Oh, and since reasonable responses to your false comparison have been offered, and you’ve given no counter-argument, I think we can take that to mean you haven’t got one.
Yes, you are correct. You win.
Bullshit.
Daniel
(I kid! I kid because I love!)
Tis a mighty sword ye wield, so swiftly and so true.
Damn, it, Contrapuntal, you beat me to it!
Looks like there’s hope for you yet!
Very observant, you are.
To vaguely sorta take brightpenny’s side: the closest I’ve ever felt to being “violated” by someone’s behavior on the straightdope was when someone sent me a snarky email in response to one of my posts here. It was an unwelcome intrusion of the Dope into my private life. So I handled it in three ways:
- I wrote them back with a message saying, “Never write to me again.”
- I grumped about it a little bit in the thread that inspired the email, and invited folks to say what they had to say to me there.
- I removed my email from public view.
Excalibre, I certainly don’t think you violated her by sending her an email; nor did you violate any rule or law. Your reason for sending the email was better than the reason the snarker had for sending one to me, and even that one wasn’t beyond the pale. However, I can understand why it, especially the last line of it, would be especially unpleasant for her to receive.
Daniel
Willingness to offend is indeed important, but it’s no substitute for a thicker skin. Gang-rape, gang-rape, gang-rape! Nyah, nyah, nyah!
You’ve got a point, but if you wear a hat, nobody will notice.
Daniel
Remember, you can’t spell FLAMEANON without MEAN.
Penny needs to relax. Maybe she could fly to some nice vacation spot.
Don’t let the bastards get ya down, brightpenny.
Have you ever heard or read the obvservation that a primary human motivation is to seek out a perch fron which to look down upon everyone else? That goes on a lot around here and Excalibre is one of the worst. It doesn’t take a lot in the way of critical thinking skills and analytical ability to know what you meant by your remark regarding rape. Keep in mind that it is people who feel the most powerless in life who are most likely to engage in pile-on behavior when they can do so without fear of harm to themselves. Your remarks in the other thread and in this one in no way justify the pile-on you are being subjected to. This fact speaks much more to the character of those doing the piling on than it does to you. (And besides, perhaps your concern about dirty undies struck a little too close to home for the liking of some of your tormentors. )
There are lots of fine, educated and helpful people on this board. However, there is also a small coterie of assholes just waiting to pounce on someone in an effort to make themselves feel superior. My adbvice would be either to ignore them (and, while perfectly capable of carrying on without you, there isn’t much they can do in the other forums without running afoul of the mods), or, if you’re pitted, to respond in a fashion that gives their attack the response it deserves, such as nothing more than a roll-eyes smilie in response to the OP here. That would be enough to get you off the hook vis-a-vis making a pit thread response while at the sanme time not requiring that you engage in an insult exchange that you have no taste for. You could then simply ignore the thread and let it die of its own dead weight, which it will eventually do.
But at any rate, don’t let this thread or the responses you got in the GQ thread dissuade you from posting. Most people in the other forums would be happy to answer your questions. I would suggest, however, that until you’ve been around long enough to recognize what sort of comments are likely to become asshole fodder that you limit your questions and comments to those of a factual nature (i.e., “would germs be spread”, etc.) rather than offering your own thoughts on the subject.
I hope this helps and that you stick around. You seem like a good person.
Wow. Just Wow. Brightpenny, you really need to grow a thicker skin. May you never be raped, because, I can tell you, it sucks FAR FAR worse than any of the comments directed at you in those threads. And I’ve never been gang raped, which I would assume is worse. This is not a great place to assume that you won’t be teased, made fun of, and yes, occationally ridiculed. Its one of my favorite things about this board - so please don’t try and change the culture. Those comments weren’t vicious, they were good natured teasing on “hey, this isn’t the huge risk factor you think it is.” Now, calling you a loathesome bitch is vicious, but then, so is accusing someone of virtually and/or symbolically gang raping you.
Having been on the receiving end of both really nasty insults and snark on the intarweb (both anonymous and not anonymous) and a gang rape, I can certainly fucking tell you that the former feels nothing fucking like the latter, thank you very much. There is nothing anybody could say to me, online or even in person, that is in any way as bad as being gang raped. Nobody ever attempts to crawl into the street naked at 5 am because of the freaking intarweb.
You need to grow a skin, brightpenny. I’d tell you to grow a thicker one but apparently you have no skin at all.
The more I read of this, the more I think there’s some doubleplus ungood ganging up going on here; I just want to be clear that I’m not trying to insult brightpenny. I think her simile was very ill-chosen, but that’s it. Comments about she needs to grow a pair and so forth are not really helpful, in my opinion. Why not? Because they distract from my point ;). My point is that folks shouldn’t trivialize rape by using it in similes for things that are less bad.
I personally think that’s an important enough point that it ought not get lost in a sea of insults.
Daniel
ditto.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the extent of my feeling about this. I just laughed to myself when I saw the original thread; it’s the gang-rape comparison that pissed me off.
But implicit in her analogy and her generalized complaints to us about how awful she was getting treated were insults for the rest of us - we’re big mean jerks for having been slightly sarcastic in the original thread, and so forth. There was nothing motivating her comparison beyond some mild ribbing. This is the sort of thing I expect to get from my friends in real life as well as here on the boards; condemning our little community here and making baseless complaints that we were being so gosh-darn mean to her is sort of insulting, and she should expect to reap what she sows.
I’ll sign on to this as well. Was her comment pitworthy? Yep. Does she need to grow a thicker skin? Sure. This thread? It’s getting gratuitous. Can we take it down a notch or two?
Cheers, Starving Artist, wish I had the ability to state the obvious underlying truth half as well.
May I use this as my sig line?
Thank you, Bike Rider. I appreciate both your compliment and the fact that you thought enough of my post to make it the subject of one of your own infrequent postings.
Regards,
SA