Continuing the discussion from Chronos, this is the wrong call:
Accordingly here is a poll.
~Max
I voted yes, on the understanding that it’s only a subset of what I’d prefer.
Fine by me. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
~Max
Explicitly ban sexism from ALL threads, ALL forums, ALL the time, from ALL posters.
All the mods need to get on board or else stop saying the SDMB is fighting misogyny.
Accept that your sexism is misogyny, no more weasel words or hedging.
Misogynists are jerks. Being a jerk is against the rules.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to attach it to the cart.
This.
The world has moved on, at least in its public spaces, but the Dope hasn’t moved on with it. Racist comments everywhere are excised. As are transphobic or gay-bashing comments. As are ageist or ableist comments. As are sexist or misogynistic comments. That’s the way of the world now.
Why is the Dope struggling to keep up?
We can still discuss women’s sports or transgender bathrooms without laying judgments on women athletes or transgender people who need to go potty, so it’s not a question of limiting discussion.
Conservatives can still post here as long as they keep any bigoted judgments to themselves, so it’s not a question of driving off conservative voices.
Just blanket-ban all that crap. Like everywhere else does.
Anybody who can’t abide that can slink off to the shadowy corners where their bigotry will be welcome. They’ll be happier and we’ll be better off.
I mean, we should ban it in all forums, not just Game Room.
It’s the minutiae of what exactly counts or doesn’t count as sexism, though, that generates the furious debate. I’ve never heard a poster say, “I posted a sexist comment but that’s because I like sexism.” It was/is always an argument that “my comment is not sexist.”
If someone says, for instance, (a very frequently made argument), “The reason the WNBA is less popular than the NBA is because many women can’t dunk the ball,” is that sexist? What if they phrase it instead as “the reason is because one league has less athleticism than the other” - is that acceptable even though it’s essentially the same sentiment, just phrased more nicely?
I’m curious if it’s worse in the Game Room than the other forums. Maybe? The Game Room is usually talking about either video games or sports, and both of those are industries filled with controversies on the way women are treated. I don’t think I see more problematic comments denigrating women there than, say, P&E or the BBQ Pit, but maybe that really is the case. If I think about the times when I personally have seen posts that cross over the line about women, I suppose I have seen them in the Game Room. Certainly the only times I personally got really ticked off at someone for saying something against women it has been there.
You wrote:
I think that’s bananas. If sexism is rampant among fans of sports and other kinds of games, it’s intuitive that a lot of sports fans and other fans are jerks.
Of course this kind of jerkish behavior should be banned. It’s being a jerk, and that’s against the rules.
I agree with the sentiment here. I’m a veteran of the “old internet” of the 90s and even arguably the 2000s. For years and years, Reddit had a high level philosophy of letting subs moderate themselves, no matter how objectionable the content, unless that content crossed certain clear legal boundaries (copyright infringement, child pornography etc), that’s been abandoned for at least a decade or longer.
I understand I think the core of why the Dope has such complicated rules–we want and have always wanted to be a place where anything, including “difficult” topics, can be discussed in a rational and intelligent manner. I think we can still be that, but while still adopting some clear cut rules on hate speech, bigotry etc. It’s kind of long but I wanted to post a big section from Facebook’s “community standards” that I actually think aren’t terrible as written:
I think that we could just establish broad principles like this, and leave it up to the moderation team to decide when to step in.
To take an example a bit removed from the recent controversy, the whole controversy around the book The Bell Curve by Charles Murray. I think that topic could be discussed rationally here. To me a rational discussion of that topic would evaluate Murray’s claims, address the argument that many colleges and other institutions “deplatform” him, and then address many ways in which his specific findings and claims have not held up over the span of the 30 years since he wrote the book. There is a real discussion you can have here.
In fact, we’ve had that discussion. But then the people who really had what I frankly think was a racist agenda…kept posting about it. Again and again and again. They would frequently make arguments that made it very clear they weren’t interested in having a real talk about the controversial work of Charles Murray, they were interested in being able to get a platform for their real position which was “non-whites are less intelligent, and this is based on their genetic inferiority.” I don’t actually know if all those posters eventually got banned, I don’t see most of them around anymore. But I remember a time on the boards when topics like that were fairly common, and they no longer are.
This is where discretionary moderation comes in. Charles Murray’s works coming up and there being a real discussion about them is something I think is possible here. When the same cabal of people keep bringing them up over and over, and it is patently obvious they are doing so to advance a racist ideological position, I think that’s where moderators can simply say “okay we see what you are doing here, you’re suspended and when that suspension ends if you do this again, you’re banned.”
