How Capcom’s fighting game reality show turned ugly | Hacker News Reader

How Capcom’s fighting game reality show turned ugly

penny-arcade.com

19 pointsvetler8 comments

"How dare people hate me for being a complete cunt!!"

That said, context is everything - once back in the days of Counter-Strike, I pissed off a female clan member because I called her an "awp whore". In CS, this is not a gendered insult, and I was merely joking around as I would with someone who was male (it's a generic term for someone who uses a specific sniper rifle too much). She chose to find that as personally offensive, and despite me apologising and explaining, she left the clan. It left me feeling horrible despite just treating a woman as an equal. I mean it's a long shot from what these people are doing, which is gendered and nasty, of course.

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There's a class of "X whore" insults floating around. For example, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=attention%20w....

The `whore' part refers to doing something regretable in exchange for personal gain, no gender implied. Here `awp whore' would refer to a player using http://counterstrike.wikia.com/wiki/Magnum_Sniper_Rifle predominantly, even in cases it made little sense.

Due to overwhelming power of this weapon, any hit kills instantly. That's a bother to other players, and may tilt game balance.

This has not been my experience, though I have never put much thought into it. In almost all of the gaming communities I've come into contact with, "X whore" is not gendered and not particularly insulting. It is used to refer to someone who employs X more than is expected, whether or not it is detrimental to the team.

I don't believe I usually say this, but I will be sure not to now.

That you would apply it to men to belittle them, as well as to women, doesn't change that it's deploying a term used to degrade women in order to degrade others.

This seems like some really contorted logic. You're saying that using a term on a man doesn't change the fact that it's a term used to degrade women? Sure, that's true. But if it is being applied to men, it is also a term to degrade men, at which point it is hardly gendered.

You might be a little more right if we were talking about a word that is inherently related to women and only women, but both women and men may be considered whores in the original meaning of the word.

Have you ever heard the "N-word" applied to white people? I personally have only ever heard white people use it to label other white people. By your untortured logic, can we declare it to be free of racial context? After all, inherently that word derives from the word for black, and anything can be black -- people, bananas, a tshirt, anything it's not inherently a statement of race.

I'm imagining that you wrote the feeble defense contained in your second paragraph only after you finished complaining about how men can be whores. You probably realized the very obvious flaw, but like many men, couldn't bring yourself to admit that actually, men who whore around (in the sexual sense) are considered studly. More importantly, they are enviable -- I know of no promiscuous men who became that way by considering sexually active women to be whores. Men who constantly are rejected, on the other hand, will sometimes descend into such resentment.

I have no interest in discussing this with someone whose main form of rhetoric appears to be arrogance and condescension.

In certain parts of Ireland, calling someone a "cute whore/hoor" is actually something of a sideways complement, and is usually applied to men:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cute_hoor

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