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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27512 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Well, the hand writing certainly looks like it was written by a boy…

If I see a guy using !!! in any context, I'm going to rip off his pants to see if he has any balls underneath them.

As for the handwriting, it looks pretty gender neutral to me, but I am a doctor, so maybe I have brain damage from reading notes left by consultants who should have retired after their cerebral palsy got this bad..

On a side note, I occasionally visit /r/GoodNotes, a sub for discussion regarding said note taking software which I rely on heavily myself, even if I'm using the obsolete 5 after the 6th version moved to an abominable subscription service. It's 80% women shilling Etsy sticker packs of ridiculous ornamentation and others posting "aesthetic" notes showing off their handwriting or typography. I am forced to retreat in confusion, given that my use case is purely agglomeration and annotating the terabytes of medical notes I need for yet more exams.

If I see a guy using !!! in any context, I'm going to rip off his pants to see if he has any balls underneath them.

I have to admit I have written notes with !!! to indicate important developments or other critical issues…

You're a pigeon, in your case a cloaca is entirely normal haha

Literally this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

?

Sorry, I meant to link to this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

To me, the handwriting looks practically indistinguishable from how the archetypal basic white girl would take lecture notes.

That link lands on a removed commment under a photo of Lady Gaga wearing an orrery as a hat.

Ugh for fuck's sake, thanks for letting me know.

Weirdly enough exactly the same thing happened the other week: https://www.themotte.org/post/728/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/152420?context=8#context

And that is represented by Lady gaga wearing an orrery or by some redditor saying nice hat?

Sorry, it was pointing to the wrong link for some reason. I meant to link this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

Weirdly enough exactly the same thing happened the other week: https://www.themotte.org/post/728/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/152420?context=8#context

I remember, because I was just as baffled then.

The word "home" is encircled by a love heart. I've never even met a gay man who'd do something like that.

That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about how the letters are formed and how consistent they are. Look at the note where she's calling her targets faggots. It's all over the place. The letter formation isn't consistent from one word to the next, let alone inside words that have multiple of the same letter. The letters that stick up or go below the line are often smushed to the point of looking like a completely different letter.

None of this makes it completely illegible. You can still tell what letters they are based on context. But that doesn't mean it's neat. Girl handwriting is almost always clean and consistent. Their neatest handwriting gets close to looking like a font.

This is a girls' handwriting if I've ever seen one. How bad can you be at recognizing gendered writing not to see this.

Have we considered ‘uh, she was mentally ill’? I believe inconsistent handwriting is literally a symptom of schizophrenia; it’s certainly a stereotype.

There's also some probably-subclinical things that might make someone's handwriting mediocre or average instead of excellent. Hypermobility is one of them, and trans people are disproportionately hypermobile. Same for autism and the sensory bullshit and weirdness that goes with that. Including, say, mild dyspraxia or clumsiness.

TL;DR trans, a bit more likely to be loose-jointed and a bit clumsy.

I agree a lot of women have very neat penmanship, but I wouldn't say neatness is synonymous with femininity. The handwriting in Hale's manifesto/diary/whatever looks broadly similar to this, and both look distinctly feminine to me, even though the latter example is far from consistent (although certainly neater than Hale's penmanship). It's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes penmanship look "feminine", but for me it's something to do with the broadness and roundedness of the characters: the lowercase As are much larger and rounder than I would write mine. It's referred to here as "bubble" handwriting which I think is an apt description. I think men, regardless of whether their penmanship is neat or messy, generally have a preference for narrower and straighter characters.

I shouldn't even be surprised that (like vocal pitch or gait), this is a trait that transgender people are aware is gendered and go out of their way to train themselves into doing.

While I'd hum and haw a bit about "girls and boys have different writing styles", I can see why the transgender lobby is so desperate that "biology not real". The amount of determinism there about gender roles based on biology, that there really is rigidly a gender binary and two sexes, so that your real sex will show up in the tiniest ways does mean that if you genuinely feel you are the wrong sex (because by now 'sex' and 'gender' have become interchangeable terms and people seem to have ditched 'being transgender is only about the gender you express, not your biological sex' talk) then you have to insist on advanced biology in order to argue that no, this is not a disorder or mental illness, it's totally natural, look earthworms are hermaphrodite!

Your advanced biology link leads to a thread about Lady Gaga having a funny hat. It seems to happen every time someone shares an old.reddit link. The exact same thing happened to me this morning.

Well now that's odd.

It looks like a user-side problem with the Old Reddit Redirect extension:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/164uqjg/why_do_ireddit_image_links_go_to_that_ancient/
https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/15p1ctt/why_does_clicking_any_image_on_reddit_open_the/

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issues/99

Developer says it's fixed but as suggested on the Github page I removed and reinstalled the already updated addon and still have the problem.

Uh, does it? I thought the only way it could have looked more feminine is if the Is were dotted with little hearts and the whole thing was in a Hello Kitty diary.

Most of it looks like chicken scratches. Would 100% earn “you’ll be a doctor someday” jokes. I’ve met very few women with handwriting that shit. For a guy it’s not the worst in the world, my hand writing is way worse, I’d say it’s just a bit below average for boy handwriting.

Or am I out of touch and all teenagers have garbage handwriting now?

I’ve met very few women with handwriting that shit.

Just an anecdotal aside, but my mom's handwriting has always been pretty terrible (and now that she's in her 60s, it's approaching illegibility).

Or am I out of touch and all teenagers have garbage handwriting now?

That's been my, admittedly limited, experience. For that matter, I think it was when I reached 5th grade (1992-1993) that they stopped teaching us handwriting in school and had us start submitting all reports (and generally anything not a "fill-in-the-blank" worksheet) as typed up on computer and printed out. With modern electronic communications, do they even do the "print out a physical copy on paper" step anymore?

Well most teenagers barely write anything anymore outside of sometimes at school, they type it.

Something about the clearly formed loops in letters looks very feminine to me. It's not the ultra neat penmanship you'd expect of a grade A student, but that's not who this was, this was a deeply mentally unwell girl who thought she was a boy. As far as tomboy writings go, it matches up well. The handwriting is inconsistent in places, I assume, because she was undergoing a continuous mental breakdown.

It all looks extremely legible and vaguely feminine to me. Perhaps my standards are far too low (re. legibility).

Agreed. It's nowhere near typical "good girl" handwriting (the valedictorian in my high school had handwriting that looked not just like a font, but like a cursive typewriter) but it's very legible and has some obviously feminine features (like the heart).

Also, it's not a manifesto, it's a diary or journal (or two), which strikes me as more feminine (this is obviously culturally mediated, diaries weren't always female coded, but they are now)

Look at the note where she's calling her targets faggots. The handwriting is all over the place. The letter formation isn't consistent from one word to the next, let alone inside words that have multiple of the same letter. The letters that stick up or go below the line are often smushed to the point of looking like a completely different letter.

It's legible enough to understand if you slow down a bit. You can still tell what's being said due to context. But in no way would I call it neat, especially for a girl. Girl handwriting can get almost font like. As I said, my handwriting is way worse, but I have appalling handwriting even for a guy. My handwriting is often not legible to anyone but myself unless I slow down to an impractical pace.

I only glanced at it, and I assume these entries, like many diary entries, weren't meant with a future audience in mind necessarily, but for the writer to essentially vomit thoughts onto the page. I've read many, many handwritten pages throughout my teaching career and I'd have thought girl looking at these. Not girlie girl, but female.

That doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong, it's just what I thought and still think. You have a point that some sections are far less legible.

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