Something like dale’s posts about women I think would fall into that same category. I think you can call into question the veracity of a rape claim. I think you can express things you dislike about specific women’s sports. But there’s ways of doing it that are appropriate, and there’s ways of doing it that make it patently obvious you have a strong anti-female agenda you are looking to advance. Having questions about a rape claim based on contradictory or poor factual evidence, is not the same as asserting that a rape accuser is a “dirty whore who needs her name exposed”, which unfortunately is I think a close paraphrase of terminology dale has actually used.
Saying I dislike women’s gymnastics because it focuses on aspects of gymnastics different from men’s gymnastics, different events and valuing flexibility over strength, would be a valid critique. Putting women’s gymnastics on blast because “women are boring and we shouldn’t have to see them on TV”, clearly is just not a valid expression we need on these forums.
But, uh, not in The Game Room.
Definitely not in The Game Room.
I recognize there is a wider and more contentious debate as to whether sexism should be allowed in, say, Great Debates or IMHO. If possible I would like to keep this poll limited to The Game Room specifically, so sports, video games, party games, cards, puzzles, etc.
IMO it would be left to mod discretion whether any particular statement constitutes unacceptable sexism. Our mods are some of the best on the internet and I am confident in their discretion - provided the rule is in place.
~Max
The second statement isn’t phrased more nicely; it’s much worse.
The first refers to a specific action. If women are actually worse at that, saying so isn’t sexist in itself.
The second says that women in general are less athletic in all senses of the word athletic. Which pretty much insults all women athletes.
Man, do I ever agree with this post. I read the earlier post and thought, who would think the second is better than the first?
If you watch basketball for the dunking, it makes total sense to avoid the WNBA. If my favorite gymnastics event was the uneven bars, I’m not going to enjoy men’s gymnastics as much as women’s.
I mean the poll is one thing, the discussion thread attached to it is another. I voted “Yes” in the poll, but kind of the same as MrDibble, I actually don’t really think it makes a ton of sense to say “sexism is bad in the game room but not the other forums.” In fact I frankly think it’s a stupid idea. But I did vote yes because I think it helps maybe advance understanding of what kind of forum the members wish to have. I can’t separate the idea you put forth from the actual logical, better idea, which is to regulate the entire forum with rules that are normal on basically any other discussion platform that isn’t 8chan.
Just to be explicitly clear, voting yes does not imply that you think sexism is appropriate for any other part of the forum.
~Max
I voted no because I don’t think “I don’t like to watch women’s sports” is sexist.
You don’t think the second says that women in the WNBA display less athleticism than the men in the NBA? Why would it mean ALL women in ALL sports?
“One league has less athleticism than the other” in discussing the NBA and WNBA is a very uncontroversial statement, and I don’t see why it’s insulting to anyone. Men are stronger and faster than women. That’s why there’s a WNBA. Hell, WNBA players will tell you that. It doesn’t make women people of lesser intrinsic value.
Is that the definition of “athleticism”? Nothing to do with agility, balance, flexibility, coordination?
If all you’re interested in is speed and power, why watch humans at all? Other species are better at both. They don’t play basketball, of course, because a lot of other skills are involved in basketball.
I’d define “Athleticism” as being the ability to excel in a given sport. or athletic endeavor. In basketball, it is rather clear which sex is possessed of greater athleticism, taking all the possible elements of that into account. That may not, of course, be the case in other sports, but since the example was basketball, the statement that the NBA has more athleticism than the WNBA is not at all controversial.
That’s an interesting question that is ill served by pretending things aren’t actually as they are. Women aren’t as good as men in most sports, so why is it that women’s tennis is exceptionally popular, but women’s hockey can’t get a pro league going? Is that a thing inherent to the nature of the sports as a spectator sport? It is a business thing? Is it a matter of individual vs team sports? (Maybe; women can make a damn good living at golf.) Why are some college sports, despite being inferior to the pro versions, so popular, but some college sports are not, and can we relate that to men/women sports? Is there a similarity? I honestly don’t know, but if we make it a rule that you cannot observe that men are generally better at most sports, it’s going to be a hard discussion to have, isn’t it?
I’m fine with saying you can’t be a sexist on the SDMB, but this rather quickly illustrates how people can have dramatically different opinions of what “Sexist” means. Not in a million years would I have thought saying NBA players are better than WNBA players would be a sexist or offensive statement.