He didn’t threaten me. He didn’t say he would hurt me. It was just a thought in the back of my mind that I was alone in the woods with a man who kept trying to undress me when I didn’t want him to.
I wasn’t fighting him off during sex. I just decided that giving in might be my better option. So is that changing my mind? I don’t know and still wonder about it. I wasn’t traumatized, or terrified and I still don’t know what to call it.
But from his point of view “no” didn’t mean “no”. He could be one of the guys posting about this girl who said “no” but he talked her into a “yes” with no idea of what happened from her point of view.
I’m very sorry it happened to you and I think it would be unreasonable to see it as anything other than a rape.
He may not have explicitly threatened you, but you were in a position where you reasonably believed anything other than having sex would have gotten you beaten up.
Okay, this thread is getting way beyond the scope of the original question.
(And FloatyGimpy, I’m sorry that happened to you. Yes, it’s forced sex … that’s rape.)
There’s people on this planet who have no problem at all thinking and doing the most heinous shit and that is sad but true. Regardless of where and how it comes about, it ain’t right.
About This Message Board is not an appropriate forum to get into these issues. There are other places on the board where these things can be explored and you’re encouraged to start and continue those conversations. Who knows, perhaps someone will even learn from it, understand, change, grow. Stranger things have happened here.
But just griping at those who may be ignorant or found lacking in understanding or clueless for empathy is probably not sufficient. And doing it here is not useful.
The Pit is an area of the board that is in many ways a free-fire zone. People say all kinds of things, express opinions, sometimes – most often – negative opinions. Highly negative opinions. They speak out in controversial ways and sometimes act out in ugly fashion.
To expect such an area to be sensitive to the feelings of others is unrealistic. If anything I would tend to think that any sensitivity would be perceived as weakness, an area to be exploited in argument or otherwise used against a participant in the discussion.
All that being said, there are times and issues and ways of expression that are too much even for The Pit. And if you see something that you believe is too much we ask you to report it as you would anything else that you found objectionable on this board. The same reporting mechanism is in place in The Pit as everywhere else, even if the standards for appropriateness are not the same.
Report what you find objectionable everywhere here. We may not agree with your judgment but we’ll look at it.
This wasn’t asked of you by me, but it’s still pertinent:
Rule of thumb: Avoid doing that.
And FloatyGimpy was raped, and Tracy Lord was obviously too young and unworldly if she would post about how a blouse “made her boobs look amazing,” and be surprised that she got comments back about it, the same as I could expect inane comments if I said that my new Speedo made my penis look amazing. She was inadvertently giving a cue that she liked to show off her breasts but didn’t know that others would pick up on that cue, even though she chose as a user name one very close to that of a particularly notorious porn star. Or she was trolling. As a father of daughters with friends as clueless as her I’m going with naive, with a side of stupid.
And MOL’s thread was fun, at least for the part of the first page I read. I sympathize with her because she’s living in a part of town where they frown on a sister ditching a body too publicly, so without a car her options were limited. But just a couple miles away she coulda dumped it in Gacy’s yard; cops wouldn’t be surprised to find another dead guy there. Then there’s the woods where OJ got rid of his knife. And more! Lotsa options if you have a car or work van.
But my serious point is that this is an odd sort of meeting place and we are still trying to work out the kinks. What is one person’s stupid joke is someone else’s raging sexism, and we can never be sure how someone will react. Another of my rules of thumb is that, especially now that we can be Googled, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want someone from HR reading. Sure, then you can’t describe how your Speedo is so tight that people can tell that you’re not circumcised, but do you really want people to know that? Save it for Facebook.
Ok, but nobody is really talking about the issue of “people say mean things in the Pit”. This isn’t a group of women complaining because people say mean things to them in the one place we’re allowed to say mean things to eachother. And this thread wasn’t for the purpose of exploring the heinous shit people have and will continue to say. It’s the pervasive culture of misogyny that goes unmoderated in every forum, many people have brought up examples of threads that are shining examples of what many people are referring to. If you’re essentially saying that nothing different will be done, nobody will be warned or asked to knock it off, then just come out and say that. Otherwise “take it to the Pit, but people can be mean there” doesn’t really answer the question.
Yeah, thanks for the recap (speaking of patronizing), but I read the thread before replying to your comment and I still think you are being disingenuous in your response to me. This thread was inspired by that other thread. The behaviors you were “generalizing” about occurred in that other thread. I was countering your “broad brush generalization” with an example of how it doesn’t always hold true, referencing that other thread. Your simply dismissing it as irrelevant doesn’t make it so.
Ok- I really little more to say, camille. You have proceeded to tell me what I was talking “really” about and what my motivations were and that I was patronizing and disingenuous. Frankly, when presenting the sequence of events to illustrate my POV is taken as a patronizing “recap”, there’s just not much more I can do. You’re taking offense when there just simply is none you need to take.
Obviously the thread(s) in question sparked the conversation, but as the person writing the posts, I know for certain that I was addressing the larger issue of anger sparked by saying “calm down” and calling “irrational” behavior in general. And I know that the posts I was responding to were also talking about the ideas in a general, larger sense, since those were the posts I was responding to.
I think you’re working hard to get offended at this. Saying “like a homeschooled autistic” isn’t calling all homeschooled children autistic but rather an autistic who is homeschooled. So please while you’re making an note be sure to note that you’ve read it completely wrong.
Yeah, by “homeschooled” I simply meant “having minimal contact with women”. Feel free to assume I said “autistic shut-in” instead. (I was hardly trying to make a point about homeschooling - not an issue I give much thought to.)
