A "poser" is someone who tries to fit into a group by acting/dressing a certain way but is seen as fake. It's a subjective term that the accuser gets to define. It's prevalent in different communities, usually those related to music, fashion, or skating (skateboarding for my Midwest folk). In other communities it can be other titles, like "queer-baiting" in LGBTQ+ (I think queer-baiting can be done by companies, but not by people). Used to separate people from the community that they want to identify with, and sometimes used as simple insults against someone for not identifying with said community.
People who call out posers are the people who feel like you need to act in a certain way, or that you need to have a specific set of knowledge, or that you’re not allowed to dress how you want in order to be in their community. The last one I think I’ve seen so much throughout my life. A subculture and their style becoming trendy, so they now have to bar or bully people out of it. To dress alternative you must listen to Black Sabbath; to dress goth you must listen to The Cure; to dress in slacks and a hoodie you must skate. The idea that finding a style that you like and pursuing it will piss off people wearing the same stuff feels so odd. A world where people have to think twice before wearing a shirt that they thought looked cool because it has a band name they don’t know sounds pretty lame to me.
Any post with someone doing anything with a skateboard is full of comments asking them to prove that they can kickflip. If you can’t do a kickflip you’re a poser. If you grab your board “wrong” you’re a poser. If you don’t follow pros you’re a poser. So many ways just for people to say you’re doing your hobby wrong.
Watching SLC punk, there's a running joke throughout the film about the disdain for posers, while they plaster slander posters of Reagan everywhere and yet never bring up what they didn’t like about his policies. The hatred for Reagan is very common in liberal or punk communities and tends to be a general staple. I tend to consider myself punk in my views and have had my fair share of hating on the U.S. 40th president, yet I genuinely don’t know much of his presidency. I know about his “Reaganomics” and War on Drugs, but most of the hatred for his policies goes over my head. I think that in every community where you have “posers”, you are one of them.
As a fair counterpoint, radicalized subsets can easily overtake the brand name of the community as a whole. Most communities generally praise tolerance and acceptance of certain things like race, so racists and other hate groups identifying as part of the culture leave an understandably bad taste in people’s mouth. For that I turn to the old idiom: “Tolerance of the intolerant is intolerance itself”. Those that preach hatred and exclusion ought to be excluded to keep true to the values of inclusion.
Labels are a powerful thing; they can hold a community together and tie people to their own identities. On the other hand, they exclude people from their passions and can be just as easily used to bully someone out of their own identity. I’m a poser. I don’t fit into a template of any group because I’m one of a kind. I think a poser is someone who can break the stereotype, not make a new one.
This is sort of a new kind of post. I just felt like posting about it as I thought of the Reagan stuff. I’m not exactly a word smith and I didn’t spend too long proof-reading all of this so it feels a little choppy to me. Either way, I’m glad to have written it, and I hope you were glad to have read it. :)