I’m a guy. I’ve never been raped. However I’ve dealt with more than a few women who have suffered that indignity. Short of actually dying, I would suspect it is the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
Having said that, I have also heard the word used by women in different contexts. One was to describe how she felt when her house was broken into and was trashed. She wasn’t home at the time and they went through all her “personal” things, emptied all her drawers, etc… A similar occasion involved a motel room. Same scenario, different woman.
My point is, many women ( not all ) have the propensity to conjure up feelings akin to being raped when they feel extremely overwhelmed and out of control in a gang-like setting. Reading her posts, I would conclude this is how Brightpenny ( sorry, my bolding function won’t work) felt at the time. Was it an overreaction? Perhaps , to some of us. Was she entitled? IMHO, yes, if thats what her feelings were at the time.
Please remember to never discount the “eyes of the beholder” point of view.
This has gone on far too long and has reached epic proportions at the instigations of a few members here.The best and most humane thing we can do now is to back away from this thread and allow Brightpenny time to ponder what has happened. After having done so I would support her no matter what.
:rolleyes: Starving Artist, you’re more full of bullshit than the streets of Pamplona.
Nice. You’re accusing me of trolling, huh? Hey, Starving Artist - grow the fuck up. brightpenny said something that offended and upset me - and she apologized, and I’m satisfied with that. Obviously you saw an opportunity to get a dig in at me - fair’s fair, you had the right - but why don’t you be honest about this?
To all those who are gleefully joining in with Starving Artist’s histrionic condemnation of me: you need to understand that his attacks on me here stem from a bit of history between us; Starving Artist tried his familiar ass-kissing routine on me (“I admire and respect you a great deal. You are a person to be taken seriously, even though we often disagree, and my respect for you is considerable.” And other stuff along those lines.) Now, I found Starving Artist’s obsequious ass-kissing then to be faintly nauseating, as I still do. So I spurned his affections, as it were. The bottom line is that those who are joining in with his over-the-top hysterics at me now should understand that what Starving Artist is saying here is motivated by history between us; it might help in the process of contextualizing his otherwise bizarre attacks on me.
Perhaps if it hadn’t taken her quite so long - and quite so many posts - people would have been quicker to forgive her. That’s just my guess - nice job trying to blame me for this, as though I were leading some pitchfork-wielding mob.
I wasn’t aware that pittees get to ask that pit threads die. “Disgusting orgy of abuse”, huh? Care to find any examples that even come close to matching your ridiculous description?
Oh my God! She got pitted! It’s absolutely extraordinary! It’s horrific!
Oh, please. She said something that I found upsetting. And I pitted her for it. You know, like people do every day. I know that even you aren’t stupid enough to actually believe that opening a pit thread merits this kind of response. It’s clear who’s being disingenuous here, and it ain’t me.
I indeed did and do apologize for losing all proportionality in what I said in the OP. Obviously, though, it’s not enough for you, and you have to get your licks in once again. Funny how many of the behaviors you’ve claimed I’ve engaged in here are actually excellent descriptions of your own conduct here. You, Starving Artist, are a hypocrite. You saw an opportunity to get your digs in at me, because I rejected your ass-kissing attempts to curry friendship six months ago, and you seized the moment.
And it’s true. brightpennywas to blame for her original GQ thread spiralling into an enormous mess. I know you don’t have any actual response to that, or you would have come up with it by now. I think that’s irrelevant now, but people like you kept bringing it up again. Funny how the discussion keeps seeming to die until people like you come in to pour gasoline on the flames.
Starving Artist, you are a titanically stupid person, as we’ve established in countless other threads. But at the same time, you are very skilled at self-aggrandizing shows of magnanimity. Congrats. The lesser lights on the board are no doubt impressed by you once again. Your attacks on me are disingenuous crap - something you know and I know. But no doubt some people don’t know it, and they’ll continue believing your bullshit. Good work.
I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about here. “Pit Lord”? Dear God, man, get some perspective. Whatever the hell you’re basing this on, it’s certainly not my behavior.
So, your cowardly ass finally decided to answer one of my posts, eh?
First, regarding this ‘ass-kissing’ bullshit: it’s true that I made the mistake of offering a complimentary observation about you once. You quickly disabused me of that notion, however, with one of your standard attempts to appear superior by acting the ass and claiming to see through my ‘phony’ attempt to curry favor by virtue of your superior intellect. However, as I said at the time, I call 'em as I see 'em and at that time, even though we had had words on occasion, I scarcely saw you for the asshole you’ve since revealed yourself to be. I have no history here of kissing anyone’s ass, and if I were going to try, yours certainly wouldn’t be the one that inspired me to do it.
