So, if you follow me on Instagram, you may or may not have noticed something with my bio. If you don’t, you can find me @_nathan.dev, but my bio there isn’t the most conventional, especially for someone promoting themselves as a WordPress and website developer.
No, it’s not the “ice cream lover” bit. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a strong love affair with ice cream, and I am not ashamed to admit it. Give me a tub of that sweet frozen dairy stuff and you can pretty much bend me to your will. But that’s not the bit that is questionable, especially for a profile that I share as part of my professional work. It’s this:
Why on earth would I put “Simp Lord™ and Empathetic Warrior™ collecting Chivalry Points™” on my profile?
So, if you have been following me lately, you’ll have seen stories ranting about how some men are complete and utter cockwombles with less than a single fully functioning brain cell between us. This is especially true when talking about abuse, and even more when talking about abuse perpetrated against women. I’ve talked about how much I hate “Not All Men”, and I’ve talked about how much I think we should not stay silent. I have spent so long being silent myself and I cannot continue to do so in good conscience. Before, I would at least make a token effort to show support for those who had been abused even if I was quiet other times, so I can’t understand why others stay quiet all the time. It fosters an environment where abusers feel they can get away with their attrocious behaviour. By saying nothing, you’re effectively siding with the abuser, because you’re not challenging their behaviour and forcing them to behave differently.
So now I’m speaking up more. And that’s where the names have come from.
Some months ago, I was told about a guy who ran a repository on GitHub for a documentation tool. On the landing page, it showed that they was comparing documentation to sex. Specifically, they were using this quote:
But for some people – especially women – a bad sexual experience is being raped. While I can understand the quote – bad documentation is better than no documentation – in this format, it dismisses the trauma that is faced by survivors of rape and minimises the effects of rape altogether. The sentiment very much comes from a man, as it is often from men that one would hear how “bad sex is better than nothing”, which also goes towards the misogyny of the comment.
Rather than tackle this and try to understand what was being suggested, the owner of the repository called those who complained “Empathetic Warriors” and ignored requests to change the quote to be more sensitive to those who would look at this and see a comparison to rape. I even suggested alternatives that could have easily been used to replace it. One was by a Mr Ed Yourdon, and goes:
Actually, I lied – if you were to visit the repo landing page and scroll right down to the bottom, you would find that quote there. Proof that the first quote wasn’t even needed. Has it been removed? At the time of writing, no it has not. Will it be removed? Probably not. Am I a proud “Empathetic Warrior”? Why do you think I put it in my bio?
The other two are related to the same post. I follow someone on Instagram who has posted more meme-based content than anything really substantial. One day a few weeks ago, she posted a series of screenshots of people threatening her with rape and degrading her based on sexual innuendo and insults. As I said, I’ve been speaking up a lot more now, so I commented how she was not to blame and how anyone who called out “Not All Men” was a part of the problem. So of course, some guys got so offended and came after me.
By the way, if you do read this and decide to come after me for defending women who are attacked in this way, bring it on.
Anyway, the first was a guy who suggested I was trying to collect “chivalry points” by defending women who effectively bring it upon themselves by daring to show more than an ankle of skin. Others joined in and ultimately failed, but the idea that defending women was somehow a mechanism to collect points that could be exchanged for something like some kind of arcade was laughable. So laughable, I had to add it to my bio.
A couple of weeks and multiple entirely unrelated posts later, I received another comment from a guy declaring me as the Simp Lord and announcing his discovery. For reference, Urban Dictionary lists quite a few definitions of being a “simp” as ostensibly being overly submissive to a woman, by bowing to a woman and not standing up for themselves. It talks of them being overly desperate for the attentions of the woman, even when she expresses disinterest in him, regardless of her usual conduct. Some definitions acknowledge that it is often misused as someone who shows basic decency to women. This has been the case each time I have been called a “simp”, and it always seems to have been used when I have called out men for their bad behaviour. As was the case here.
Am I right to include these on my profile? Probably not. This is arguably taunting them more and acting in an incredibly petulant way.
Do I care? Definitely not. I’ve been quiet too often. This shit needs to be called out. Maybe I will get nowhere by doing so, but I cannot stay quiet and sleep peacefully.
What do you think? Should I remove it? Should I be proud of it? Should I use it in more places? Should I include other things? Scroll down to the comments and let’s discuss.