We are currently discussing an example of a comment that reflects, from my point of view, the essence of the problem. Drunky Smurf makes light of rape in the midst of a very heated thread in which women are sharing their experiences of sexual assault. I don’t care whether it fits your narrow definition of misogyny, it makes me feel like shit, and it is the reason many women get so fucking exasperated by this board. I would take 1,000 boob jokes in exchange for no more of this.
I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s a joke that an antifreeze stain is an alien and maybe someone will get revenge probed- a fictional situation that doesn’t insult or demean anybody or anything.
It’s ethically okay to shout about all the bugs crawling around under your skin, too, but if someone started doing that at my birthday party, I’d tell them to leave. You can invite them over to yours, if you want.
I don’t need to argue with the mods about their moderation because generally I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t always agree but it very rarely rises to the level of wanting to say something other than when they want to either close threads or overly steer a conversation.
Furthermore, I have absolutely no problem with moderation of sexual jokes in serious and/or women issue type threads.
But I seriously disagree with posters that attempt to define acceptable board behavior based on their own personal set of opinions to the degree that you and LHOD are arguing for. It strikes me as self-centered. I don’t understand how it’s possible to not be able to step back and understand that there are many points of view and that no person on this board or anywhere has some unique access to the absolute truths of the universe.
LHOD arguing to eliminate posters that engage in “gross jokes”, or you insisting that specific patterns of jokes are always promoting sexual assault are opinions that are so far beyond the spectrum of reasonable that I feel motivated to post in response.
My point is we should stop misusing words. Sexism or sexist comments ≠ misogyny, and conflating the two is not helping to clarify matters. Instead, it muddles the entire argument, as has already happened.
Very few comments that I’ve seen–actually, none that I’ve seen, have expressed anything close to the actual definition of misogyny, so it would be nice if we could use the proper language when describing things where these things matter.
Ok. I’m probably going to regret this, but here goes.
Yesterday, my husband and I were out having a couple of drinks at the bar. A baseball game was on. Me, my husband, and two acquaintances of ours were there - me and the bartender were the only females in the bar. As is done everywhere, sometimes the TV cameras focused on women in the stands at the game. One of the acquaintances was making loud, lewd comments about the various aspects of some of those women shown on TV and what he’d like to do to them. He did not say this sotto voice to the person sitting next to him - he was very vocal and we ALL heard his crude bullshit. He thinks he’s funny - he SO ISN’T. My husband got pissed off and told him to knock it off. It was completely disrespectful of the bartender and myself - if you just HAVE to be that crude and disrespectful of women, do it on your own time. Not mine. And quit acting like expecting you not to be a neandrathal and showing a little decorum is infringing on your constitutional rights - the rule is don’t be a jerk and don’t be disrespectful. SO DON’T!
We’re not changing the Pit rules. It still takes something exceptionally nasty to get modded in the Pit, and we’re not creating some kind of rule that says ‘you can say what you want in the Pit unless it’s sexist.’
The moderators can do this if they want, but if what you’re after is leeway for what you can argue is good-faith, light-hearted posting, I think it’s probably to your advantage if the moderators don’t spell out such a prohibition in their official rules. Does this largely leave enforcement to moderators’ discretion? Of course. But that is always going to be the case, isn’t it?
That’s precisely it. Some places those jokes are fine in. Some places they’re not. I don’t much care to go to places where they’re fine. Some folks don’t much care to go to places where they’re not. Raftpeople et al want this to be the sort of board where such comments are fine. I want it to be the sort of board where they’re not.
So far so good.
But when Raftpeople et al start acting like theirs is the morally superior position, I disagree.
Yes, and those are the next topics for discussion. It’s just that misogyny was the easiest one to tackle. I hoping very much that this goes well, so that we will have a legitimate reason to bring up the other ones.
Plus I must point out that political jabs are already verboten in many places on this board, even if they are jokes. So it’s not as if we haven’t already started this. The religious ones are, I agree, still a major problem. I know several people on this board who I didn’t even know were religious until I found old posts by them. They’ve been that discouraged from mentioning it. (One post even was a comment about how they don’t usually mention it here, due to the inevitable backlash.) Heck, for a while, people even thought I was an atheist.
So, rather than being condemnation for the current rules, I think you are right on the money. That stuff needs to be dealt with, too. But bringing it up now is a horrible, horrible mistake. The mods are very, very reluctant to make any more changes right now. This is probably the biggest change since “cuntgate.” Heck, I could argue that it is even bigger than that, seeing as we pretty much neutered that idea.
I know I just argued that Drunky Smurf’s post was unrelated, but you do have a valid point in one respect. In general, that type of remark is commonplace and unrelated. In that specific example, Drunky Smurf was being an ass of unbounded proportions, but that was his behavior for that entire thread. (I am not aware of his behavior in other threads.)
That is a pile of flaming horse manure. There was no assumption that she had already consented to having sex acts performed against her, nor was there an assumption that sex acts would be performed without her consent. There is an assumption that by exposing her nether regions as an act of protest over sexual policy that she is thereby opening up her nether regions to sexual commentary, including expressions of desire to engage those nether regions, if allowed.
