I’m not sure a message board is the best medium for that though (especially a message board that doesn’t have much patience for bigots).
However there is some encouraging psych. science showing that parasocial attachments work just as well as real ones. That is to say : people being confronted with positive portrayals of people of other races, other orientations etc… on TV or on YouTube and even in video games tend to become more tolerant of them, just as people tend to be more tolerant who grow up and live in more diverse communities. Not always (it can go the other way as well), but more often than not. Basically people tend to go “huh, They’re not so different after all” ; and this even if the They in question aren’t “real”. This because the lizard brain doesn’t differentiate between liking a real person and liking the image of one.
I suppose a message board does work too as far as parasocial relationships go - but it’s more abstract and I don’t think the lizard brain gets in on the action. Like, I know **monstro **is a black person and **margin **is a woman… but they’re really just text and opinions when it comes down to it. Who they are as persons, what they look like, how they come off, even class signifiers don’t really get into that mix to any perceivable extent. They could all be dogs for all I know.
How many people do you suppose have had epiphanies about racism or sexism due to questions on the SDMB over the years?As far as I can tell, few or none. Do you think it’s worthwhile to insult and frustrate many people on this board by allowing racist questions because one or two people might potentially experience an epiphany?
Jragon mentioned white men engaging in “civil debate” as if it were mental masturbation. That’s precisely the kind of mentality I would expect message boards are suited for. Somebody comes here to get a rise out of critically thinking (I know I do, and this is me projecting myself). In doing so, they end up learning something and becoming a better person.
It’s stressful, yes, but to me that is the trade-off.
I can’t speak for others, and I don’t have the experience here to make a guess. I have tried really hard to jump on the anti-misogyny vibe here but I just can’t seem to make the right connections.
And I do think it is worthwhile, possibly because I do not share, and cannot comprehend, the frustration. I might agree that individual instances are hijacks or advocate violence, but I would not go so far as to outlaw sincere and non-malicious positions that border on transphobia, mysogyny, racism, etc. In threads about kittens or sports? Sure, leave that stuff at the door. But in threads about those very subjects?
And, well, I’m sure I’m biased in that, but I have a hard time putting “bigot” and “intellectually stimulated” in the same Venn diagram. Or at least “intellectually honest”. I don’t really get how one could be bigoted and have a critical look at oneself at the same time. Certainly the racists and bigots in my life are the least self-aware people I know.
“Civil debate” to some of these guys means they get to claim that if they eschew the “n-word” in favor of “urban” or “thug” or “underclass” or whatever dogwhistle they’re using that they’re not racist, even if they believe and use every last racist stereotype that exists, they get to claim they’re not racist. It’s even worse with sexism because what seems to strike the usual offenders as unjust is that they can’t use all the comforting slurs on women that they always have. The response to a slur hurled against a woman isn’t, “that’s awful!”, it’s, “Well, SHE IS.” Every rape victim gets accused of lying-----and no woman is ever defended with, “Well, she’s innocent till proven guilty.”
Another factor is the fact that these guys AVOID information. They ask for cites, but never read them. Their bigotry is their bedrock. They avoid the reams of information available to cling to the same bigoted beliefs, always using the dogwhistle defense. There’s also a curious belief that if they do not announce they are racist or sexist, they cannot be identified as such.
Eight years ago a bunch of guys ganged up and attacked an 11-year-old gang rape victim on this board. They attacked her choices, her clothes, her relationships----but the guys, the rapists, were utterly invisible. (Kind of like how in the abortion “debate” the woman gets entirely erased, as if only the fetus exists.) It’s an article of faith here that rape victims lie. It also seems to be the belief here that if you use dogwhistles and euphemisms, you can get away with polite racism or sexism.
That’s an easy tradeoff because let’s face, it is not particularly stressful for you if you are being honest. Certainly not compared to a black man who has to see the biannual “are blacks racially inferior?” debate. Certainly not compared to a rape survivor having to watch the latest “why did she wait to call the cops?” discussion
History is chock full of them. Consider Emmanuel Kant, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle even. Or as you claim to live in France, Charles Fourier.
What you describe does not fit my idea of civil debate. Using unwarranted slurs, holding double standards, refusing to read citations, attacking other participants in the debate, these do not conform to my idea of civil debate. If someone pulled that on me, I would report them.
I will agree with you on that.
(are you serious about slut-shaming an eleven year old member who shared a rape story? Here? what the fuck?)
