Like everyone else, I got a million links to the article at The Chive and even started a serious post about it before it was revealed as a fake, which I noted here.
In the serious story I was writing, I refused to use the word ‘girl’, as a I think a young professional person of the female gender should be referred to as a ‘woman’. I was dismayed about the treatment of her by a boss who treated her in a sexist and demeaning fashion, which struck a personal nerve with me as I have a 22 year old niece who has just started her professional career and had told us that even as she tried to work in volunteer groups through college she constantly dealt with being treated like a HPOA.
So the next day the story is a hoax, everyone has a nice chuckle, the site enjoys the uptick in traffic and flow of hit-based cash and will likely see a nice overall increase in viewership for some time to come. Most blogs and web forums had some comments about the article and then moved on.
But is it REALLY over? Just this morning at a video game web forum I visit daily I checked the ‘unread threads’ and the ‘Girl Quits Job’ thread had popped back up to the top. The reason? A debate amongst some folks about whether or not she really is ‘hot’. Oh boy, welcome to the internet!
So I browsed the pages of the thread, and then looked on a couple of other sites, and found that a common thread – a seeming large number of anonymous, likely young and male, commentators were discussing her various physical attributes, rating her on a numerical scale, and so on.
Here is a sample:
– I’d tap that. But don’t tell her that.
– I’d pay her legal fees for her office sexual harassment lawsuit. If you know what I mean.
– She’s still hawt though.
– where I live she isnt even a 6… but that’s also why I live where I live.
– I put on my old reading glasses and all of a sudden I got a woody! She’s actually really f’n hot!
– Is she SURE he was talking about her? If she’s a hot piece of ass his standards are pretty ****ing low. She’s not ugly or anything, but if are a broker of, well, anything, and have a decent enough job to have an assistant, I’m pretty sure you can do WAY better than that without much effort.
– Absolutely nothing ironic about using the word “girl” to describe a woman who quits a job due to sexism.
– And I bet that hot tomato makes a mean stack of flapjacks!!!
– She’s a hot looking broad though, I wish I had a dame like that.
… and so on. That is across five different sites with a variety of interests across gaming, technology, and other general interests.
And he thing that saddened me the most – nearly ALL of them were from BEFORE this was known to be a hoax! Yes, that’s right – when confronted with a mildly amusing but supposedly pointed tale of someone who was treated badly and regarded as a piece of meat, the enlightened young men who dominate these discussion forums headed straight for the most important subject: ‘d’ya think she’s hawt’?
Every time I think we have made progress as a society, like moving to a supposed ‘post racial world’ (whatever THAT means) I am beaten over the head by small minded remarks by folks like the ones above who remind me that in many ways we haven’t come a long way baby!
So what did you think when you saw the article the first time? Did the use of ‘girl’ bother you as it did me? Did you also notice the many ‘she is hawt’ comments on the sites that linked to the article?
A few years ago I told my wife that I thought she was a beautiful woman. She stopped what she as doing and sarcastically said “Woman? Gee thanks, I guess I know I’m middle aged for sure now”. I learned my lesson and went back to referring to her as a pretty girl.
Haha! I know what you mean, Eliot! My wife claims she has three boys – two she gave birth to, one she married! 😀 At my age, I don’t mind at all!
“And he thing that saddened me the most – nearly ALL of them were from BEFORE this was known to be a hoax! ”
Maybe you’re a little more likely to believe stuff on the internet. I was pretty sure that this was a hoax from the get go. Not everyone needs to be told something is a hoax before they believe it to be one. I made my facetious comment on that site knowing it wouldn’t be real. Simple really. Nothing to be sad about.
I guess I have a few points that come to mind after reading this:
1) We’re on the internet. Some people on the internet take a perverse joy in being an anonymous annoyance. I’m willing to bet most of the crass comments we come across would never be spoken out loud by that person, face to face. This has always been the case, and always will be true. In days gone by people like this used to be the ones who knocked your school books into the mud or stole your lunch money. In modern times they just sit behind a keyboard and stir up trouble.
2) I agree with Elliot on this one; saying ‘girl’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I supposed it depends on context and timing. It doesn’t have such an instant negative connotation as the word “boy”, for example, which used to be (and probably still is) used as a racial slur. I call my own girlfriend a “beautiful girl”, all the time as well, and she loves it.
3) Regarding her as a “piece of meat”; lets face it, the whole point of the story was the fact that she ‘might’ have been hired just based on her looks, and her boss thought she was a so-called “HPOA”. After knowing those key points of the plot, of course you are going to take a second look and judge for yourself whether or not you think that could have been possible. And lets face it, the fact that she popped out in a skin tight wife-beater and short-shorts in the final shots — even if it was done in an ironic, sardonic way — doesn’t dissuade people from thinking of her in terms of her looks, in fact it forces the reader to consider her in terms of her outward appearance.
If you read between the lines, that last frame, “Something tells me I’ll be just fine :)” is a not-so-subtle jab, pretty much saying “Look at me. Just LOOK at me. Who in their right mind is going to let this go to waste? I’m going to have 1,000 people snapping me up in a split-second. I’m going to be JUST fine.”
Of course it was fake, so none of it really matters.