Anger in the abstract. Ain’t it beautiful? [Title mine] Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

A white, man-splaining tone policing reply guy.

Georgia NeSmith
2 min readMar 19, 2020

A perfect, stereotypical white male response. No doubt, Marley, you’ve seen tons of responses that fit into the reply guy constellation.

That’s another label, of course, but labels aren’t necessarily bad things. Another word for label is category, a useful linguistic choice when one attempts to name a truth. Properly used only when it enables better understanding, to be discarded in situations where it is no longer useful.

E.g., “anger” is a label for a certain type of emotion. Anger is not necessarily a negative emotion, however. As you know, anger against injustice is a positive thing to have. The category “Reply Guy” names a type of social media respondent specifically [usually]a man purporting to help a woman be more effective.

[See Know Your Meme for explanations of each type.]

…And off I go again, drawing the argument into a related but nonetheless tangential space, now moved to my own page if you care to read it.

😈 😀 🤪 🤩 😈 😀 🤪 🤩 😈 😀 🤪 🤩 😈 😀 🤪 🤩 😈

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Georgia NeSmith
Georgia NeSmith

Written by Georgia NeSmith

Retired professor, feminist, writer, photographer, activist, grandmother of 5, overall Wise Woman. Phd UIA School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994.

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