By the way, has anyone constructed a timeline of SDMB lore? 'Cause I’d definitely be tickled to see the phrase “Nipple Poll Incident” in a list like that.
Where the hell have I done that?
:rolleyes:
So you’ve gone from silence, to arguing ‘it was not that creepy!’ to ‘Doc is creepy and so has no right to call me creepy!’ and personal attacks. Then, you oddly declare victory.
Regardless of whether or not I agree, your reply gave me a good chuckle.
Yes, that is it in a nutshell. You, on the other hand, skipped the pleasantries, and started right off with the personal attacks. So don’t get all butthurt when I finally dish it back at you.
Which is fine, but judging another person by your own personal tastes quickly devolves into something meaningless on all sides.
There is no objective standard.
So it sounds like your primary points are:
- The nipple poll was objectifying and that is not good
- The nipple poll crossed normal society boundaries
- It also crossed SDMB boundaries
My thoughts:
-
Objectification
It’s wired into us, but I believe most of us compartmentalize it also - meaning that just because we objectify the female form, it doesn’t mean that our relationships with women are unhealthy - both can and do coexist - it’s not all or nothing, black and white. -
Society Boundaries
Yes it crossed boundaries in the sense that it would not be appropriate in most social settings -
SDMB Boundaries
This is the one that just stuns me, with all of the other threads I see about sexuality I don’t see how this can be the one that is considered to have crossed the boundary.
Regarding the “creepy” adjective - to me it seems that the only thing that is creepy is when the gathering of information is unwanted but the person persists or is not honest.
Most of the times I have ever heard women describe what they considered “creepy” situations seemed to have this component of the other person involving sex in a situation/discussion in a way that is subtle to hide their ulterior motives or was unwanted, etc.
But an opt-in poll can’t possibly be like that because the only people that go to a poll about nipples are the people that want to respond to a poll/thread about nipples.
I assure you, I am not butthurt.
If you look at my posts in this thread you’ll find that besides some comments which I’ll grant could be construed as personal attacks or insults, I’ve been debating other posters and making some sound points. You, on the other hand, have only done what I described in my last post.
RaftPeople This reminds me a great deal of an article I read years ago on a researcher who was studying disgust. While most of the subjects could agree that something was disgusting, few could say just why. I said in my first post to this thread that I had trouble saying just why I felt the Nipple Poll was so creepy. I’m still having difficulty identifying exactly why and putting it into words.
It’s true and I’ve been aware of that all along with my questions - humans are irrational pattern matching machines that can’t have their responses easily dissected by detailed questions.
But it’s still worth asking the questions and trying to probe for more information - if the final answer is “because that’s the feeling that I get when I look at the poll” then so be it.
Here’s another data point for you -
My almost 13 year old daughter wants to join the board as soon as she’s legally able to, so I showed her the poll as ‘one of those things I worry about her having to deal with’.
Her reaction was; “I wouldn’t measure my nipples, but I’d show him my middle finger.”
When I stopped laughing I asked her about it and she said it reminded her of some of the more sex-obsessed boys at school - not in a specific way, but it rang the same warning bells. To me it’s like the bloke leering from his car as he drives past, to her it’s the boy in class impressing his mates with his outrageousness.
We’re not shocked or offended or in terror of being raped, we just have a bird-flipping instinct that kicks right in there.
There’s probably no one thing that pushed the ‘creep’ button for so many posters (male and female) but the overall combination of multi-multi-multi options & salacious tone of the OP worked in combo. Fear Itself’s initial refusal to explain then offended victimhood really haven’t helped.
The fact that he thinks he’s ‘winning’ any kind of moral high ground in this thread is beyond my comprehension. He’s lost what little amusement vaue he had for me. Not that I expect him to care.
Regardless of what you actually meant with your Silence of the Lambs comment (or how far you intend on back-pedaling), in a thread where someone is repeatedly called a creep and a pervert, I’d be amazed if you’re actually so dense as to not see the obvious implications of a statement like that.
But obviously not everyone felt the same way you did. Don’t confuse your own uncomfortable feelings with a “violation of social norms”.
I read the OP in that thread as being by someone who obviously likes female nipples (most men do), and was just expressing that in a whimsical way. The poll just seemed unnecessary thorough, just a case of “over thinking it”. Based on other replies to this thread I don’t seem to be the only one who saw it the way. I don’t see any reason to assume Fear Itself meant any differently than that.
It’s others who read the poll and OP and jumped to the conclusion that it was some weird perverted thing, and that he was obviously going to masturbate to the poll results (really?).
If the poll creeped you out for some reason you can’t put you finger on, that’s one thing. But claiming it creeped you out because Fear Itself is clearly some sort of sexual deviant trying to trick women on the internet to give him masturbation fodder, is something completely different. There’s no reason Fear Itself should be expected to apologize because of the ridiculous conclusions others have jumped to.
And with that, I’m done with this thread. Partly because I have other stuff to do, but also because I can only read “nipple poll” so many times before it just gets too silly.
The warning bells that say “I didn’t realize the extent to which 99% of males think about sex”.
I think this again just confirms that a portion of the people that object do not have a realistic understanding of what goes on inside most male’s brain.
It is interesting that you have now decided my allusion to Silence of the Lambs was so appalling, because I made the allusion in a response to you and you had nothing to say about it until **emcee2k **started harping on it. At the time you were far more focused on my use of the word “perviness”, which was actually in the very same sentence as the Silence of the Lambs remark. Here I see you’ve seized upon the very mundane word “require” and claimed it is unintelligent hyperbole. I have seen your later post where you acknowledge misinterpreting Acsenray’s use of the word “require”, but based on your behavior in this thread it looks like you have a bad habit of focusing on a specific word or phrase that you dislike and ignoring the actual context. If you’re trying to come across as a rational, intelligent person here then this sort of thing isn’t helping.
