That would be a fine question if there were indeed a specific term for black men that commit crimes. A joke answer of “African Americans” would be rightfully modded.
This sort of things interests me. I think it exposes a certain type of person. There are people who tell off colour jokes, they know they’re offensive and they know why they’re offensive, and they tell them because they’re being edgy / satirical / whatever, but they know what they’re doing. These people probably aren’t actually racist / misogynistic / etc. On the other hand there are people who have learned by rote that certain things shouldn’t be said. They generally get by ok by not saying the things they know shouldn’t be said. But sometimes they say something that is not on their list but has a similar effect. They are told off and become confused because they never understood the issue in the first place.
I would have had no problem if the thread just specified “person” rather than “woman”. I saw trouble coming and it arrived.
I have no idea what a mod didn’t step in and suggest this fix. Instead Colibri snapped at people objecting to a clear issue. So a thread running off the rails was encouraged by a mod.
There have been some high profile people quitting here because of mod refusals to control obvious bigotry. I am very worried for this board in this regard.
The OP was trying to remember/figure out a specific gendered term he had encountered. In another thread, the conversation could turn to why a term was gendered, or whether someone should use a gendered term. But in a thread about “what is this term?” why would we want the OP to give less information than he had about its use and connotation?
Because that’s not the question that was being asked.
The OP asked a specific, narrow question. You suggested a different question. That would have been a hijack. If someone asked for other terms for “womanizer,” would you insist that it be expanded to similar terms for women?
In general, I am not going to shut down or redirect a thread merely because there is a possibility that some people will make inappropriate jokes. In that case, I would need to shut down every thread that mentioned current politics or the Catholic Church or gender issues.
And I’m not sure how issuing notes against inappropriate comments is seen as “encouraging the thread running off the rails.”
Correct. And given the recent tendency to restrict the use of “thug” to refer only to black criminals, the question is not so outlandish.
On the one hand, if somebody started an IMHO thread, “what are your favorite slurs for women who manipulate men” that would surely be shut down immediately.
On the other hand, I don’t think we want bona fide GQ questions on a forum dedicated to fighting ignorance to be out of bounds solely because they touch on a sensitive area.
It seems to me that the problem here was that the question was sufficiently vague that even with tight moderation the valid GQ answers would be barely indistinguishable from an IMHO “list of favorite slurs” thread. Perhaps the right balance for GQ in difficult areas like this is to require that questions should be more narrow and specific. It’s a fine line to draw, though.
Insist? No. Is it offensive and would hope that it be modified to include all people, you bet.
This is what a good mod can do with an iffy thread. Nudge things in a better direction. Definitely not in the bad direction.
Quite honestly, I think your suggestion is ridiculous. If somebody started a thread asking for offensive slurs for black people, would it “nudge it in the right direction” to change the thread to a list of non-racial slurs for people in general?
It’s an open question whether a thread like the one under discussion is appropriate, but dodging the issue by changing it to a completely different question just seems like a bizarre idea to me.
Unless the expectation is that the user base here will be triggered to misbehave by the topic, there should be nothing went with the question that was posed in the thread. And my expectation was that I’d get a factual answer and that would be that.
If one was to ask, “What is that term for a guy who likes to beat on women?” The answer might be “wife beater”. It’s a factual question with a factual answer. Yes, it’s a negative term, but it’s a negative term for a clearly defined, negative sort of person of whom there is no implication that that personality type is common or defines their gender, nor does it indicate approval of that type of personality.
Now, granted, wife-beater does imply a male. By implication that the term exists, we might assume that some X% of men beat on their spouse while 0% of women beat on their partner, and that says something about the genders. And that’s obviously nonsense. So, sure, it may make sense to try and reduce usage of such terms.
But that’s a different discussion than someone asking a factual question in this website. They might be writing period dialogue, preparing a dictionary, writing a paper on gender-specific negative terms, etc. Even if we accept that general usage of such terms is not super kosher, that really doesn’t relate back to a factual question on a website that’s popular with fans of minutiae and facts.
Barely indistinguishable? 
What distinguishes the two is that your IMHO version not only explicitly invites folks to offer crude and insensitive expressions, it encourages their celebration. The GQ question is a simple request for factual information.
Well, obviously I understand that’s the theoretical principle. My point was that the framing of this particular question made the effective result similar, since it amounted to asking for a list of words that could be used as misogynistic slurs. I’m not suggesting that the OP had any deliberate ill intent, but that was the effect.
You can envision a thread in IMHO entitled “list your favorite misogynistic slurs” that had exactly the same list of words as responses. Is it really adequate that because a list of such words is in GQ the intent is not to “celebrate” those words?
That’s why I suggested a good balance for GQ might be to require more specificity, such as asking “what does vixen mean when applied to a woman?”
I believe a lot of people (rightly) complained about the misogynic lean of the board.
I would be totally OK if the moderation becomes a bit heavy-handed to correct this.
They are not some higher authority that has to be perfectly fair at all times.
While discussing measures to correct misogynic behavior, we can totally declare stuff to be too sensitive or (temporarily) out of bounds. Admitting you don’t know how to deal with something is perfectly in line with “Fighting Ignorance”.
If both threads were simply a list of terms, then fine. But the IMHO thread asks for your favorite term, and so it would be unusual for folks (especially here) to list the term without explaining why they liked it so much. Offering that info in the GQ thread goes beyond the factual. So, yeah, it’s possible for the two threads to be identical, but it’s highly unlikely.
But I think the real problem with a suggestion that such threads be subject to special moderation is that the mods don’t go around proactively looking into every thread to see if it has the potential to be offensive. Once the offensive posts had been either discovered or reported, the moderator gave direction as to what things posters should avoid posting going forward. Asking for the thread to be closed because some posters couldn’t resist making offensive jokes seems overly heavy handed to me. If you were to suggest that the first offenders should have been given a warning instead of a mod note, I think a good case could be made for that in light of the issue of misogyny that has been brought up quite a bit recently. Similar statements made about race would almost certainly be mod’ed with a warning.
I honestly don’t like threads being closed because some people can’t act properly. I don’t think it’s fair to the other people. I get why mods do it: it’s less work than going through it all, and it could still wind up that you can’t contain the thread if you try. But I’d like to see them try other techniques besides just notes followed by closure.
A second step might be a threadban for those who won’t listen? That seems underutilzed. I could also see topic bans for repeat offenders, as an attempt to avoid a suspension.
This would be ideal.
It is indeed an issue deciding if a thread is merely “iffy” or really just completely wrong, like your example.
I’ve seen an uptick lately in threads with “innocent” questions that are often loaded questions, many of the bigoted ilk. If the mods decide to let the thread continue then some … moderation would seem to be in order.
Which is exactly what happened in the thread in question.
Expanding the question in the OP to include both sexes would have been pointless. It wouldn’t have prevented sexist remarks about women, but merely would have opened it up to sexist remarks about men as well.
I think you missed his point. He wasn’t talking about “moderation” in general, but the specific solution you were proposing. If the problem is that a a poster is offending a group of people, that problem isn’t solved by expanding the size of the group.