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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4269 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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What would you say are the "psychological impulses" behind Wokism that "gay" and "retarded" are such effective counters to?

"Gay" captures the destructive aspects of femininity (woke is a license to exhibit those qualities): that being effeminacy/learned helplessness, weakness, vanity, and superficiality. (It's not a surprise that men don't like sharing their space with this any more than they do a woman who isn't controlling those failure modes. Tomboys are partially exempt from this in male spaces just as gay men are partially exempt from judgment on those attributes in female spaces.)

"Retarded" is merely a signal that objective results matter.

Tomboys are partially exempt from this in male spaces just as gay men are partially exempt from judgment on those attributes in female spaces

Now that's interesting, I never made the connection. What's the flip side of tolerated failure modes for men? Performative toughness, stubborn self-reliance, unrestrained competitiveness?

It doesn't seem like there's a single slur to capture that.

In British English, "cunt" has become the preferred slur for toxic masculinity taken to the extremes where a harsh slur is needed. "Douchebag" in AmE and "wanker" in BrE capture similar but subtly different aspects of toxic masculinity at a milder level.

Wokists use "bro" or "dudebro" as a slur for this kind of thing, but that usage hasn't caught on among normies. My impression was that "chud" is used this way by the very online yoof.

But the normal way to attach someone engaging in unnecessary performative masculinity is to accuse them of compensating for a small dick. I'm not sure why no dialect of English has developed a one-word term for "small dick energy"

That's just classic "toxic masculinity", with "macho" and "chauvinist" being the closest linked slurs.

They don't land as hard, maybe because of the tacit acknowledgment that many women find some degree of macho/machismo attractive, and "chauvinist" is just to... intellectual, I guess.

That's because there no tolerated failure modes for men, the disposable gender.

In this sense, I think it would be characteristically masculine behaviour that's considered unpleasant, bad, or socially maladaptive?

I feel like the obvious examples are things like heavy drinking, brawling, gambling, and the like? All the 'male' vices.

Presumably 'gay' is a useful shorthand that connotes effeminacy, weakness, vanity, and superficiality? Something along those lines?

Ah, that's exactly what ThisIsSin said as well -- and the connection to Woke being that woke allows for the expression of these.

I've thought about trying to articulate "gay" as a pejorative with "behavior that's gone so far up it's own ass it's forgotten the original point of doing the behavior." Which is nothing to do with men who have sex with men.

Under this metric, a peackock's tail, and being part of a magic superhero team who only chases after one guy, are both completely gay.

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