That is not an accurate summary of what happened here. This was not a discussion of spanking, like “is spanking an effective form of punishment?” or “spanking is harmful and should be outlawed”. Spanking was not brought into the discussion until this poster tried to make a joke and used spanking as punishment as a set up for his comment about wanting to spank her. That does not fit into the category you describe, he was not hijacking a spanking thread.
Even if that’s true, and he wasn’t using a word correctly and accurately because he knew it would be shocking, it’s still not a joke about sexual assault. In that case, it’d be a statement about tanking in the stock market and using rape as an example of another horrible thing that can happen to someone. Just like if someone said “man, I really got slaughtered in the market today!” they wouldn’t be joking about murder.
That, or something rational.
Could go either way.
There’s nothing obtuse about that, wilful or otherwise. I was provided with a cite of a post and I went off that post .I haven’t and don’t intend to read the thread it came from. But, be that as it may, it’s not a joke about sexual assault any more than “Did the see the game? Man, our team really got the shit kicked out of them!” isn’t a comment about a massive series of assaults that ended up with the victims leaking fecal matter.
Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t, who are you to speak for her?
And regardless of that oddity in your beliefs, that still doesn’t make it about “unwanted sexual contact” let alone “sexual assault”. Even if this wasn’t a set of anonymous comments on a message board that the woman will never read, even if someone had actually propositioned her rudely, that wouldn’t be assault. And the claim that men can’t talk, let alone joke about wanting to have sex with a woman who wouldn’t be into them? Well, that’s just pants-on-head-silly.
Now do elaborate on any of the, one is sure, hundreds of actual common uses for condoms that don’t involve sex. No? Didn’t think so. If y’all truly need to ask why oh why anybody would think that a half-naked woman with an attention catching designed shaved into her pubic hair, out in public, passing out condoms, is somehow sexual? Well… there’s such a serious disconnect that it really is easier to ask, chocking back disbelief, how on Earth y’all see that as anything other than sexual. What part of a public protest designed specifically to promote sex-for-fun and against sex-in-the-context-of-procreative-marriage is unrelated to sex?
Because, honestly, to someone who knows what condoms are used for, claiming that it wasn’t about sex is absurd enough that it seems like y’all are game-playing.
OK, I will try Shodan. It is a protest, that’s the main thing. The protest is not a sexual act. It is not a come-on, she’s not a prostitute. She’s protesting the Catholic Church’s views on contraception.
So, contraception. That’s sex, right? Yes, it is but the woman wasn’t presenting herself as a sex object, she was using sex in her protest. That’s what I was thinking before when I wrote the mod note.
I agree it is a fine line, which is why now that we’ve codified things a bit I hope it will be easier to see. It’s a pretty sex-laden thread, and sexual comments of most types would probably be OK under these new guidelines unless of course they’re directed at other posters or direct put-downs of women based on this one woman’s conduct, for example.
There may be contexts where it is inappropriate and jerkish, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with implied sexual assault. We can say that a comment is inappropriate without using hyperbolic language like sexual assault.
[QUOTE=Red]
Very few comments that I’ve seen–actually, none that I’ve seen, have expressed anything close to the actual definition of misogyny, so it would be nice if we could use the proper words.
[/QUOTE]
I think casual dismissal of a group of women’s experiences of sexual assault qualifies as a misogynistic thing. Do you have a special name you would like to call it? It seems to me like you’re just trying to dodge the seriousness of the issue by playing a semantic game. I’m perfectly willing to discuss it using your language.
Just for the record, I don’t have any beef with Drunky Smurf in particular. I doubt posters who make comments like this realize the effect they have on women with a history of sexual victimization. That’s what I’m trying to get at here, I don’t think these posters have the intent many would attribute to them. I don’t see them as potential rapists or anything like that. I see them as men who are so far removed from the reality of sexual assault that they don’t realize the kind of hostile environment they create with these jokes.
[QUOTE=Marley]
We’re not changing the Pit rules. It still takes something exceptionally nasty to get modded in the Pit, and we’re not creating some kind of rule that says ‘you can say what you want in the Pit unless it’s sexist.’
[/QUOTE]
Oh wow, that’s 12 pages of missing the point. Quick summary of the situation per my understanding, for those skipping straight to the end:
You still can’t be a jerk, only now being a jerk to women or about all women is no longer funny by default. The OP has 3 helpful hints, if you have trouble understanding this concept. This entire thread is people not understanding this simple clarification of existing rules, don’t bother reading it.
Then you’ll no doubt be very happy to learn that I have not made any kind of insistence that any particular specific patterns of jokes always “promote sexual assault.” Would you like a party hat?
How does wanting to clarify something you said, after you repeatedly ignored my requests for a cite, make someone “hung up on” it? People were only “hung up on” it because you kept hand waving away a request for cites. Thank you for finally posting links to what your idea of sexual assault jokes are.
That being said, those are not examples of sexual assault. They’re examples of sex. Juvenile, punny, questionable, possibly gross, not targeting anyone here, not promoting assault of any kind. The spanking joke probably the least appropriate, but is not automatically an example of sexual assault.
Unless the joke included a reference to the woman’s lack of interest or consent, then you’re simply projecting your own ideas onto the jokes and the posters who made them.
