Long ago I remember an argument in favor of rule #30 “There are no girls on the internet” which I will paraphrase:
The internet gives anonymity and if you have something of value to say, it should be able to stand on its own regardless of one’s weight, sex, religion, preferences, location or such. If you have to chime in that you are a girl, then you are either FBI (see rule 29) or looking for attention, but with nothing valuable to add. If you have nothing to add, then we go to rule 31 (show pics of your tits or get out).
Now, the reality is that such sentiment is sexist and ugly, but there is a general truth to the concept of an idea standing on its own merits regardless of source. Current social pressures lead to the behavior in question in that we’ve been somewhat conditioned to think that a) computers are for boys (this has become far less of a stereotype since smartphones became a thing), and b) veganism is unmanly/stupid (I don’t understand why this still has traction, either, given Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Lewis, and a bunch of butch people are vegan).
rules of the internet (some NSFW)
SPOILER : 24-34
These are from an older version on archive.org:
- Every repost it always a repost of a repost
- Relation to the original topic decreases with every single post
- Any topic can easily be turned into something totally unrelated
- Always question a person’s sexual prefrences without any real reason
- Always question a person’s gender - just incase it’s really a man
- In the internet all girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents
- There are no girls on the internet
- TITS or GTFO - the choice is yours
- You must have pictures to prove your statements
- Lurk more - it’s never enough
- There is porn of it, no exceptions
Interesting. The couple of vegans I have known in real life have been sickly-looking young men, so that’s what I envision.
When I hear ‘vegan’, the picture that comes to mind is of a fit man.
The politically correct bien-pensants always fail to recognize that stereotyping is a form of inductive reasoning. If you see something repeatedly, but not necessarily without fail, you form an opinion, which is layered with a degree of truth. A subset of the human race, based on ethnicity, inclination, or geography, will spring to mind after reading each of the following words: financier, migrant worker, male flight attendant, NASCAR driver, sprinter.
I’m sure most of us immediately conjured similar images. Yes, it is unfair to impose a group characteristic onto an individual, but we did so nonetheless. To belabor the obvious, each of us is an individual, not a group. When the stereotype is proven fallacious for an individual, move on.
We’re not confused about why we do it. We’re aware that doing it has negative outcomes.
No amount of prolix explanation excuses even the act of stereotyping.
It may be impossible to avoid stereotyping entirely which is why people practice not doing it. You call this “politically correct”. I call it “behaving decently”.
No amount of prolix explanation excuses even the act of stereotyping.
It depends on why and how you use stereotypes.
Prejudice only properly refers to judgments formed without consideration of the available information.
Prejudging is legitimate when we do not have all the relevant facts of an object or subject, having to resort to inductive reasoning in order to try to induce and predict its individual characteristics.
It’s all about trying to make new information about someone or something, so we can economize information.
Men aged 25-45 account for something like half of all beef eaten in America. So if you’re not gonna eat meat you’re more likely to be a woman.
Nah, or you’re a vegan on the internet, I assume you’re a religious zealot
I think it’s cuz women care alot about their diet. Vegan diets help with weight loss
It’s because when you take small sample size of “people on the internet” you’ll get either completely random set of beliefs and assumptions, or you’ll get beliefs and assumptions that you’re prejudiced to project onto the wider sample.
I don’t, but the only vegan I know is a male, so I imagine him when I hear or read the word vegan. He’s a pretty cool cat.
Easiest stereotypes to confirm? most likely that.
Because people who have never actually met a vegan before assume they’re all unwashed hippie women. They’re basically incapable of imagining a scenario where a man wouldn’t want a steak dinner lol
Most vegan people actually want steak, but they consider that wish to be unreasonable and decide to actively go against it
The second epithet is rather boring, I say that as a vegan, compared to the first one: To be imagined as US-born, white, middle-class, able-bodied, suburban, slightly anxious, heterosexual, cis-male person working in an office to sustain car, house, consumer goods and vacations is just not enough to represent the fediverse’s, the internet’s capabilities.
Demographics. It may not be the case anymore but in the early days of the internet it was a majority American males. That trope has stuck around.
And statistically, vegans are roughly twice as likely to be women.
In the early days, and still now if it’s in English. At least on things like lemmy and reddit.
Nobody here old enough to remember rules 30&31 of the Internet lol?
For the first systement, yes, there are a lot of women on the Internet nowadays. But there also are a lot of men pretending to be women, and a lot of creepy men, so I’m guessing a lot of women just don’t mention it or pretend not to be one just to get some peace.
It all boils down to stereotypes, IMHO. Every time you’re making such statements as “all X are Y” when talking about groups of people based on one criterion, you’re stereotyping. Such broad generalizations are rarely useful outside humoristic tropes, and even then…
Ah, I looked for their text, didn’t see it, so I commented. Should have replied to you, but my CTRL+F missed your post.
I assume everyone on the Internet is a dog.
Woff
Son of Dog, House of Barktok.
Then who was phone?!
Everyone knows that cats rule the interwebz. That’s why there are so many cat videos. Self promotion.
