Just as the post-2000 period revealed what strangers on the internet looked like, the 2010s and its explosion of “shareable” content clued us in to those people’s ideologies, warts and all. OkCupid, Tinder and other dating services provided staggering evidence of this character, who in flirtatious correspondence will pull a quick 180º upon even the most polite rejection, trading a pretentious air of old-world chivalry for vile and graphic attacks, sometimes continuing to insist that the woman is missing out on a genuinely sensitive, empathetic, and gracious partner. A close cousin of the neckbeard, the “Nice Guy,” drew mockery on Reddit and Tumblr, further refining the shared stereotype of an inept, unattractive manchild who imagines himself the height of gentlemanly sophistication and wit - a common trope has him tipping his fedora to a woman and saying “M’lady” - but harbors deep-seated misogynist resentment that often erupts in spectacularly un-self-aware fashion. ?????? ??????? August 11, 2017īy the end of the aughts, Reddit was a crucial hub for the neckbeards and their critics alike, hosting stories of encounters with neckbeards, photos of their unsanitary living spaces and screenshots of their cringiest posts on social platforms. According to this incarnation of the concept, a neckbeard needn’t wear the token scruff - though if you want to try it out, we recommend the fantastic razors from MEL’s funder, Dollar Shave Club. The neckbeard went on to acquire a host of accessories, including fedoras, strident atheism, sword collections, Guy Fawkes masks, metal jewelry and pretty much any Hot Topic item a middle schooler might admire. Know Your Meme cites a pivotal Urban Dictionary definition, submitted in 2005, that connects the archetype of the unwashed nerd to “hobbies such as card gaming, video gaming, anime,” etc. Calling someone a neckbeard these days doesn’t just mean you find them visually repulsive - it conjures an entire personality.
Within a few short years, however, “neckbeard” had accrued meaning beyond its aesthetic commentary. Wimpy kid has a literal neckbeard /4lXdSVFcKD It is probably mistaken by the man who bears it for casual virility, untamed animal appeal. The neckbeard is the ugly sum of a crude cost-benefit analysis. I can confirm that shaving this region, especially the Adam’s apple, is rather unpleasant, and that as my facial hair developed, the initial excitement gave way to the annoyance of managing it. The assumption is that a contemporary neckbeard arises from a dereliction of grooming and hygiene, or more plainly, laziness. The neckbeard itself doesn’t seem to be deliberate, as with the religiously imposed “Shenandoah” beard of Amish men, which omits the mustache for its association with Civil War armies, or the bushy undersprouting worn by Henry David Thoreau, who claimed it warded off “ throat colds.” The neckbeard, then, would be the hallmark of a prototypical online geek: Male, of course, but also rather greasy and unkempt, since most of his interactions are virtual. This was a moment at which many internet acquaintances were seeing each other for the first time - and it wasn’t always a pretty sight. Already we’d begun the exodus from a chat-based world of anonymizing screen names to friend networks like MySpace (which launched the same month as that neckbeard thread), platforms that touted customized pages with profile photos. First appearing in 2003 on the Wackbag Forums, where dudes debated whether the “style” was in any way alluring or simply hideous, the term lodged neatly into the lexicon, a sorely necessary descriptor for the burgeoning Web 2.0 era. This and similar questions swirled in my brain when I puzzled over the arrival of “neckbeard” as an internet-age pejorative. "I said, 'Michelle, I really want to grow some neckbeard.' She said, 'No, absolutely not. In retrospect, this should have been the obvious call: What good is a beard if it doesn’t lend definition to the jaw and frame your features with suave precision? Somehow it never occurred to me that weird streaks of hair coursing down from chin to collarbone greatly detracted from the robust beard on my face - until my girlfriend asked if I couldn’t shave the damn stuff. It should be embarrassing to admit this, but since I’ve debased myself online almost daily since the turn of the millennium, I won’t hesitate to tell you that I suffered from neckbeard past the age of 30.