On a scale of 1 to 10, how much emotional damage do you think was done to our poor, weak, frail members of the Fairer Sex by reading such a salacious comment? 11, yes?
Of course, as pointed out to and ignored by you again and again, the rationale was not that comments were off topic, but that they displayed hatred of women. And, honestly, how hard is it to ignore a few jokes in a thread? Do you really require the mods to protect you from having to use your mouse’s scroll wheel?
Really?
It was in Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share, not Great Debates.
Really?
Here’s some horrible reflexive misandry, directed at an actual Doper none the less.
Iterated misandry, zounds!
Look at all the horrible misandry on display here, I need to be protected lest I be offended!
Clear, clear misandry. The poor gentleman must be protected from such churlish behavior!
Do I even need to start browsing CS threads where women make (horribly, horribly misandrist, of course) comments about male actors? Really?
The current moderation direction is bullshit, and you know it.
Yes, there’s a double standard. Yes, this is Victim Culture bullshit. And yes, the idea that women are so very delicate that they can’t read anything offensive on the internet and have to be protected from it is absurdly and blatantly sexist.
Don’t circle-the-wagons here, play straight. Is ‘offense’ really a valid metric? Really? Y’all have long argued that simply being offensive was not enough to justify mod action, which is why our Scientific Racist community is still pretty much alive and kickin’. So, what, being a racist is okay, but if you offend a woman, it’s time for moderator action?
Come on.
See the first link in Post #14. And yes, I reported the post. And in the other thread on this topic, I asked why it wasn’t moderated similarly. Repeatedly. Did not get an answer.
Some of them are borderline, but the joke about licking her “crucifix” was definitely out of line. The joke about spanking her is really, really close to the line, and I don’t have a problem with modding it. The ones about how attractive she is are acceptable, in my opinion. They wouldn’t be in a more serious thread, but that thread really wasn’t that serious when those comments were made. It was full of a lot of people cracking jokes, with only a few being serious.
I think twickster saw the worst comments, and then just felt she had to include the others to be consistent. Overmodding, sure, but at least somewhat understandable. I see the mods do this all the time on other issues.
Borderline what? Dirty? Not acceptable for the Queen’s company?
What standards are you applying here? It makes no sense what you find “acceptable.” Judging her looks is fine? But a dirty joke is not? It sounds like you’re just offended by dirty jokes. I would think commenting on a female activist’s looks would be considered more misogynistic than just a run of the mill sex joke. So again, what standards are *you *applying to what is acceptable here?
And, more importantly, what standards are the mods applying?
I’m not going to rehash the original thread that got this started. The summary is that the comments were problems because they were being inserted in threads in which they didn’t belong AND were gratuitous leering comments at women (such as women asking a question about finding a shirt that fits her well across the chest and getting “show us your boobs” jokes). They were jokes AND they were in the middle of more serious threads, which leads to a board culture that some found off-putting. The issue was that this behavior led to women feeling uncomfortable about posting things and not wanting these jokes to appear every time someone brought up something tangentially related to their body.
So the issue is jokes + context. And that is exactly what the posts were being modded (not even warned, mind you) for.
Anyway, in the thread being discussed here, I already (look up thread) said that I thought “misogyny” was not the right term, but that the idea was right- it was gratuitous, leering comments in direct response to serious comments. Agree or disagree, but at least try to understand where some of us are coming from. I won’t even go down the “poor women beed protection, boo hoo” comments, because that’s all modding ever is: protecting people from the inappropriate actions of other posters. If the defense is to use the scroll wheel past posts you don’t like, then why mod at all?
If men, or Christians, or conservatives want to champion their cause, go for it. No one is stopping you. In the previous thread that started all this, enough men and women championed this idea to affect change.
I don’t care if it’s MPSIMS or GD. If it was the Pit, I’d see your point. But MPSIMS can have it’s level of decorum addressed as well. All said, I do agree that a move to GD coupled with mod note wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
Again, agree or disagree as you like, but don’t be so dismissive of a position some of us feel rather strongly about. I think I’ve addressed most of the points I can without multiquoting a wall of text, so with that, I’m off for now.
If everyone got their way, this board would not exist in any recognizable form.
