Meet 'Guy on the Internet,' Champion of the Dullards
Latest“Guy On The Internet” is a term we came up with to describe a certain sort of person you meet online (maybe it’s a guy, maybe a woman, whatever). You have no idea who they are or what they’re like in real life; that doesn’t really matter. Online, they behave exactly as the Internet tells them to behave.
There are a lot of these people. Recently, as you may have seen, a feminist blogger/video gamer named Anita Sarkeesian started work on a project examining the representation, and portrayal, of women in the world of gaming. Anyone who’s played many video games lately knows that this culture isn’t quite an egalitarian Utopia. Sometimes the misogyny is sneaky and casual, and sometimes it’s almost unbelievably flagrant, but it’s perpetuated on an institutional level.
So somebody wants to examine this critically. Not militantly, not threateningly, not like she’s trying to break into your house and steal your video games. Just critically. And holy shit, did this bring out a clone army of Guys On The Internet. They harassed Sarkeesian, insulted her, and repeated “go back to the kitchen, go make me a sandwich” with the same rote, unthinking determination you might observe in the guy selling “mystical life stones” in a mall kiosk. They’ll balance your qi! At least that guy isn’t trying to take your happiness and self-esteem, just your money.

Humans have fallen for this gag for thousands of years: they’re tricked into thinking they’re fighting for a revolution, only to do and say the same old shit, the shit that’s shackled humanity ever since we decided to start living next to one another. They see a wave of people saying, “make me a sandwich, bitch,” and holy shit do they want to belong to this party. Holy shit do they want to buttress the status quo that has stood firm for eons before they ever came along, and totally does not need their help at all.
I saw this last Saturday, when ESPN’s Twitter account acknowledged the 40-year anniversary of Title IX, an amendment that works to guarantee girls the opportunity to play sports. I’m having difficulty painting Title IX in a light that isn’t fair and egalitarian — or, at the very worst, from some worldview that isn’t mine, benign — and after reading through the waves upon waves of misogynist junk that followed on Twitter, I have a lot of trouble believing that the authors of said junk had an actual, considered opinion on the matter either.
It was like they were sneezing or something. Like it was a reflexive, unthinking act to pop in and type 10 words of bigotry, many of which were paraphrases of the same three things: “make me a sandwich,” “get in the kitchen,” “barefoot and pregnant.”
This is the trademark of the mediocre, the unthinking among us. These people are the kid you knew in high school who wouldn’t — maybe couldn’t — stop making the same terrible Austin Powers impressions. Every day he’d sit down at the cafeteria and look down at his rectangular pizza and bellow a, “GET IN MAH BELLAH,” years after everyone else stopped giving a shit. But he never stopped. It was what he knew.
That, in itself, is not a sin. Maybe that person isn’t cut out for comedy or observational wit. Maybe he’s instead really good at designing bridges, or writing dramatic fiction, or building custom motorcycles, or any other thing. And that is totally fine.