If you’ve ever been on social media before, you’ve likely encountered a “Reply Guy.” These are the men who feel compelled to reply to every social media post they see, especially those written by women the Reply Guy is attracted to. There’s rarely anything extraordinary about him except that he has a lot of opinions. About everything. And he loves to share them with you. Especially if you didn’t ask him to.
While Reply Guys will go after anyone they feel needs some knowledge dropped on them, they typically target women—because mansplaining is real. A Reply Guy may come off as friendly at first, if not overly familiar to a complete stranger, but he’ll quickly descend into his egomaniacal truth: the need to dominate. This may take the form of unsolicited advice, comments, corrections, unfunny jokes, requests for you to check your facts, or just dumb memes designed to reduce you to a gender stereotype.
If you’re a woman, you probably have a number of Reply Guy followers on Twitter who regularly pop up in your mentions. Perhaps some of them have even had the audacity to slide into your DMs with winners like “hi” and “ur hot.”
What if one of these Reply Guys came out of their dingy basement studio apartments, walked into your favorite coffee shop, and asked you out? Or worse, what if you’re already dating him?
Take a deep breath. It’s easy to spot the red flags on these dudes, especially if they’re in front of your face rather than behind usernames like @NiceGuy4UrMom. Here are some things to watch out for:
He seizes every opportunity to correct your grammar, memory, and opinions.
If you share a personal problem with him, such as, say, continued harassment from a male co-worker, he offers one of these pieces of advice: “Just ignore him!” “Maybe you should try dressing differently?” “Why haven’t you gone to HR already?”
He calls himself a “life coach” but doesn’t get paid for his services.
He has trouble making direct eye contact when he’s talking to you because he’s so used to looking at a wide open screen.
He loves to tell you how your vote for Elizabeth Warren was selfish and destroyed the chance for a progressive to win the nomination #BernieBrosRevenge
For every sexist thing you’ve ever experienced, he simply must compare it to something similar (but not really) that he’s experienced, so he feels your pain.
He’s mansplained mansplaining to you.
He has given you his perspective on the director’s choices in every movie you’ve watched together while you’re watching it. In real time.
If he senses any emotionality coming from you, he immediately shuts down and calls you out for “taking a simple discussion and making it personal.”
You’ve noticed he manages 14 different Twitter accounts that he says are for “business purposes,” which is weird for a part-time server at Olive Garden.
He shouts general feminist catchphrases like “The future is female!” in response to a woman doing anything, then looks at you pointedly to make sure you acknowledge his support.
If you’re dealing with an inappropriate older man, you’ll hear your Reply Guy explain it away as “he’s just from a different time”—more than once.
He genuinely believes sexism will phase out with the baby boomers.
He has said #notallmen in conversation unironically.
He has several high school debate trophies on display in his bedroom and has invested in every For Dummies book ever made.
If he’s met your parents, he’s tried to convince them why their political affiliations are incorrect.
He texts you random, sweeping generalizations about society, culture, and politics like, “Revenge porn was an overexaggerated trend,” or “There’s no difference between socialism and Marxism.” If you text back anything at all, you’ll open an unclosable floodgate.
He has a podcast called something like Here’s What I Think or You’re Wrong, in which he spends an hour ranting on whatever topic has tweaked his rage that week. It has one subscriber (Probably his mom. Or his other username).
If he introduces you to his female work colleagues, he’ll proceed to go into great detail about how he’s “gone to bat for” each and every one of them.
He sometimes wears a #BelieveWomen T-shirt and has used it as a thought-starter for why men deserve to be heard too.
He actively tries to debunk the subject you wrote your dissertation on with research he did in one afternoon.
During game nights, he’ll try to disprove the Trivial Pursuit answers written on the answer cards.
Should your logical responses push him too far, his inner troll will reveal itself by dropping the veiled niceties and going straight to calling you a “whore.”
Or he does none of the above because he’s actually terrible at IRL confrontation, which is why he only practices it behind a computer screen.