That can’t possibly be the new rule, or else no poster can criticize anything or any group because it would relate to a poster here. You don’t like Christians, atheists, Democrats, or Republicans? Well don’t say bad things about them because there are posters here who are members of those groups and anything bad you say about them, by extension, are bad things directed at individual posters.
And I know that’s not the case. A few posters here actually get away with vile insults against religious or political groups under the guise that they are insulting the group and not individual posters. Why doesn’t that same rule apply to females?
IvoryTowerDenizen’s post summarizes my reasons for writing the note I did – and, as a couple of people have pointed out, it was a mod note, no warnings involved.
The fact that the comments came early in the thread made them no more relevant and no less sexist.
Yet it is ok for your mod note to be explicitly sexist.
Because, of course, only male posters are capable of making “offensive” jokes. :rolleyes:
Bad call. Again.
And, as I said in the other thread, if the mods insist on enforcing this ill-conceived, utterly unnecessary “paradigm shift”, you need to announce it officially. Everybody does not read every thread in ATMB.
You’re the first to make reference of warnings, soooo…what? And mod notes often lead to warnings (or at least aim to prevent that from happening), as you well know, so I don’t know what you’re getting at.
I expect better logic from you.
None of these were salacious comments that were directed to men in the midst of a serious thread on a separate subject.
Have you seen any Moderating that told males (or females) to stop making puerile comments in CS threads in which the thread was specifically intended to solicit salacious comments?
In GD, I do Moderate comments that are off topic if their only point is to throw in racist, ethnic, anti-religious, or sexist one-liners that are liable to derail a thread.
I have not seen any indication that salacious comments are going to be forbidden at all times–only those that are off topic.
As to the rest of your comments, they sound far too much like “What? You mean those [pick your minority group] just don’t have a sense of humor?”
Ma’am, I ventured to comment in the other thread that a set of compliments about a woman as a person that included approbatory reference to her appearance could be distinguished from dengiratory comments putting women down. Another member, not a staff member, pointed out that any comment is misogynistic. Staff made several posts immediately after this in that thread and did not address that question. My conclusion is that the only safe thing is to not speak of a woman’s body in any way, lest it be seen as misogynistic by someone, reported, and a moderator decide it’s inappropriate.
And that, combined with the increasingly arbitrary and selective enforcement of the rues and the tendency to lock threads that criticize staff, paints a picture I would never have thought would happen on the Dope, which has always been a shining exception to this sort of board-destroying pettiness.
Well, it was nice while it lasted, and I plan to stick around, trying to make as few waves as possible after this, until I finally get banned myself. I’ve learned a lot here, and met some great people. I just find this (not the misogyny issue; that needs fixing – but how it’s being applied) to be a crying shame.
Bloody hell, Polycarp. It was a crackdown on cunnilingus jokes, not a secret word of the day that if you accidentally type it you never see your kids again.
I’m not about to say that I think the friggin’ Straight Dope Message Board is the proper venue for these kinds of broad semantic issues to be resolved, because it isn’t and they won’t, and I’m mostly just going to give that whole debate a miss and fight my battles thread by thread, but jesus… from where I’m sitting, there’s at least a little daylight between “literally anything ever about a woman’s body” and “Punishment? Naked from the waist down? I’m thinking … spanking. “Oh, you’ve been a bad girl, a very bad girl!””
Run to that daylight. Bask in it. Even if only for one glorious moment before you drag yourself up the hill to Calvary, feel the warmth on your face, and know that you have said a thing about a woman and haven’t offended everyone, because that isn’t that hard to do.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask where that daylight is and get an answer to that question.
And even in your extreme example that falls outside of the daylight, for a woman to march in a parade, naked from the waist down with a cross shaved into her public hair, while handing out condoms, and not to expect that sexual jokes will result from that is silly at best.
If she was in a business suit and gave a speech at the NOW convention about female rights and a poster said that she probably needs a hard dick in her ass, then that would cross the line, IMO. But these silly jabs do not need to be moderated, and if they will be, we need some guidelines.
twickster, come on, where the hell did you get that it was a serious conversation? Are you projecting that it *could *have been a serious conversation? Wishful thinking, perhaps?
