How accepting/tolerant is the Dope?

Oh fudge, my bad. Puts dunce hat on.

It’s ok…I’m sure if the joke had involved a ladle, you would have gotten it! :wink: :smiley:

Until they are produced in an equal number, they won’t reflect reality or interest the women my age who are retired, on their own, have time for the matinees and can’t find much of anything to see except maybe one every three or four weeks.

The population is aging and increasingly female and the movies are not.

jgoddess, with a name like yours, I would have thought that you would have been interested in movies about women as well as men. Any speculation as to why?

Thelma and Louise wasn’t exactly great cinematic history, but it was interesting and worth my time.

The very fact that society tends not to find women as interesting as men is telling in itself. That is quite a message to send to ten and twelve year olds. (Won’t somebody please think of the children?) :eek:

And Sarahfeena’s given up hope of moving beyond the traditional roles. Evolution has determined that men should be chefs and women should do most of the cooking at home. :dubious:

Exactly. And the curriculum changed because people didn’t give up and say that it’s hopeless. It’s just changed more in school and in children’s entertainment than it has in adult entertainment.

Anyone remember Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda?

Oh, sure, Zoe, that’s exactly what I said. I NEVER said that women “should” or men “should” do anything. I am quite pleased and gratified that both men and women have choices for what they want to do with their lives.

But if you believe that evolution has nothing to do with the way gender roles exist in our culture, then you really need to get yourself to an anthropology class or two. Life isn’t about fighting a battle for some artificial construct, it’s creating a world where individuals have the opportunity to do what makes them happy. You may find it strange that the vast majority of women want to raise a family, and are willing to make sacrifices in their careers to do it, but it is a fact nonetheless.

Absolutely…I grew up on it, and it helped shape my way of thinking about men & women.

Who said I’m not interested in movies about women? I really don’t tend to be a movie buff, and what I do like tends to run to Pixar, comedies, or Jackie Chan.

I do like romantic comedies in general. One thing that I am not now and have never been interested in are tearjerkers. I loathe them. There aren’t words strong enough for how I feel about them.

Thelma and Louise? A horrible movie in my opinion that sought to cash in on all of the worst things about male-dominated movies. Just because it was women didn’t make it worthwhile to watch people make violent asses of themselves and die.

My husband, on the other hand, generally loves chick flicks of all stripes, including Thelma and Louise.

There’s been a lot of misinformation spread about what pissed enough people off to get me tossed off the Dope for a month. It wasn’t that I was writing in too much detail about my personal bondage practices. I’m not a TMI/MPSIMS poster, and never have been.

It was that in a particular forum, Cafe Society, I was writing about bondage in threads that were not necessarily about bondage.

There’s a reason for that. I have been writing reviews and essays for years about the bondage content of mainstream movies and TV shows, mostly sending them up but also pointing out when some startling bondage imagery popped up unexpectedly in the mainstream. So, I know a LOT about the topic. And very often when mainstream TV or movies came up for discussion, I would discuss the bondage aspect because that was something I could contribute that no one else already had.

Some people were offended by all this posting about bondage imagery in mainstream movies and TV shows in Cafe Society, many could give a shit, and a few seemed to like my posts along these lines. But you know how it is. When a few noisy types get worked up over a subject, they can generally have their way even if most people really don’t care about it. Especially if they are happy and willing to repeatedly post … misinformation … on the topic.

As for my interest in bondage imagery in the mainstream, it’s very simple: I consider bondage scenes in the mainstream to be almost subconscious manifestations of where the mainstream culture is with regard to bondage imagery. It’s a lot like gay interest in finding homosexual subtext in ostensibly straight relationships in mainstream movies and TV shows. When you are attuned to such things you pick them out very easily.

Now, as to my assertion that homosexual posts of a similar nature would be accepted much more readily than bondage posts, well, it’s been happening all along. In almost any thread about hotties, you will find gay people expressing their admiration/love/lust/whathaveyou for a member of the same sex in some movie or TV show or other and it gets pretty much accepted just as readily as people expressing their admiration/love/lust/whathaveyou for a member of the opposite sex.

But if I say, “Hey that blonde honey who was tied up in “Chupacabra Terror At Sea” did a WONDERFUL job of waggling her breasts as the monster approached” well, whoa! That’s bondage. No can do.

