Fair enough; as one of those who didn’t get insinuatingly referred to as a rapist, it’s easier for me to stay calm about it.
I get the impression that it’s not the sort of thing she expects from her friends in real life, which may be why she reacted so strongly to it: from her perspective, what seemed like mild ribbing to you may have seemed like unpardonable rudeness to her. Different social circles and all; and it’s no more good telling her to get a thicker skin than it is good telling you to get some manners. Different social circles.
Probably true, but would you agree that the “social circle” that makes up the SDMB is more like Excalibre’s real-life social circle than brightpenny’s? If so, telling her that she needs a thicker skin to fit in here is just good advice.
Thicker skin? Come on now lets get serious, everyone in here bitching about brightpenny needing a thicker skin, are the same people letting a (stupid and said without thinking and apologized for) analogy make them cry.
No one here is arguing that nobody should ever get offended by anything, ever. What is considered offensive is largely defined by context. In the context of the SDMB, careless rape analogies are considered offensive. So are fat jokes, or using “gay” as a synonym for “lame.” At the same time, the responses brightpenny garnered in that thread are not considered offensive. They’re par for the course in posting to the SDMB. We can dissect the reasons why until we’ve all got bloody finger types from the typing, but at the end of the day, it’s easier to adjust your own behavior to fit the context than to change the context to fit your own behavior.
Honestly, John. I’m not sure how it can even be remotely argued that this is a pile-on. In the original thread, she asked a question. In grand SDMB tradition, her question was neatly answered in a few posts. There were no direct cites, but who knows if direct cites for this topic are even available. UncleBeer came closest with fairly good cites for the relative cleanliness of your hands before and after defecation, etc. People then answered her follow-up question (Is no one else concerned about this?) with a resounding “no.” Some other people were mildly (very, very mildly) snarky. By the end of the thread, she had freaked completely out over nothing.
The second thread consisted essentially of her bitching that she felt she had been gang-raped. Now, this is easliy recognizable as hyperbole to anyone with a shred of sense, but there are those here with no sense at all, and thus we have this ridiculous gang-rape hijack.
Aside from that, however, she has just fueled the fire by acting like such a damn babe-in-the-woods. She needs to be able to withstand a little gentle fun-poking around here, cause it ain’t going away. It’d be much less of a cool place if it did go away. This place has a certain amount of rough-and-tumble does-not-suffer-fools mentality about it, and by God, that’s what sets it apart from every other l33t-speaking dumbass message board out there.
The only truly objectionable thing I see about the whole affair is Excalibre’s frankly moronic title. Loathesome? Completely inaccurate. It makes me wonder, in fact, if Ex even knows what the fuck the word means. Miller’s “dopey” is a much better fit.
Now, brightpenny may be a perfectly good human being and a potentially valuable poster, but if she can’t take a little very gentle ribbing, she’s either in the wrong place, or she needs to toughen the hell up.
I agree it’s probably time to let it die, but I for one found her incessant need to be a victim in this whole affair to be extremely exasperating. Thus, I have no basic objection to the existence of a Pit thread over it. People have been Pitted for much less.
Wait. Ihave to retract something, and then I’m done. It’s not a hijack. Excalibre is absolutely right. brightpenny’s breathless comparison of someone gently ribbing her over her histrionics to a “circle of men who begin by tossing out comments, increasingly bold as they feed off each other, embolden each other with their own power displays…” is well, idiotic. Not loathesome, really, but deeply hysterical. She evidently has no perspective.
OK, since you asked: yes. Look, when you post something on the message board, you explicitly invite all 57,000 members, plus guests, to comment on it as long as they stay within the rules and general culture of the message board. If you get 57,000 responses saying you’re being hysterical, then you’re probably being hysterical, and you should think about perhaps modifying your behavior.
Now, I’m not a member of any SDMB clique, society, group, or association. I am utterly independent. I have no regular connection (besides Sampiro, but we’ve been friends since long before either of us were members here) with any active board member through email, personal contact, IRC, snark boards, spin-off boards, or anything else. I have no agenda, much less any animus against brightpenny, but in my not-so-very-humble-at-all opinion, she was being a mewling, histrionic pseudo-victim, and her Pitting was entirely deserved.
As for your implicit assumption about my manners, fuck off. If this were face-to face, I’d tell her (and you) gently that she was being hypersensitive and should take a deep breath, and buy you both a beer. There’s nothing at all ill-mannered about offering your opinion of someone’s already-bizarre behavior.
Ogre, I totally agree with most of your points, but this post of mine will be the 111th? in this thread. I’m guessing that 90 of those 111 posts are people kickin’ shit on brightpenny. I call that a pile on.
All things considered, back to the original GQ thread, I find this incident shameful.
My choice of words may not have been the best, but I really do think that rape is a very serious matter, and when she was called on it in the ATMB thread, she tossed off the part you quoted rather than, say, admitting to a heat-of-the-moment exaggeration. Maybe I take that too seriously - my mother worked at a shelter for victims of domestic violence when I was a kid, and I guess I take references to violence against women pretty seriously. I’ve known more than one woman who was sexually assaulted; it’s upsetting to me to see rape trivialized this way.
Apparently that didn’t stop you from sending an email that, depending on the “eye of the beholder”, could have been considered harassment or threatening.
It’s thus that you seek to renounce your membership in The Illuminati? Not so fast…
The beholder would have to be squinting that eye to see it as harassment, and would have to be frankly unreasonable to see it as threatening. There was absolutely no threat in it.
How the Hell did I miss this thread for so long?
I’ll join the crowd with Starving Artist, jrfranchi, John Carter of Mars (and many others) and say yes this is a pile on ! :mad:
This thread has gone on to a third page now and no one has mentioned the title of the thread: brightpenny, you’re a loathesome bitch
I realize this is the Pit, but do you think that’s a good way to promote any meaningful discussion? So I guess you wanted this to be a slugfest from the start.
People have been accusing brightpenny for alluding to “gang rape” in a rather cavalier fashion. Oh, but start a Pit Thread by calling someone a “loathesome bitch” is totally acceptable. :rolleyes:
Oh I can be sure that Excalibre and Left Hand of Dorkness will be in here to tell me I should have read every post in this thread *and *the thread which led to this pitting. OR maybe I’ll be subject to a grammar correction in which I failed to use the pluperfect verb tense in a posting from 17 months ago.
Not to be petty or small-minded but Excalibre - it is spelled loathsome
Cite ?
