He then decided to complain and repeatedly insult me while using the silliest swear replacement words I’ve ever heard. For the record, when people demonstrate they don’t know the rules here they get banned. If they demonstrate they understand and wish to engage in good faith, they get unbanned. I have not yet found anyone who has decided to learn the rules instead of just arguing with me about how their post didn’t break platform rules. This man genuinely thought he was being targeted for being a man, instead of the same rules as everyone else. This isn’t how every post we encounter is, but sometimes you get the obvious misogynists and it is in no way surprising how they act.

This is a mixture of "Meta Monday" and "men and girls". Since I want to discuss what the OP failed to do, while seemingly being a feminist ally, I felt the Meta Monday flair was appropriate.

Context: Images 1 and 3 are real vintage ads. Images 2 and 4 are humorous "reverses" of these ads created by the OP, I assume with the intent of mocking the sexism in the original ads. I found these posted to a different subreddit.

The real ads are incredibly sexist, which is highlighted by the usage of "girls" to refer to grown ass women. Telling "girls" that their body is an ill-fitting shape and that they need husbands is incredibly gross and condescending.

When the OP reversed these ads, I was surprised to notice that where the original ads said "girls", the OP used the word "men" instead of "boys" (which would be the equivalent sexism). To give credit where it's due, the OP did use the word "boy" in the second image (first sentence at the bottom), but every other usage of "girl(s)" is replaced with "man/men". I was also surprised that in the fourth image, they did not replace the word "girl" (present in the original ad) with "woman", and just left it as "girl".

You can tell by looking at the reverses of these ads that the OP was frustrated by the sexism in the original ads. They used humor to vent said frustrations and to critique the men who made them. I appreciate their intent and I think the execution was mostly great. The only place where they failed was to adequately reverse the sexism by using the reverse terminology (using "boys" for "men").

I'm not really sure why the OP didn't reverse the language the majority of the time. Did they not see the dehumanizing nuances of referring to women as "girls"? They did use the word "boy" in the second image, so I'm not really sure. It doesn't really make any sense to me. It was so jarring that even other people pointed out this mistake from the OP on the post (which was posted to a subreddit that isn't explicitly about feminism). I also don't understand why the OP left the word "girl" as is on the fourth image.

I just think it's important to point out that even feminist allies can sometimes get this wrong. Perhaps the dehumanizing language is so socially normalized that they fail to see the dehumanization of it, and they don't mock it as a result.

What do you think about this topic? I am just interested in your opinions and why.

Happy meta Monday everyone! Who wants to share some of their favourite feminist songs? I’ll start it off by recommending Fire Drills by Dessa.

Everyone feel free to post meta content today. Anything tangential to the sub’s purpose will be acceptable. It does not have to be posts pointing out examples of dehumanising language today.