Even more telling, there was a period of months when MPSIMS was regularly visited by threads along the lines of, “Hey, straight guys, have you ever wanted to do it with another guy?” and “Hey, straight guys, have you ever tripped and have your dick wind up in some guy’s butt?” Threads whose heavy-breathing nature was incredibly obvious. If I had posted a thread along the lines of, “Hey, vanilla gals, have you ever been tied up innocently, like in a dorm prank or games at summer camp, and gotten turned on by it?” I could just hear the vapors! The horrors! Evil Captor at it again, call out the goon squad!

I still post to the Dope because, even though I’ve been called a one trick pony, it’s a lie and always has been. The bulk of my posts have always been on topics other than bondage. Nowadays I just don’t post on bondage-related topics unless someone else has brought them up or it’s very relevant to the topic at hand. You guys are missing a wealth of bondage-related information thereby, but it’s mostly your loss. I know some of the posters who are in this thread will not miss my posts bondage-related or otherwise, but hey, I’m not here for the folks who hate my posts anyway.

EC, as I have posted before, you’re not a one-trick pony. But you do, as you note above, have a favorite trick. And as pointed out by Miller, you seem to be somewhat blind to the social boundaries you cross when posting on your favorite subject.

As **Sarahfeena **said above, part of the problem may be that your screen name ties into the subject as well. If I brought The Legion of Super-Heroes into multiple discussions, it would be rather obvious. Have you considered trying on a different name?

I am not sure what you mean by “social boundaries” but as a general rule I don’t think it’s a good idea to let the online equivalent of Ned Flanderses set the social norms on any message board that’s interested in actual communication.

My screen name isn’t a big deal to me, but I don’t see any point in changing it after more than 10.000 posts. I think most folks who are inclined to have any sort of opinion at all about me have formed one by now.

I don’t want to offend you, and I think you get piled on unfairly at this point. But I think you’re missing something if you characterize my wife (that would be Dangerosa, by the way) or **Miller **as “Ned Flanderses”. You’re getting feedback that the level of information you post, and the context in which you post it, makes some people uncomfortable. You’re feeling attacked (at least I infer that you are) and you’re being defensive. That’s an understandable and human reaction, but it’s causing you to miss the valuable information you are getting: the way you communicate makes some people feel uncomfortable.

Possibly-analogous experience from my life: As a manager, part of my total compensation is in a “long-term incentive” package. It takes a few years to arrive, but it’s worth many thousands of American dollars. Getting it depends on performance (a criterion on which I do very well) and “living the values”, which is mostly corporate code for “not being a dick at work.” Two years ago, I didn’t get the long-term incentive, because a couple of people had taken offense to my behavior in two specific instances. For two incidents, totaling perhaps 20 minutes of the total work time over a year, I lost thousands of dollars.

This was unfair, and stupid for my company to do, because it removed the golden handcuffs that keep me there. But it was also a very definite message to me that my behavior mattered.

There’s nothing here that really penalizes you for behaving in a way that other people don’t like. The worst case is that you get banned, which won’t kill you.

But if you value spending time here, please take the constructive criticism seriously.

Yes, they have, and seeing your name reminds them of it. If you want to break the cycle of reinforcement, changing your name is way to do it.

[post=8858209]Some things never change.[/post]

Theatrical movies may not be, but television movies certainly are. See the aforementioned Lifetime/Oxygen/Hallmark set. Those three channels probably produce an equal number of movies that star women to make up for all those other “men’s” movies.

This is the kind of argumentation displayed when someone has made up their mind and starts making shit up to support their conclusion. It’s not a particularly successful technique. Made-for-tv “movies” are not equivalent to theatrical releases, and you know it. Even if they were, the output of the rest of the channels (Sci-Fi/HBO/Cinemax/etc) is male-dominated, throwing off the balance.

If you want to make the case that we’re about as equal as practically possible, please back it up with more than the occasional opinion thinly disguised as fact.

As opposed to those that “have their mind made up” about how repressed they are and cling on to old hats like the discrepancy in pay to “prove” that women are still repressed?

And yours and hers isn’t opinion because…??

Here ya go: Cite.

Women watch much more TV, while men go to the theater much more often.

I mean, it couldn’t be that movies targeted for women aren’t out in force in theaters because WOMEN tend to go to theaters less and movie producers know this and want to make the most money. No, it has to be about repression. :rolleyes:

Thanks for making my point about the intolerance of the Dope so well, Ellis Dee. Note that the vast majority of the post wasn’t about bondage at all: it was about a general theory of what makes movies/TV shows interesting. There is a link to an article on my site which explains the theory of cheese more fully, in the context of an old TV series called “Planet of the Slavegirls” which had no slavegirls, which is bondage related, but that’s because it’s my damn site and I can write what I like to on it. If you don’t want to read about it, you have the option of not copying and pasting the link. How easy can it get?