I don’t care if it was a mod note or a banning, you guys are NOT being clear or consistent in your actions. Jokes about a half-naked girl aren’t automatically sexist because they’re dirty. It’s juvenile humor! This board and the Internet were founded on this shit.
Can we just get some clarity here for fuck’s sake? Nothing dirty as long as it involves a female? Is that the rule now? No jokes in MPSIMS threads that may or may not be “serious?” Only posts that a mod deems relevant enough to the topic at hand will escape without mod action?
How odd, as your actual note makes no reference to any of his bits of reasoning and actually included totally different reasons.
But again, let’s check your actual mod note, shall we?
Kindly explain which phrase is code for “that’s off topic”.
Perhaps “reflexive misogyny” doesn’t mean hating women, but it means posting off topic? How about “many women find [that] offensive”? Surely that’s code for “hey, those comments are off topic?” Oh oh oh, maybe all that talk about juvenile behavior and acting like 12 year olds was really code for “you know, the topic you’re discussing diverges from the 10 words the OP wrote which wholly and completely set out the topic under discussion in this Serious Thread.”
I’m sure that’s it, right?
..right?
I expected better reading comprehension from you.
But okay, I’ll go step by step and explain the links to you.
Balanced against those, you have a thread about a woman who went half naked, handed out condoms, dressed up like the pope and shaved her pubic hair in the shape of a cross, all to promote the idea that sex-for-fun is right and proper and it doesn’t only have to be sex-for-procreation-in-the-context-of-marriage. And in that thread, some people made jokes about how they’d like to have sex-for-fun with her. And they weren’t modded for being off topic, by the way, but being “reflexively misogynistic.”
Please read the mod note that started this thread. It was not about whether or not they were on topic, but whether or not they were “reflexively misogynistic” and, what’s more, whether or not they “offended” women on the Dope.
I see you’re unable to actually engage with them and need to rely on an ad hominem. And I also notice that you have absolutely no answer, at all, for why Scientific Racists are allowed but if women are “offended”, then their feelings must be protected. I suspect it’s because you realize it’s utter bullshit.
But no, it’s utterly unlike “hey, why can’t blacks just take a joke when I talk about how they’re all lazy watermelon thieves?” This was a ruling by an SDMB mod that comments reflecting sexual interest in a specific woman who isn’t a Doper and never was a Doper are really about hatred of women in general, and specifically that it wasn’t going to be allowed because women on the SDMB were “offended”. Even the argument that they were “off topic” is absurd, as there was no topic. The OP dropped off a link and provided ten words “Personally, I think it’s fantastic. Other people… not so much.” What was fantastic? Her nudity? The political statement? Supporting sex-for-fun? Well, we weren’t told. But evidently Twickster knew what the topic really was (perhaps through a similar method where she wrote a mod note about “reflexive misogyny” that “offends women”, but really meant to say “those comments are off topic”.) So, yes Tom, Twickster’s actual mod note, as opposed to her retcon of it, is indeed an argument that women are so weak, frail, emotional and unable to deal with anything that offends them that they must be protected. The correct moderator response to someone reporting a post with the note “I’m offended!” is “…so?” It isn’t “You poor defenseless dear, how on Earth could you cope with reading something you don’t like? We’ll silence those nasty men immediately!”
And, honestly, it borders on pathology to view healthy human sexuality as analogous to racism. I trust that you just realized your argument was beaten and were acting out of desperation, but it’s rather unseemly for you to be casting allegations like that around because I made the correct point that an adult woman should have the emotional maturity to read a sexual comment by and about some random stranger on the internet, without being so “offended” that she has to be protected. There is something seriously, seriously wrong when “I find her sexually desirable” is viewed as being at all similar to “I hate women.”
I am going to post on a completely different tangent of this moderator note:
One time in GD, Marley23 moderated a post directed at me that said, "You sound like a 14 year-old who doesn’t really know what he is talking about."The only reason the moderator note was withdrawn was because I was a fourteen year-old boy.
I would imagine that by that line logic, twickster’s moderator note should be moderated itself as no one can possibly be twelve on this message board without violating the registration agreement.
I don’t see how you can qualify it as a joke thread or a serious thread based on my OP. Some people thought it was silly, others thought it was serious. I don’t think I led on either way in the OP. The fact that it was in MPSIMS, not GD is what I consider most relevant.