Secondly, as I said, I call 'em as I see 'em. I said pretty much the same thing to you in this thread when I said you were intelligent and well educated and could be an asset to this board. And it’s true, you could be…if, as I also said, you weren’t such an asshole.
Now, about my using this thread to get even over this so-called snub. You make it sound like you’ve not heard a word from me since that exchange and that I’ve been lying in wait ever since looking for an opportunity to get even. Perhaps you’ve forgotten the numerous other times I’ve called you out since then for your transparent and pathetic attempts to appear superior by attempting to play the intellectual bully with someone.
Still, our interactions have been few and far between. If I were out to get you there have been plenty of opportunities for me to do so. The fact of the matter is, in this thread anmd in your OP, you were clearly way out of line and you were taking sadistic delight in visciously attacking someone who, as lissener said, had exposed a weakness and had no stomach for the confrontation. Such behavior is typical of bullies, and that’s exactly what you are. Your posting history is full of mean-spirited attempts to make other people look bad. The delighful irony is that by attempting to build yourself up by attacking others, you expose yourself for the asshole that you truly are and you end up accomplishing the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do and end up looking like even less of a person than you did before.
As I said before, there is something wrong with you. You have an almost desperate need to try to portray yourself in a superior light to others, and this need is rarely more manifest than in the behavior you displayed in your ridiculous OP here. Your own words and behavior are what condemn you, not me.
…what you characterize as sarcasm, others read as threatening. Isn’t it amazing how that works? You can write something down, and it means something different to the person who reads it. Kinda’ like what happened when you started this pit thread.
…it apparently didn’t look sarcastic to her. And of course, there’s the whole hypocricy angle, where you complain that she over-reacts and uses inappropriate words on a message board, then proceed to over-react and use inappropriate words in an email.
…in other words, she expressed how she felt. Why characterize it as manipulative? I didn’t see it that way. If she felt like she was harrassed in a thread for no reason and that upset her and she wanted to leave, how would you suggest she express that?
…and it appears (we are not quite sure) that she may have been gang-raped. And as you mentioned in your OP, people tend to get a bit sensitive about that kind of thing. So when she got questioned on it, she lashed out in the wrong forum and she got an official warning.
I have no idea what you mean.
…oddly enough, getting told that her OP was a paranoid rant, being called Germaphobic, being told her question wasn’t worthwhile, and that her concerns were trivial, pissed her off.
…yeah, and it only took you one-hundred-and-sixteen posts to do that: or four posts, depending on how you want to spin it.
…since she’s been driven away from here anyway, I suppose you could always send her an email to ask her if she forgives you…
…not really. Why was the question so weird? The first person to actually question the OP was Dr Shagnasty, who called it a paranoid rant. After two pit thread and an ATMB thread, I still have no idea what the problem was with the OP, and why people had such a big problem coming up with an answer.
…don’t ask had a pretty good answer in this thread. 3.885AM posted some interesting insights. But by that stage the thread had been already been derailed.
…nice spin. Care to point out where she demanded people stop disagreeing with her?
…you mean an accusation of having a phobia and being told that her question was irrational and that it was a paranoid rant.
…I didn’t see many WAGs in the thread, I saw a lot of unsupported assertions.
Can you point out which of those comments were WAGs? Can you point out the good natured ribbing everybody keeps talking about?
…and you know what, if people didn’t share her concerns, or if they couldn’t answer the question, or if they didn’t want to make a WAG in an a attempt to answer the OP, why did they post in the thread? If they felt, like **Dr Shangnasty, **that the OP was actually a rant, why didn’t they just report it and let the mods decide?
…go ahead, I posted a lot of them up above.
…they merited some sort of response, don’t you agree? How many of them would you say were on topic?
…or the posters in the thread kept baiting her with comments that were just within the rules until she snapped. It just depends on how you look at it.
If you could prove to me that her concerns were trivial, we would be half-way to getting an answer to her question. And she didn’t throw a “fit” after people starting making smartass comments, she got angry when people started being rude.
Rubbish. The people who posted unsupported assertions in support of their analyis that the OP was delusional derailed the thread.
Yep. Is it normal, in response to a fairly normal question, to respond with sexual imagery and accusations of phobia and mental illness? Is that how the typical General Question normally goes? Just because they managed to stay within the rules doesn’t stop them being jerks. Read Dr Shangnasty’s post in this thread. I don’t think that he believes a word that he said in that post. I’m not sure he believed a word that he said in the GQ thread.
