I think so, too. Certainly any dumb comment will be a hell of a lot more annoying the 1,000th time than the first.
And that’s what I’m talking about. When a lot of people take that attitude - either because they think someone else will handle it, because they don’t want to be a pain, or other reasons - things slip through the cracks and resentments eventually build up.
Perhaps you could have dispensed with the scare quotes and found one, or at least acknowledged that maybe I didn’t remember something from a ten-page thread or didn’t see something since I only started posting on page five. Oh well.
I said specifically that I’m not trying to blame anyone. I’ve asked the IMHO mods to post their opinions on the thread that we’re talking about, and they will if and when they can. But there are two sides here. It’s very rare for a post report to be simply overlooked. Other times posters and mods just don’t see eye to eye. That’s more common and we can talk about those instances. That’s a large part of what ATMB is for. But if people don’t report posts the odds that we will see and deal with a complaint go down by a very large amount because this is a pretty busy board. And I’ll continue to say I don’t believe for a minute that on the large scale, allowing for differences of opinion and even occasional errors, that this is something any of the mods wouldn’t take seriously or would deliberately let slide.
True, and there’s been too much of that in this thread alone.
Which is good. But I’m not blaming anybody when I say somebody has to be the first or else nothing happens. This is clearly something that’s been bothering at least some posters for a long time, and if nobody spoke up before I’m glad they’re saying something now - but if few posters or none were speaking up before, it’s kind of unfair to blame the staff for not being responsive because there wasn’t much to respond to.
I am a woman with full vagina and breast equipment. I’ve been a member since 2007, and lurked for years before that. I read threads all over the board, from the controversial to the highly mundane.
I’ve never noticed any sexism here, outside some random poster who usually gets an insta-ban for saying something clearly sexist, like all women are stupid or an obvious troll. I’ve never been offended as a woman by something someone says on these boards. The idea is absurd to me - I’m a Doper, consider myself part of the community here, but I don’t take it to heart. The lone exception was, ironically, was a group of women who were insulting about how I clean my vagina, and it descended into a direct implication that my husband was abusive. I was PISSED. But only for a day, and it would never have occurred to me to bitch at the mods about it.
I’m bothered by the idea that we would want to ban speech of certain kinds here. Now, if someone posts an obvious medical thread on their breast health, and some jerk chimes in with a pic request, them call them for threadsshitting, sure. But snark is snark, and the way a grown up handles it, IMO, is to ignore it. If its preventing you from getting a job, then report it. But a message board with a million different personalities? You have no right to demand that certain ideas be banned.
It’s whitewashing of the worst kind, since it flies under the flag of being “good for you”. I don’t care for the idea that other Dopers can decide what’s good for me.
IMHO mod ringing in with opinion.
I had seen the comment and passed it off as the kind of harmless joke/post that a topic like that might receive. I would have done likewise if the genders were reversed as well (and it was a guy making a “I think my dick is getting bigger” thread with a female making a joke about how photos were needed).
I file comments like that not usually under being sexist pigs but rather more “being human” (perhaps slightly immature, but still human).
Now if it became a common problem from the same poster time and time and time again and in multiple threads, I would definitely call the person on it and tell them to knock it off. Same with if it was much more serious in tone. But (IMO, but obviously YMMV) there’s a big difference between the type of joke Absolute made and displaying real, hard sexism or misogyny on the boards.
And for the second half, what if its a recurring problem from multiple posters but not a significant pattern of one poster? Do you moderate the person or the behavior? Because its being reported because the behavior is annoying, and the individual posters are not being warned for the behavior.
Further, I think the issue at hand is a more pervasive, perpetual low level of misogyny. The obvious stuff still isn’t really being moderated, but the low level stuff even less so.
What will that prove? Men and women are different, and generally have different sensibilities and senses of humor.
A better request would be to ask for examples of women snarking about how men throw their socks on the floor, or refuse to put the toilet seat down, or are terrible and whiny when they’re sick. Those are more accurate examples of what women throw down on men as “snark” and could be called sexist based on some of the opposite examples in this thread.
If you think a request for tit pics in a thread about a medical concern is akin to “omg men throw their socks on the floor!” I don’t have much to discuss with you. She specifically said the comment was ignored because she equated it to women asking for dick pics. My contention is that never happens. Ever.
Exactly. There is a long-time male poster who routinely posts stupid, sexist comments–so much so that I finally put him on my ignore list. But I never reported the posts even though, to my mind, they clearly violated the “don’t be a jerk” rule, mostly because I felt as though nothing would be done.
I would moderate the stuff on a case by case basis, most likely. Each case/example is different and sometimes different factors play in. To give the same moderation to every report that would come in about it wouldn’t be fair because of multiple things like words used, tone, context, etc.
