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I've never heard this and there were plenty of girls on IRC


Well if you've never heard that old joke, then clearly it can't ever have existed, right?

Oh wait:

> Welcome to the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the kids are cops.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546789

I picked this instance of course because it was said on HN, but it was a dead horse even in 2010.


by 2010 IRC was largely replaced by social media except for niche communities, sorry you were on there in the wrong decade


Of course it was, but that's not what we're talking about. The link I chose was just the arbitrary one I picked from the google results.

Personally I remember hearing that joke in the 90s. If you want a different example, here's a variant from 2001: http://www.bash.org/?2832

Note that this one ends with "but some of the men are really women"; it's already old and well-known enough in '01 that people are modifying it for meta-humor.




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