Have you read this thread?
Have you read this thread?
…as many of us said, the mods have spoken and deemed the thread did not break the rules. But samclem’s comments in an unnoffical capacity in this thread leads me to believe that he at least considers the behavior of the posters in the GQ thread as rude, and that we were poor “hosts”. (Feel free to correct my interpretation samclem.)
…you mean one reference. Then she was asked to explain herself and she did. So, like…two.
But lets say that brightpenny had been gang-raped in the past. Look at the imagery in professional-thread-shitter-ex-mod Nickrz’s post, right before she demands the thread closure. One of my close friends was raped, and that kind of imagery, whether in conversation, or visually, would sometimes trigger a panic attack. Is that outside the realm of possibility here? (Since it seems we’re all playing amateur Frued)
…you mean, like, her second post in the thread, don’t you? As in, her second opportunity to post an apology, since the other thread was closed? You feel thats unreasonable? I know it would have been a lot better to post it in her first post, but hey, can’t you cut her a bit of slack?
ROFL!!! …how about you read my posts again and point out where you consider I said I don’t “want to continue a pile-on”. Why don’t you quote some examples from the GQ thread that you consider to be “good natured ribbing.” Why don’t you provide some evidence that brightpenny made anything up. It’s amazing how angry you get when people just want people to be nice! (( hugs galt. ))
Maybe calling it a “rape” is stretching the hyperbole a bit too much, but the whole incident does remind me of classroom bullying.
The group gets together, finds someone who is new or relatively alone, and come down to make jokes about him. If he is cool and doesn’t give any ground, the bullies just say “Eeks, he’s boring. Let go elsewhere.” If the poor target’s reply somehow open him up, like brightpenny’s, they would jump on it, making it a big issue. “Do you hear what he says gasp! OMG, I can’t believe he just said that!”
By no way I am saying that people are delibrately provoking a response from brightpenny in the first place. But when she snapped, the wolves gathered.
Of course, brightpenny shall be able to stand up for herself. Of course, she shall choose her metaphor wisely. But some people is milking it for all its worth, for what purpose, I have no idea. Sometimes we find people to pick at to reassure ourselves that we are not too bad. I wouldn’t blame anyone for that. It’s a all too common human trait, that for some, needs some savage repressing.
Just for the record, since this is the only thread open on the subject. I have reread the original thread several times. I still stand behind everything I said and the manner in which I said it. Nothing I said or did is in any way comparable to any crime and I resent being referred to as a participant in a gang rape. I would have spoken the same way to someone to their face had they shown the same pattern of behavior IRL. Sometimes something that bothers you is just a personality quirk or a mental problem or just the result of ignorance. I cannot give you all a cite about the adherence of bacteria to synthetic surfaces since I did the research under a confidentiality agreement and the results are proprietary. I guess you can believe me or not, I don’t care. In the original thread, I objected to brightpenny’s attitude about the whole thing. However, I don’t give a shit if someone whose mental status is questionable and whom I have little respect for thinks I am somehow similar to a rapist. I do give a shit when a new person comes in and whines about how the board community is. You paid your money, if you don’t like the deal you got, maybe you should’ve done a little more research before you forked over the money. I joined the board knowing that I wouldn’t always agree with everyone. Some threads piss me off and I mostly ignore them because life is too damn short to care what some random username thinks about you.
It’s getting to be a habit: every morning I make coffee, read my email, and check to see if I’m still a loathsome bitch.
I’ve been tempted to jump in here and say “who cares, you’re all imaginary people”. But you’re (collectively and individually) not and neither am I. But we do have different ideas about how to behave, knowing that we’re real and so is everyone else.
I never had any intent to play in the Pit with the Big Bad Members, and in fact did peruse other threads in GQ before posting there. I thought some of the questions I saw were beyond ridiculous, but the posters were treated fairly. Based upon that I posted my own question. I didn’t care whether you disagreed or agreed with me, but did care whether my question was treated as worthy of some info about search practices, etc. If everyone hadn’t tried to score snark points off my post, I might have actually learned something. Next time I’ll look elsewhere, since this isn’t the place for honest inquiry afterall. And just for the record, I’m not a victim, a babe-in-the-woods, germophobic, nor mentally unbalanced, and I have degrees in both computer science and psychology. I may have even been working as a programmer before some of you were born. It doesn’t make me superior, but you should know that I’m not new to virtual communities. I’m just new to nasty ones. I’m curious as hell and I guess that got me killed like the proverbial cat. I was caught offguard by the flurry of taunts in short timeframe to the exclusion of facts.
