@discoursedrome (I can’t seem to tag you for some reason)
About your post here-
I think that you’re only partially correct when you say that people clearly actually hate others for superficial traits, then cover it up by appealing to real reasons.
This is because I used to do that thing where you actually hate someone because they’re terrible, but you actually make fun of them for completely facile traits. The most prominent example would probably have been Trump.
People hate Trump because he’s a racist, misogynist, xenophobic probable-rapist. But that’s actually not very funny- not for very long. And it makes you upset when you remember that he’s actually a terrible person. It gets old after a while, too, going on and on about the same damn aggravating traits over and over.
So instead, people start to focus on superficial things, like, say, his orange face and weirdly corn-like hair, because those are easy to joke about. They’re funny. They’re snark-worthy.
Also, excepting him from the usual rules (”don’t make fun of people for their appearances”, “don’t be gratuitously mean about people”) makes you feel transgressive. It emphasizes in itself “this guy is a really shitty person, a really unusually shitty person”. It’s more Othering than simply criticizing his ideas. All of these factors combine to make it funnier.
It’s unfortunate that what counts as a funny, snark-worthy attributes are typically socially constructed, and thus tend to be unfairly stigmatized.
And so now from the outside it looks like you hate Trump because he is fat and has a weird sounding voice.
The other thing you notice here is that when challenged on their hatred of superficial, stigmatized features, people will react as though you’re challenging them on their serious reasons. This is for a number of reasons. It could be because they see the hatred of superficial features as legitimized by the evilness proven by the serious reasons. It could be because, by challenging them, you’re a soldier for the other side.
And it could be because you’re disturbing their fun.
In the post you quoted, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on. I think that your theory about stereotypes leading to associations of the superficial features with the serious badthings is pretty good. However, I would guess that the commentors truly think that “this guy is a misogynist” legitimizes making a meme out of his face to make fun of him. I would also hazard that, before they had good evidence of misogyny, they pattern-matched him, through stereotyping, to the misogynist men they’ve encountered elsewhere (”he reminds me of the nerd boys I knew in high school who were always looking down their noses at me”).
I also want to point out that it’s legitimately possible that people know supercilious, arrogant nerd boys who were perceived to have had or who actually had higher status than them. This is a possibility that’s sadly neglected in a lot of these discussions, and I think it ought to be mentioned more. Nerd boys do not have a monopoly on having been bullied, having been unpopular, etc.; I know for a fact that many people {who stereotype and are vicious towards others} were, themselves, unpopular and bullied for things like being queer, being Japanese, et cetera.
This doesn’t make it better for them to stereotype and mock others, but it’s certainly worth noting.
(This is also a thing I’ve written about earlier, in that post about stereotypes that I know you’ve already read but which I’m linking for others.)
discoursedrome says-
I think you can't @ ppl who are set ungoogleable? It's weird. Anyhow yeah this is all v. true. My read on the original post was that it wasn't a specific person, just a random image being used as a joke and riffed on. If it was a specific person who's actually bad that would soften it somewhat, though I think the core issues are still there.
It's true that a lot of the people doing this stuff are doing it becuase they've been seriously wronged by people in the group. It's just that if you're intentionally careless at how you delineate that group, attacks against it are going to have a lot of collateral damage, and if people are /consistantly/ careless in a specific way it seems indicative of a broader problem with tribal identification.
Oh, wow. I think your read is correct and mine is wrong; disregard some of what I’ve said in that case. It didn’t occur to me that that could be the case.
And yes, I definitely agree that it’s bad to be careless about delineating groups. It is bad to make jokes tarring given groups with the same brush and connecting actually-fine traits with actually-bad traits, and even worse to do this based off the actually-fine traits alone.
If it wasn’t clear here, my point here is to say that, even if you know that someone is a misogynist, or they are really despicable, you (general) shouldn’t Other them to the point where you’re making fun of them for actually-fine traits, even if it feels really funny and transgressive and Accurate.
(Side note: I once read about the Star Wars Kid from the memes. He was fairly badly affected by people discussing his video and ended up moving away from his school due to it. This is not really relevant, except that I’m worried that this might be the thing happening here. But I don’t have much actual support for that.)