged boy. I pretty much mastered that one before I was even born.
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 9:03 am

DashaBlade wrote:Because it's a DRESS. Most men don't wear them.


And because women generally care more about and invest more time/money into fashion than men do, despite the fact that the people at the top of the clothing design industry are mostly men. Which is the point: the fact that a man created something doesn't mean women won't like it, possibly even more than other men do.

Image

Aside from the "Interviews with people giving their own subjective viewpoint" articles, the "weirdass history" and the endless photoplasties (all of which tend to be pretty gender-balanced), most of the other articles written by the main columnists read as "Advice for all you dudes out there."

You know what I don't need, as a middle aged woman? Advice on how to not be a shitty teenaged boy. I pretty much mastered that one before I was even born.


Huh. So did they get rid of McKinney and Sargent and company, or what? Last time I checked most of the articles that don't fall into the categories you mentioned were aimed at young men the same way rotten vegetables are aimed at a bad performer.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: 7 Ways You Can Accidentally Become A Social Outcast

Postby TheSyrupNugget » Fri Feb 05, 2016 11:15 am

So, today I learned that David Wong would have hated my guts in high school- I was good at sports, got votes for stuff like prom king, people by and large thought I was awesome, I didn't have much trouble getting dates, and I... had body hair, which is apparently also a "popular kid" thing, per Wong...

Honestly, I think he could stand to take some pointers from John Cheese on moving forward; So he was a clinically depressed, suicidal neckbeard (who ironically couldn't grow a neck beard) in high school, big deal. He's now a best-selling author, who had one of his books made into a movie. He's an editor for one of the most popular comedy sites on the internet. He has his own forum, full of more sycophants than there were kids in his graduating class. He's the success story that every bitter high school outcast aspires to achieve.

It's time to move past any lingering resentment over Cindy HighSchoolCrush wanting to date Brad the Quarterback instead of Jason the Really Nice Guy in 10th grade. Hanging onto that stuff didn't work out so well for Jay Gatsby, old sport.
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