FWIW, if you had bothered to ask me to clarify my Silence of the Lambs remark then I would have explained that I thought (mistakenly, it seems) that you were interested in learning why other posters found the nipple poll thread to be creepy. I thought a semi-humorous reference to a well-known movie that involves a creepy character who is unhealthily obsessed with women’s bodies would help you to understand why the poll might strike some people as creepy. It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would think I was claiming that Fear Itself was a real-life serial killer. It didn’t seem to occur to you either until someone else brought it up.
On preview:
I’m not backpedaling, I am merely attempting to correct your misinterpretation of my remarks. As I say above, I really did not believe anyone would think that saying something reminded me of Silence of the Lambs would be interpreted as a serious accusation that another poster was murdering women in his basement. In fact I still have a difficult time believing it, but I guess you wouldn’t claim to be that stupid unless it were actually true. As for me, I really am dense enough to have assumed that other Dopers would understand that saying something reminded me of a movie was not the same as saying that I believed the exact events of the movie were playing out in real life.
I disagree rather strongly. I think that the overwhelming majority of posters know what goes on in the brains of men. They also know that the majority of men know how not to act on those thoughts and feelings, and how to act on them appropriately.
I get the feeling (based on others’ posts, not my own emotions) that many folks feel Fear Itself acted in an inappropriate manner.
Again, no, I’m a guy, and I do not think about sex in any way that resembles the thinking inside of head of the author of the poll. I’ve talked about sex with a fair number of men (it’s a natural topic of conversation after sex) and I’ve never heard anyone use this level of detail in describing his preferences for anyone else. And since I’ve had a fair number of straight male friends and acquaintances, including ones whom I’ve talked about sex with, and they didn’t sound like this guy. Even in circumstances where I was privy to straight guys talking amongst themselves who didn’t realize I wasn’t (mostly while we were drinking), they said things that are far more explicitly sexual than this, and yet even cruder remarks than any of this still did not involve this oddly obsessive categorization, much less any interest in gathering statistics about body types.
I do not believe that this is how most men think about sex. This level of detail to something that’s only one portion of someone’s intimate anatomy is not something I think most men care about all that much.
You keep saying it, but it still keeps not being true.
No. Really off target there, again. Others have said it better.
Yep, I ignored it for the most part.
I don’t consider it a valid comparison or point to make in all of this.
Yes I was more focused on that word. It seemed like something actually worth debating.
Well, I’m not trying to come across as anything. I do enjoy getting down into the weeds and details of things and trying to figure things out.
But at the same time I am an emotional human. And in this particular case I incorrectly read that sentence and had my mind made up as to what he/she was saying even before I finished the sentence.
Yes, I am interested in that.
No, it didn’t shed any light on the subject at all.
Actually it confused the issue for me because:
- I didn’t know you were joking (I didn’t think you thought he was a serial killer, but I did think you thought the poll was on the same continuum as the mindset of the character from that movie which I think is completely ridiculous)
- It still doesn’t offer any insight as to why someone would find it creepy.
- I never thought you thought he was a serial killer
- I thought the comparison was ridiculous to even be in the conversation from the beginning
- My thinking it was invalid existed the entire time and I mostly ignored it because it was so ridiculous - but when another poster seemed to think it made sense then I posted something
I understand what you are saying: it crossed the boundaries for SDMB.
I can be surprised by the number of people that responded that way in the thread, but I can’t provide any factual evidence one way or the other regarding whether it did cross the boundaries (mostly because the number of respondents to the thread is so small).
About the only way to determine if accurate is with a detailed survey of either SDMB members, or possibly only IMHO members (because each forum has it’s own set of regular posters and culture) as opposed to a self-selected set of responders.
How do you know? You don’t know what is going on inside his head and you have no idea what is going on inside your head that would appear creepy in a poll unless you actually put it out there.
Unless the only thoughts you ever have about women are strictly missionary position with the lights off - I guarantee you there are things you’ve thought about that women would label as “creepy”.
And my point is that the label “creepy” is primarily due to an understimation of what’s going on inside the male brain.
I’ve never heard anyone describe his preference in this level of detail either. But so what? Human conversation doesn’t lend itself to a detailed poll.
Your contention (and other’s) is that any detailed list of variety is necessarily “creepy”? And it’s “odd”?
I guarantee you that you have attributes of your sexual thoughts that I don’t have at all, and vice versa. Even if something is relatively rare (say 10%) - is that “creepy”?
Just because something is different from your own experiences, how does that rise to the level of “creepy”? There must be more than just “different”, right?
My point isn’t that most men would come up with this exact poll, but rather the following points:
- Visually males track far more information that what is contained in the poll
- Males think about sex, a lot
- Men like lots of variety
- Most men I know have much “cruder” thoughts then this poll
Add these together and what you get is, from the male perspective a big “whatever”, and if the female perspective is “creepy” then I think that is primarily because they aren’t along for the daily ride inside a male’s brain.
In all honesty, do you have Asperger’s?
And my repeated point is that the general consensus is that it’s perfectly fine to think those things. It’s ‘creepy’ to say or do them.
Again it was what Fear Itself POSTED. Had he kept his thoughts to himself nobody would have objected.