This was always my understanding of the rule as well. A poster can say misogynist, racist, or any other type of hateful statements as long as:
They aren’t directed at a poster and
They aren’t obvious trolling to derail a discussion.
And short little joking, jabbing posts were always tolerated. For example the “pics or it didn’t happen” even in a thread asking for medical advice for swollen breasts. While it may be juvenile and distasteful, a lot of things are. That post can be ignored and the topic of the thread maintained.
I don’t see a reason for this shift. It simply serves to stifle debate by limiting speech.
As an outsider to the “board culture” here I will say that I have noticed a recurring trend among long-term middle-aged posters to make wink-wink comments about what turns them on at every opportunity. I don’t think it’s misogynistic (especially since the women do it too) but it’s gross as hell, especially since it seems you’re actually getting off on unwillingly involving other people’s reactions in your sexual envelope-pushing.
Misogyny (actual misogyny) isn’t cool, but the Internet parody-feminist line of “since my life is a mess no one is allowed to enjoy anything, therefore humor itself is misogynist” shouldn’t become the norm either.
Oh give me a break. If the moderation makes this place unenjoyable for people, what would you expect them to do? Of course they’ll leave. So stop with this “ball, home” nonsense.
Sounds like “plenty of women” have done the same thing. Does that make them just as immature and intolerant in your eyes? Taking their ball and going home because they don’t like something here?
I’m sure we’ve lost some Christians and Muslims and Conservatives and Libertarians and people who don’t like swearing and non-Americans over the years for things that are said and accepted here as well. Does the fact that they don’t stick around mean that they “Wah-wah-wah took their ball and went home?” It just means they didn’t like some aspect of how the board operated and left. Many of them even explain their reasons for leaving before they go. There’s no need to cast them as babies. And if there’s a new policy that a chunk of us view as ridiculously strict and unnecessary, we have the right to leave without being cast as such too. And I would think, this being a for-profit entity, and a community that many of us have spent a good chunk of our lives at, we have the right to explain why we are so unhappy that we are leaving, should it come to that.
Right, but in the FinnAgain post I responded to, he compared uncomfortable-making comments about a woman’s body to… comments about how cool you thought a mosque was. He seems to want to think that “admiring women” should get a pass because “Hey, they’re compliments!”
Except, of course, they usually aren’t at all. Really, a better-fitting analogy for the comments in that thread would be something like “Oooh, I’d like to rub my hard dick all over that minaret.”
In short, I absolutely agree with you about FinnAgain.
Which, coincidentally, is something I neither said nor implied. But in this case the issue does indeed seem to be lead by the Offenderati.
Nope. We can tell them to put on their big boy and big girl pants. We can expect adults to take responsibility for their own emotions, and you (plural) being sad is not a crisis on my part. Your (plural) hurt feelings do not grant you special privileges. Thinking that trumpeting one’s thin-skinned pains grants someone not just sympathy, but control is an absurdity.
Please read for comprehension. The claim was made that telling a woman she was attractive and sexually desirable was exactly as offensive as telling her that she was hideous and you wouldn’t fuck her with someone else’s cock. No mention was made of how that’s only true if you’re hitting on a woman. I pointed out the error in that formulation. Of course, I also pointed out that it’s also wrong for hitting on people, as some women like and indeed prefer raunchyness, and some enjoy hearing the exact same sentiments expressed with a bit of subtlety and playfulness.
The idea that any one person (and to be frank I generally really enjoy Little Nemo’s posts) can become the sole arbiter for what is and isn’t offensive for 7 billion human beings stretches credulity far past the breaking point.
It’s not at all trivial. To begin with, this is a very real slippery slope if this is an actual principle that’s actually going to be applied. Or it’s catering to a vocal minority simply because they made a big stink, which is an awful precedent.
One of us is demanding that other people be restricted due to the uncontrolled emotional response that others experience when reading their posts, and that he and his cohort should get to be the arbiters of Moddable Good Taste. The other is saying that we should all just live and let live and not get so bent out of shape about ribald humor on an anonymous message board that isn’t even addressed at Dopers in any case.
Between the two of us, lefty, it’s not me that needs to get over himself.
I agree completely with this. The overpowering urge I get to reach through the internet and throttle these people is in fact very similar to the violent urge I get when people jump into a perfectly good, totally herp-free thread just to shit out a Douglas Adams quote and waddle away chortling. It’s trite and anti-comedic to the point of making me dry heave. These things may be jokes, but they’re such shitty jokes that if being told to stop saying them makes you want to leave the board, then I volunteer to help you pack your bags.
The message board administration has a tough row to hoe, because from the very beginning, the Straight Dope community has consisted largely of Comic Book Guy-type people. Some of them, when they stop trying to be “funny”, even have relevant things to say. But when they keep at their tiresome schticks at every conceivable opportunity and nobody ever tells them to tone it down (and has there actually even been any more action taken than a mod saying “Hey, that’s unpleasant, please stop”? It’s not exactly fucking North Korea over here.) , it’s gonna make some other people decide to go to a message board with a, shall we say, higher tone. (And don’t fool yourself that such a place can’t be home to high-spirited debate about controversial topics. Those topics just won’t have people jumping in just to say they’d like to erotically spank someone with a shrubbery.)
Bottom line is, it’s really a question of which crowd you’d rather lose. Maybe the admins will decide they don’t want to alienate the contingent of old men who think they are funny but really, really aren’t. They have, admittedly, been here for longer than most of the rest of us. But I’d argue that they are kind of a relic of the time that the reason nobody ever complained on the internet when you made gross, unsolicited comments about other people’s nipples was because there weren’t really very many women around to voice their objection.
But now there are. And the future of internet discussion boards is only going to leave the insular, neckbeardy days of 1991 usenet binaries further and further behind. In what e-era will the SDMB decide to plant its cleats?
Again, I direct you to my answer in post number 72. More specifically, about how the mods decided to come down a little harder on those type of posts, even if made as a joke.
You might not like or agree with that answer, but that doesn’t change what the answer is.
This is probably the best meta-post about Internet forums that I’ve ever read, and it would be good for other forums besides this one to take heed of it as userbases continue to age. The propensity of teenagers to respond to everything with pictures of cats and “u mad” is annoying; the propensity of those teenagers’ parents to try to do the same thing because they are desperate to look cool to teenagers, and also blather on about forty-year-old comedy sketches and their own penises, is worse.
I certainly take issue with your definition of “a lot”. Maybe you can count the number of offended posters and contrast that with the total number of posters or even the ones that weren’t offended.
Because it sure seems that board policy is being weighted to a very vocal but very small group of people.
Who said anything about “classiness”? Not me: I am a defender of interesting, non-unfunny comedy and substantive, insightful commentary. I am Kevin Conroy’s Batman and you are Victor Buono’s King Tut.
The people who disagree with the direction the moderation is going in are all just old neckbeard Comic Book Guys.
That’s hilarious in a thread about misogyny that you are bringing out some stereotypes to shame men. The whole reason that “neckbeard” is an insult is because it implies that a man is poor, that he doesn’t have the social approval of women, and that he is unattractive physically.
For your next act, you should call everyone that disagrees with you mad, bitter, a virgin, sexually frustrated, or double down and directly call the people you disagree with fat and ugly losers.
