ZonasArch wrote: »

Cousin!

ZeroXFF wrote: »

Osteos wrote: »

From my experience meeting and playing with lots of different people, most players have both. I am female and most of my characters are female, when I have the option I usually take advantage of it. I do have 2 male characters though simply because that is what I envisioned when making the character.


Oh and the "there's no women on the internet" joke isn't funny and just makes you a beef wit.

It's not really a joke, it's a philosophy. One of the great features that the internet provides is anonymity. By telling your gender you are reducing the anonymity you enjoy, effectively diminishing one of its great features.

Furthermore, saying you're a woman and then presenting an argument will give you more support than your actual idea deserves, because there will inevitably be some white knights who will want to show you that they are the good guys that you should let in your pants (regardless of whether they have a chance). This results in discussions being derailed, and in the early days of the internet (i.e. when this meme was created) was justifiably seen as a manipulative tactic to win an argument, because if your intent was not to manipulate, you wouldn't mention your gender, as it's irrelevant to most discussions taking place.

On top of that there is a safety concern. People (both male and female) are more likely to want to help women and more likely to trust women. So anyone posing as a woman (even if it's a man) has an easier time exploiting or defrauding someone online. So to protect yourself it's best to assume that anyone who claims to be a woman is actually a man, unless you can verify it.

In essence the main reason that this meme is singling out women, is because most internet users at the time when this meme was created were indeed men. But the essence of this meme is that what you have between your legs is irrelevant, what's relevant are your arguments.

It never meant that there are literally no women on the internet, it was just the desire to create a perfect meritocracy where factors determining social status IRL (like gender, but also wealth, family background, race, education etc) would not influence the discourse, and ideas would stand on their own merit.

Now I can of course see why you would think it makes one a "beef wit" by making that statement. You've been told since the 60's (with increasing intensity as time went by) that men are superficial and shallow, only think about one thing, and that everything men do is an assertion of male dominance over women. Hence this statement must be a territorial claim like "internet belongs to men" to be in line with everything you've been told all your life, so it's not surprising at all that you resort to outrage and insults, as you perceive it as nothing but misogyny and chauvinism. But it would do you good if you did learn about the meaning of the memes before stating your opinion on them, because then you would show the men who are actual misogynists and chauvinists that the stereotypes they hold about women are not true.

So yeah, there are no women on the internet.