Maybe this makes me a bigot or something, but if I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it. I don’t want this to be a safe space for me and my cherished ideas, nor for you and yours. That doesn’t mean I’ll participate in threads that I don’t like, but I don’t take it personally if someone makes a thread questioning the intelligence or worth of my race or religion. I might not even read the thread. I put up with that stuff all the time, not nearly as much as my parents but still I think I have pretty thick skin. Seeing some random internet person open a thread to debate such topics just doesn’t bother me.
The most stressful threads for me are political threads. Sometimes, I just can’t wade into a political thread. Politics isn’t a core interest for me and I tend to get piled on anyways. In that sense, I can sort of understand why people don’t like participating in political threads, or racist threads, or sexist or transphobic or what have you. But what prompts the leap to, let’s ban these topics entirely?
If you two say there are bad, blatant racist posts commonly in the Pit recently, I will accept that- we all know what a morass the Pit is. But I post in GD nearly daily and I dont remember any such stuff for quite some time.
I notice this direct personal insult gets a note, whereas my feeble attempt to be funny got a warning.
Certainly my post could have been read as saying that poster was acting like ostrich with his head in the sand, sure. But this is a direct accusation of sealioning. There is no other possible interpretation and not even a attempt to soften it by adding a emoticon.
It appears Margin is talking about that last link. if so, there doesnt seem to be anything like “Eight years ago a bunch of guys ganged up and attacked an 11-year-old gang rape victim on this board. They attacked her choices, her clothes, her relationships----but the guys, the rapists, were utterly invisible.”
kambuckta replied*: Nobody has said this is not a big deal, in fact the opposite that this is a VERY big deal.
Nobody has said that the little girl’s behaviour caused or mitigates the culpability of the men involved.
Nobody is attacking the child who was raped.
You are wilfully misrepresenting what people are actually saying in this thread.
Cut it out.
Oh, and FTR, I’m a woman, and I know plenty of male shrieking harpies too. Idiocy on this scale knows no gender boundaries it seems.*
Yes, the third one is the one I’m speaking of. But you’d better not offend the Devil’s Advocates who want to call the 11-year-old’s rapist her boyfriend, lest you get pitted by the sort of guys who have somehow avoided the history of the word “hysteria.”
It’s not just rape, though accepting and endorsing vicious rape myths means that even 11-year-old girls are considered fair game for slut shaming.
Argue against slut shaming and rape apology and see what happens. Oh, and don’t you dare get angry at the endless verbal attacks by gangs of men, angry that their attacks on a pre-teen were criticized. Attacking women as emotional, hysterical, nuts, and so forth has an actual history in the world. It links in with the “Women on their periods, hurr durr,” trope that Trump himself invoked. “She was bleeding out of her eyes, out of her ears, out of her…wherever.”
It’s not just one dude saying this one time on one message board. It’s a political party that runs the country, it’s millions of guys, it’s the background in every woman’s life, where a lot of women can tell you how they got groped or harassed at ten or 11 by their dad’s boss or mom’s coworker or a guy on the bus or…whatever. That guy on the message board is just another straw.
I’m old and expected this stuff would be eradicated by now. All it took to deny it was fancy language and utterly refusing to take it seriously. For decades. Now my nieces are dealing with the exact same crap.
For starters, you cannot change a word like “harpie” retroactively so that the sexist history is erased.
Secondly, I guess we’re going to ignore the whole dogwhistle thing because unless somebody says, “I hearby blame this victim,” nothing apparently qualifies as victim blaming. In a case where the victim was 11, treating her like an adult or not centering her age is victim blaming. She’s 11. She cannot consent to anything, she cannot have a nineteen-year-old boyfriend. He’s a rapist. When somebody comments the victim had a habit of wearing makeup, that’s victim blaming. When somebody comments that the victim wore short skirts, that’s a victim-blaming dogwhistle. When somebody blames “two parent homes” that’s taking the blame off the rapists and blaming society. It’s also a rightwing trope that subtly blames single mothers and makes fathers necessary to not produce rapists.
If you can’t get all the subtle little pieces there, and if you won’t go to the second link I posted, there’s no point.
It might be informative for Dopers to read the 2011 thread, and consider if a rule classing it as “misogyny” or “slut shaming” would tend to lead to more reasonable debate.
Must it REALLY be pointed out that “I use [sexist word] on men, ergo it’s not sexist,” does not work? You’re using a female pejorative…on a man. The insult is because you’re saying he’s acting like a stereotype that has been used on women for thousands of years. Now, what does that imply?
Claiming that a poster is sealioning isn’t a ‘direct personal insult’ any more than accusations of ‘ad hominem’ and ‘straw man’ arguments, which happen all the time. The note was for being snarky.