Those are just examples, there are many other things.
I’m a guy, if you’re referring to me.
And I didn’t say it was ignored because I equated it to that. That’s not what I said at all.
I said I saw it as a harmless joke/comment that that type of thread might cause and that’s why I didn’t take action (myself–you’ll have to ask the other two IMHO mods why they didn’t see it fit to take action for their own reasons, because I don’t speak for them).
I then said “If it HAD been reversed, I wouldn’t have modded it either”. You say that never happens. Maybe not–and you’re right–I haven’t seen it yet----but that still does not change my answer: “I would not have modded it if it was reversed”.
So if you think that’s being sexist, it’s incorrect. Neither gender would have been noted in that specific case.
Now, another case? I’ll mod them as they come up, more than likely, and take them on a case by case basis.
I think one issue is having a poster say “this really bothers me” and the mod decision is essentially “it’s just a joke, lighten up”. I know full well you’d never say or think that directly, but for women we’re so often told to ‘lighten up’ when complaining about misogynistic behavior. Minimizing women’s complaints, by society, so often is the norm.
It’s frustrating to get your feelings of being treated inappropriatel,y dismissed.
…I will dispense with the scare quotes. I’ll quite confidentally state there have been more reports than you recall.
Look when you said this:
“And I’m surprised that in a lot of cases, people find it easier to shrug their shoulders and let a problem slowly become unbearable until it damages or ruins their experience than they do to press a button and report a post, or for that matter to just bring up the issue earlier.”
its not hard to see it as a classic example of victim blaming. People don’t just “shrug their shoulders.” Many of them did report. Many of them make comment in the thread in question. And some people do what I often do: stop posting for a while and walk away.
You might not have heard the message loud and clear in the past, but surely you are hearing it now. For me it goes right back to the Brightpenny is a loathsome bitch thread:: brightpenny was allowed to be bullyed in GQ and ATMB and I know for a fact that those incidents were reported. And there are still active mods here now who think that the way she was treated was just harmless fun.
Well yeah it has been bothering people for a while. And now people are letting you know. If you had simply said, “hey, going forward, it would be helpful if you could report posts that you think were over the line” I wouldn’t have been too bothered with your post. But your post had the implication that people were being too lazy to report: but that simply isn’t the case.
Except if a comment only ever exists in one direction, from men directed at women, your impression that its just a harmless joke equally distributed between genders is flat wrong.
It is sexist because the comment is objectifying towards women only. Only ever towards women. And we are reporting it, and it’s brushed off as a harmless joke because you don’t see the significance.
And frankly, we are taught to question our own accusations of sexism. “Am I humorless?” “Was that really sexist, maybe he would have been just as dismissive of another guy, but without the ‘Babe’ in there?”
We really really seem to go out of our way to make excuses for guys - even when we let them into our apartments to call a cab and they plop themselves down on our couch.
It isn’t until we all gathered together with these threads that we realized ‘hey, I’m not alone, this behavior really is questionable.’
And the whole point of this eleven page epic is that sort of thing really isn’t harmless. It makes female posters feel uncomfortable, and like they can’t talk about real, actual issues without inviting a bunch of sophomoric comments.
I don’t actually think anyone was being a sexist pig in that thread, because the board culture says that it’s ok to make those kind of swipes, that it’s no big deal, that it’s harmless. So when individuals do so, they are just living up to the culture around them. There isn’t any spiteful intent: it’s ignorance.
But that shit does do harm. It does make people feel like they can’t talk openly about all sorts of things. It drives people off. That’s why this is about board culture, not individuals: when shit like that goes on, it’s not about whether or no Absolute should be warned, it’s about the much milder stance of having a moderator come in and say “That’s threadshitting. Stay on topic”. It seems to me that that is what is really needed here: not a banhammer, not a purge, but a recognition that jokes about how you’d like to oogle or fondle a particular, specific poster because she’s a woman are not ok.
Not only that, although I appreciate that Idle came in to answer as a mod in that forum, it is sort of sickening that it’s his determination that we shouldn’t be offended by SHOW US YER TITTTSS! in a thread about a medical issue.
With as much respect as I can muster I believe he isn’t really someone capable of making that determination. Sadly I cannot (and no need to warn me, I will not) link here in this thread to info from another board but I really, really don’t think his judgment is trustworthy in a situation like this. Like, at all. His answer here about how he sees it as harmless illustrates that perfectly and lets me know not much has changed in his perspective since the first time I encountered his judgment on male/female interactions.
Feel free to include those of us who do feel that among the ‘we’. You don’t agree, that’s your prerogative, but don’t minimize the number of us who do.