Just a note: men sometimes experience bullying as they grow up, either as victim, spectator, or perpetrator, and the form it takes is usually physical beating or stealing. Many women don’t have that same experience of bullying. Instead, in our experience the same bullying mentality of dominance toward women might be expressed in sexual taunting, grabbing, or at the extreme, gang rape. Until you’ve been a woman you may not be aware of the psychological, sociological, political, and sexual threats** implicit** in “ganging up” behavior upon a woman in real life. It’s not unusual for people to use the only metaphor in our experience or in our fears to describe ganging up behavior. Men might refer to gang-beating, women to gang-rape. (YMMV) I clarified earlier, that my intention was to describe the dominance behavior of circling, taunting, weakening that builds in groups.
Excalibre, the more you spout your stuff, the more you hang yourself. I even wince to see what you’re doing to yourself here. Not that you want my pity, but I’m just sayin’.
I tried early on to speak on my own behalf but was drowned out with insults. Fully 24 hours passed before more than a couple of brave souls spoke out on my behalf against the behaviors that they didn’t like. Eventually others supported some of what I would have said had I had a chance to regroup from the surprises. It is because of them that I’m even considering returning to The Dope. And the more that Excalibre exaggerates my words and demands that I leave, the less inclined I am to leave. I know that I mightily restrained myself from saying a whole lot of things in this thread (yes, even witty snarky mean things) because I don’t like your game and won’t play. You tripped me up once when I was unsure of the rules in the About forum, I won’t let you do it again.
So then I thought about my name if I were to return: brightpenny or a new one? Anything I post in the future is likely to have a spotlight upon it for some time, for some in a negative light. All of you who think I’m “loathsome” for my “crimes” will know my name. I won’t know yours because there are a hundred of you and I don’t care to keep a list of allies and enemies because I’m not that way. You could be in any thread and I would treat you kindly and with respect because that’s what my values are, and because I didn’t keep track, I might even think you’re a friend. So stay or leave with my tail between my legs? I’m not a coward or a victim. I will keep my name as is and take my chances, because I have seen from my prior experiences at SDMB and especially in this thread, that there are people here who I genuinely like and admire who think I might have something to offer to this community.
I guess I’m banished to the “children’s table” where I can talk about mundane pointless things and boners, and at first that angered me, until I learned this week that the other forums might just be the “grownups table” afterall. Thanks for the learning experience.
Btw, I don’t care anymore whether any of you think I’m loathsome. I’m proud of my restraint here and maybe have even made some new friends through this mess.
Within this post is a whole bunch of stuff you can pick apart, invent motives for, and shriek about. Have at it.
Welcome brightpenny
I’ve never had a chance to speak to you before.
I joined this mess very late but I am glad that I made my opinions known.
It is disgraceful the way people treated you. It’s only recently I have discovered how some of the members of this message board can (at times) degrade into a clannish and mean-spirited mob. I guess it makes some people feel taller when they are smashing others to the ground.
No doubt Excalibre will rush right in to say I’m totally mis-stating the situation and Left Hand of Dorkness will say that I am totally lacking in reading comprehension.
The events of these left few days have made me comprehend very damned well.
Glad to see you posted again.
I am very happy to see you have returned to see this has not been a one-sided cluster fuck. And if someone is offended by cluster fuck, tough shit.
Stay with the board, keep your name, I will think well of it when I see it.
I am assuming that your previous posting and your most recent one are still good-natured.
However, please excuse me for being one of those hand-wringers to whom you referred but I still think brightpennyis a victim. Hell, you’ve got to admit that a pitting that goes on for 5 frigging pages is pretty damned disgraceful.
If nothing else, while this slugfest extravaganza was going on, there were people in other forums (fora?) that were asking questions. Really !!
Not that I am the Albert Schweitzer of this board but I managed to tear myself away from this pile-on to help somebody in GQ with an Excel question. (see my posting 132 - wolf_meister said as he once again patted himself on the back )
I’ll bet there were a bunch of people in this Pit thread that could have answered that or a great deal of other questions. It’s nice to see how we all expended our intellect in such a productive way. :rolleyes:
In the words of brightpenny
Yeah I’ve learned a LOT in the past couple of days too.
I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about here. “Pit Lord”? Dear God, man, get some perspective. Whatever the hell you’re basing this on, it’s certainly not my behavior.
