Lower share of female regulars. What to do?

[Lamia]

I’ve been posting here a long time, and have seen the board culture become more hostile towards women. Sometimes it’s better for a while, but in general it’s gotten worse over time. Based on specific threads I remember and searched down this evening, I’d say the problem started around 2009. Interestingly, a Longform essay about online harassment of women I saw last night points to 2010 as the year when things started to get much worse for women on the Internet as a whole. I think it’s likely that the SDMB has been affected by a rising tide of misogyny on the Internet.

The really sad thing is, we have long-standing rules about not being a jerk, not hijacking threads, etc. These rules could have helped to protect our little island from the flood, had they been properly enforced. I trust that the Mods mean well and don’t want the SDMB to become some sort of He-Man Woman-Hater forum, but it seems that many of them have a huge blind spot when it comes to this sort of thing.

I hesitate to provide examples since I’ve seen how well that worked out for Sunny Daze in the current Pit thread, but here’s a fairly recent one. A few months ago in a thread called Formerly active lurkers: Why don’t you post any more? I posted this:

@Lamia

A while back I came up with a private “rule” for the SDMB that I think of as the “Page 2 Rule”. By page 2 of any thread about women being sexually assaulted, harassed on the street, etc., there will be posters defending the harassment/harassers. This often winds up derailing the thread. There may be exceptions to this rule, but to the best of my recollection it happens every single time, even in threads started for the explicit purpose of inviting women to discuss their experiences.

I wouldn’t call myself a lurker, but this sort of thing is a major reason why I don’t post here as much as I used to.

A Mod quickly replied saying he was concerned to hear that this had become such a problem and encouraged me to report such threadshitting whenever I saw it.

I am of course kidding. A Mod quickly replied to reiterate his previous reply to a different poster about how liberals harass women too (for context, the entire exchange begins with post #28 of the thread):

@Loach

I mentioned it not because people may defend it. I mentioned it because it was used as an offhand way to describe conservatives despite the fact that the current spate of abuse reports in the news is almost exclusiveky well known Hollywood liberals.

Thanks for reminding me how seriously the Mods take women’s concerns here, Loach.

As I mentioned in the Pit thread, I’ve been here so long that I don’t expect I’ll ever completely abandon the SDMB. However, I am going to be taking a break from posting for a while. It probably won’t be for too long and I don’t expect I’ll be much missed even if it is, but if anyone wonders why there’s one less woman around then they can look back at this post for my reason. There are too many sexist jerks here, and the Mods don’t do enough about it.