If I’m reading you all right, are you saying that Ibanez’s quote in the OP is perhaps odious, but doesn’t warrant a warning because it was in a Pit thread–that if he’d posted it in a different forum, it’d be warnable, but in the Pit it’s allowable?
I think what she’s saying— or this is how I read it, anyway— is that they’re not going to child-proof this board so that nobody ever gets an owie.
Due respect to ladyfoxfyre, but I don’t see how Ibanez’s comment, or two or three halfwits jumping on an easy boobie joke (however obnoxious), or anything that was said by a couple of posters in the MeanOldLady threads constitutes a “pervasive culture of misogyny.” It’s like attending an amphitheater event where four people fart and complaining the show was ruined by a pervasive culture of flatulence.
If you don’t like what someone is saying and they haven’t otherwise broken any board rules, rather than appeal to the amorphous “jerk” clause to wish them into the cornfield, ignore them or— as I hear parents tell their timeout children when they’re pushing and shoving each other— “use your words.”
Thing is, three women in this thread alone have talked about actually leaving the board because of a sexist tone, so this is a real problem to some people.
I happen to agree it’s a problem, because I selfishly think that a strong female presence adds to the depth/intelligence factor of the board, instead of having an all-male nerdfest like most other boards on the internet.
I wasn’t offended, ITD, my mentioning it that way was pointing out how easy it is to come across as patronizing, resulting in offense taken where none was meant. Something you seem to agree with.
But I still don’t see why it’s irrelevant to counter a broad general point with a specific example that is a callback to the topic of a thread. And why reply at all if you feel that way? The poster you originally replied to countered the point as well, and you ignored it, so it’s not like you feel you must reply to everyone who quotes you.
Whatever. My point still stands: Sometimes even justified anger is expressed inappropriately, and can be seen as out of control, as it was in that other thread. And that’s without considering that some offense may have been taken when none was meant.
Not an earth shattering revelation, I know, but then neither was your generalization.
This board is full of smart people, and I can’t understand why there are so many male posters who somehow think that this sort of statement being directed towards a male isn’t misogynistic. You (generic you) degrade a man by implying he has female parts, which is obviously very terrible or it wouldn’t be an insult. That says a hell of a lot about how you feel about women who have those lesser parts whether you intend to also insult women too or not. I’d like to see the casual sexist bullshit be a lot less frequent around here, and this is definitely amongst the more offensive manifestations of it.
You know, I would laugh at this post, except that it so perfectly illustrates the problem that it’s absurd on its face.
A bunch of women say that they are bothered by the culture of sexism here. We bring up posts, examples, a lot of men say they agree that it’s a problem. A number of others say that they have actually stopped posting due to the nature of that sexism, and your response is to construct an analogy in which the women complaining are children who are mad about getting an “owie” on the playground.
There’s not a helluva lot we can do about a “pervasive culture.” And I don’t believe that you’ve accurately characterized the culture here. “Many people” is not the same as the culture of the entire Board.
While we can’t do much to change a “pervasive culture,” we can react to individuals who break the rules. If one finds a specific example of a post that one thinks breaks the rules, then report it (for those who are new, you click on the little ! in the red triangle in the upper right corner of the post.) Guaranteed: the mods will consider it. They may agree with you, they may not, but they’ll consider it.
However I remind y’all that one person’s misogyny is another person’s light banter. We’e not trying to enforce “political correctness,” and such things do not have clear definitions. I also remind y’all that there is a difference between personal insult (directed at an individual or small group) and stereotyping (sexism, racism, etc) directed at an entire class. And our rules are different for the Pit and for the other forums.
Except, a bunch of individuals who are not told to knock it off becomes the board’s culture. When the behavior is expected and posters say that they “know better” than to start threads on certain topics, that’s the board’s culture. I’ve been around here for 12 years, and I’ve seen it for a long time just like everyone else. It doesn’t have to be much more than a mod telling someone to “knock it off” like in a thread about how to get wine stains out of a white shirt, we end up with a full page of posters debating about why it’s okay to ask her for tit pics since she said the word “boobs”.
I will admit that I find claims of a persistent and pervasive misogyny on this board, one so built into the grain of the board that it drives off thoughtful women, to be hyperbolic, but I can see why someone concerned with the issues of the homeschooled, autistic, or shut in could be offended by your statement, and I could see how enough statements like that could create an atmosphere of hostility that would cause them to leave. So maybe I’m learning something.
That said, and said with the admission that I haven’t read the triggering thread to the point where Ibanez made that statement, I find it hilarious that this thread exists as some sort of defense of MeanOldLady’s delicate feminine sensitivities. Do you people even know her? She’s hardly old and only a lady because I’m too scared of her to argue, but she’s as mean as spit and can take care of herself very well, thankyouverymuch. I’m tempted to go back there and see how much of Ibanez is left because I assume she gutted him like a carp. And “Maybe when you women calm down, we can talk about it,” is, word for word, a classic joke about what men actually said and meant in the Fifties and Sixties. Maybe some of you are too young to remember what it used to be like, but that hasn’t been said unironically for forty years except by great-grandfathers and idiots too blithering to know they are repeating a sitcom setup that caused Maude and Aunt Esther to give the speaker the fish eye before ripping him to shreds for the unreconstructed heathen he is.
Well, I’d like to believe I’m a thoughtful woman, and I’ve definitely taken breaks from this board due to the misogyny. Sometimes it really is too much. If anything, though, I’d say a good response would be to encourage people to report these types of posts more often or call a person out on their shit. When you talk about actually banning people the line gets pretty blurry.