But the existence of that link turns the whole post into a bondage post for Ellis Dee. You can see what I’m dealing with.

I fail to see what **Ellis Dee’s ** complaint is in this case. What did **EC ** do wrong this time?

He dropped a completely irrelevant “review” and a NSFW link to a bondage website in the middle of an otherwise perfectly innocuous discussion: “Here’s an example of what I’m talking about” . . .good, examples are good . . . “which you can find reviewed” . . . irrelevant, the quality of Buck Rogers eps is not under discussion . . . “at this BONDAGE website” – aaaaand there it is again. It comes across like he literally cannot have a discussion that does not devolve back to bondage, or that IHO cannot be improved by a little bondage.

He says he no longer posts on bondage-related topics unless “it’s relevant to the topic at hand,” but it seems like in his mind it is very, very frequently relevant to the topic at hand. If someone starts a thread on how to roast a chicken, and EC replies, chances are good someone’s going to be tied up before the end of the recipe.

Now, I’m not saying he’s like that all the time. It’s not like I’m following the guy around the Boards to see what he posts on. But since you’ve asked what Ellis Dee was talking about – that’s what he was talking about.

And I’m not sure how this thread became a pile-on of Evil Captor, anyway. My point was simply that notions of what degree of tolerance should be given will vary depending on how invested one is in the topic. EC is very invested in this topic and so it is not surprising that he thinks, if other people become impatient with it (and him), they are being intolerant. I can understand that POV, but I don’t agree with it. But it’s not my intention to participate further in a specific critique of him.

Fine, instead of using shorthand, I’ll spell it out. In any message board, you have a problem of where do you set limits on what people can post. Some people – let’s call 'em “robustos” – are most comfortable with little or not restrictions on what you can post. Other people – let’s call 'em “eggshells” – are made uncomfortable by a lot of things and tend to want a lot of restrictions on what can be posted. Most folks fall in between these extremes. The problem for most board moderators is, where do you draw the line? Toward the robustos or toward the eggshells?

You have to have SOME limits because the Internet is in fact infested with trolls who will completely destroy any message board’s usefulness as a communications medium if given a free reign. I saw this happen once on a bondage-related board, where the owner/moderator created a page which was essentially unmoderated so that anyone could discuss anything they liked, in any way they liked. It was immediately rendered useless by several trolls who moved in and disrupted any actual communication that might have occurred in the page. It was an amazing demonstration of just how stupid and sordid trolls are.

But given that you do need moderation, where do you set your limits of toleration? I would argue that the lever should be set as far toward the robustos and away from the eggshells as is possible. A message board is a communications medium after all – you want people to communicate as freely and openly as humanly possible on it, without inviting trolls to take over. Eggshells are by nature exclusive – they want certain subjects forbidden, or at least highly restricted in how they can be communicated about, because they make them uncomfortable, or because they feel they violate certain norms of behavior they think should exist on the board. In doing so, they prevent others from communicating freely. The onus is on them to prove that their comfort is more important than others’ freedom to communicate.

And when I read that my posts violate “certain (unnamed) social rules” well, I start thinking “eggshell.” I have a suspicion that if those unnamed norms were spelled out, a lot of Dopers beside me would find them objectionable. Eggshells always tend to assume that everyone is like them with regard to their comfort zones. This tends to be true if they dominate a board sufficiently, because they drive everyone else out.

That make things more clear?

Yah. I bug the eggshells. I’m OK with that. I don’t think it’s a good idea for the eggshells to have their way in this regard, but my suspension is proof that they already have. I’m curtailing my posting about bondage not because I agree with the eggshells, but because I know damn well I’ll get banned if I don’t. This is not agreement, persuasion, or anything else consistent with logic: it’s raw force. If I didn’t have interests in other topics (which is what some people seem to think, as if my every post is a conspiracy to post on bondage-related themes) I wouldn’t bother to post here at all.

Perhaps not a good analogy. In the workplace, the man with the dollar rules. This place is a little more amenable to logic and persuasion.

I think it is more important to fight the tendency toward creeping eggshellism than to get along with them. I see them as a threat to the Dope.

I agree, this thread is not about that. I do agree with you that the concept of “tolerance” is over-valued and often expected to be applied in the wrong places. If we are all so tolerant, what are we doing debating one issue or another all the livelong day? Isn’t the whole POINT of that to try to get people to change their opinions? Doesn’t sound like tolerance to me!