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Comment by Arceliapfa | Hacker News Reader

If you look hard enough, anything can offend you.

What is your improved description for the remark describing girls as "not overly ugly or attractive yet still wanted to be the center of attention" besides casually misogynist? I am genuinely curious. Since when does a (seemingly) objective description of a girl's attractiveness give them the social blessing to behave a certain way? I'm not offended; I'm bored with the laziness of the analogy.

"They often had many good qualities, but they didn’t think so. These girls felt they have nothing better to offer so they went with outlandish styles to attract attention." That doesn't seem misogynistic. It seems like he's describing their own bad judgement, not his.

Because it's insinuating those girls actually feel that way and are acting out because of it, instead of assuming they're confident enough to make these decisions because they actually want to. If every girl/person you see with unconventional style is presumed to be weak because you think they're doing it for attention, that's discrimination with a hint of ego for not having to 'stoop' to those tactics.

This is similar to throwing goth kids under the bus for obviously all being from broken homes, worshiping the devil and wanting to shoot up their schools. Why do we treat people coming out of their shell and avoiding the status quo as weakness instead of strength?

"Insinuating"? You just assume, without justification, that he's making those judgements at a distance and doesn't know those people personally. You've got the argument backwards: he's not claiming that everyone with "unconventional style" has low self-esteem and is looking for attention. He's observing that attention-seeking people with low self-esteem do flashy things to get attention.

I know a goth girl (real goth not poser goth, for those who care) and she told me that she dresses defensively because she gets bullied a lot. That's not an assumption or judgement by me, that's what she told me. I also know a former Wiccan girl from a broken home, and a satanist who has anger management issues and a drug problem. That does not generalize to all goth/Wiccan/satanist people but that doesn't mean it never happens.

May do flashy things to get attention, and that's not even positive attention as evidenced by this post, so at the end of the day they must do it for themselves because it'd be easier not to do it at all. I don't know what makes someone a 'poser' and someone 'legit'; what legitimizes their existence isn't appearance, what they practice or what they've been through. It's still a blanket statement of assumptions that doesn't need to be perpetuated.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/28/101-being-offende...

Not white, but thanks for dismissing my comment with a link.

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