Men Are the Biggest Whinypants Complainers on Twitter

Ugh, men, right? What a bunch of shrill, harping nags. It’s like, complain, complain, complain. Bitch, bitch, bitch. I wish I had a remote control for my husband, so I could turn his volume down during House Hunters International—amirite, ladies?!?!? Except he would probably just go complain about it with his buddies on /r/restoringoldwoodenboats. Hahaha, classic men.

That’s not how we talk about men. But, oops, it is how we talk about women! Women are supposed to be the complainy ones—shrieking away at long-suffering husbands who are just trying to watch Ultimate Ninja Warrior without getting on the wrong end of some hypersensitive harridan’s menses-talons. (To clarify: A love for Ultimate Ninja Warrior is in no way gendered and I watch the shit out of it.) Which is why it’s so fun to see studies like this one, which found that though women do write more, by volume, on Twitter, men on Twitter complain more than women. Hahahahahahaah, whiners.

Women tweet more – around 15 times a day – on average, compared with nine updates per day from men, according to the study of 1,000 British Twitter accounts by social media monitoring company Brandwatch.

When it comes to tweets related to brands, women are far more likely than men to be entering competitions, while men are much more likely than women to be complaining, the study found.

“Many studies have shown that men and women use more similar language online than offline, so we were surprised to see such clear differences in the results,” said Edward Crook, an analyst at Brandwatch.

“140 characters encourages many of the non-standard features of spoken language, which could explain this divide,” Cook said. “It is clear though that men and women are both discussing different topics on Twitter and using different language to do so,” he said.

Anyhooz, obviously that’s one study about one little slice of our internet lives, but isn’t it fun to reconsider our preconceived notions about gender once in a while? Complaining about stuff: Not just for feminists anymore!