I, and doubtless others, reported this. This kind of nasty misogyny should have no place on the board. Several people criticized dale in the thread.
Chronos, rather than saying that misogynist posts were unacceptable, explicitly declared it “valid”:
Chronos, this is the wrong call. It doesn’t matter if dale genuinely hates women’s sports so much that he’s sincere, it’s a nasty, contemptuous, bigoted post that shits up the thread. There’s no legitimate discussion to be had around that, and it wasn’t even a thread about gender in sports until he turned it into one.
If, under the current rules, sincere misogyny is “a valid part” of a discussion, the rules need to change.
Would it be acceptable in Cafe Society if a woman said, “Most novels written by men are unreadable” or “most movies directed by men are unwatchable?”
It might be offensive but it’s a legit opinion - especially given that the thread itself wasn’t about “Women’s sports in the Olympics” (in which case dalej42 would be threadshitting) but just Olympics events in general. The NCAA post was a threadshit, though.
Were it a thread about what kinds of novels are good or bad, hell no that wouldn’t be acceptable.
I don’t even know what “legit” means here. Do you mean that it’s a sincere opinion? No doubt. Do you mean that it’s an opinion that furthers discussion fruitfully? Nope.
The fact that the thread was asking about the best and worst in fact makes the comment more reasonable, IMHO (although I think dalej42 should have just said “I dislike women’s boxing the most” and omitted the first half of his sentence.)
If someone’s starting a thread asking about best and worst singers, and someone says “I dislike male singing in general but Michael Jackson is the worst of all” that would be fitting in the spirit of the thread.
I don’t understand the point in asking “if it happened to men would it be acceptable” types of questions. How would your opinion on this moderation be affected by either a yes or no answer?
It gets very frustrating to try to discuss misogyny and have the first handful of posts be focused on if this thing happened to men instead.
Fair enough. What if someone had said “I dislike women-written YA fiction in general, but Twilight is the worst?” in a thread about “which books do you like and dislike the most?”
It’s still relevant and on-point to the thread topic, although I would still argue that the first half of the sentence could or should be left out.
I typed, and then deleted from, my previous post a paragraph about how sometimes people want to engage in an endless series of increasingly strained analogies, and that having answered one, I had no interest in further strained analogies. I wish I hadn’t deleted that. No analogy is going to make a misogynist threadshit like dale’s okay.
It’s also not the same statement. That seems closer to the softer version I was going to mention: “I’m not a big fan of women’s sports in general, but I guess boxing is least fun to watch for me.”
I believe it is the objective statement that (most) women’s sports are “unwatchable” that makes it come off like he was trying to ruffle feathers.
I would argue it also matters that people often paint women’s sports as inherently inferior. Male singing isn’t treated that way. You’d probably needs something more like “Men are lousy teachers in general, but Mr. Brown is the worst.” to try and get close.
@IvoryTowerDenizen: I understand the frustration of relating things to men, but I also do think it can be useful to replace one group with another group to get the idea across if someone doesn’t get it. You just have to make careful selections.
This is the key element- we sometimes try to disentangle individual comments from historical social context. Women had to have federal laws passed to give them equal opportunities to play sports and too many people still believe the female sports are categorically less important and inferior to men’s sports. We can’t pretend that entire social context doesn’t exist whe we read a comment. Even on the off chance dale isn’t reflecting that attitude, many of the women reading it have heard that sentiment their whole lives and it really, really burns. We just can’t pretend the larger context isn’t part of the interpretation and impact.
FWIW, this larger idea isn’t limited to sports of course. It applies to comments that hit on issues with long histories of social injustice.
ETA:
I don’t want to hijack, and I understand the impulse to try to get people to see an issue from a vantage point that’s meaningful to them, it happens way too often and it’s unnecessary as it gives the impression that these issues only truly matter if men can see how it could harm them. This too, can get exhausting.[/quote]
Really? Lots of people will say NFL preseason football is unwatchable, maybe they’re kinda exaggerating, but it definitely isn’t the same as regular season NFL.
Yes really. You’re not talking about preseason, you’re talking about all the sports played by one gender. The commonality is explicitly clear in what you’re discussing.
I don’t follow football (or much of any other sport.) But that doesn’t seem to me to contradict my point. If lots of people are doing it, that doesn’t mean there’s no difference, it just means lots of people are denigrating the entire preseason, instead of just saying it’s not to their taste.