Is there any way to put a halt to the continual hijacking of the subject of female genital mutilation, the most recent example being the current thread on Female Genital Mutilation in The BBQ Pit? I’m not usually one for restricting access to all voices, but when there is a deliberate and concerted effort to turn any and/or all threads on this subject into a thread on the problems a small percentage of males have with circumcision then, frankly, I really wouldn’t mind being banned along with those other males from the next thread that is supposed to be about FGM. In my opinion, some of the posts in that thread seem to be trollish in their efforts to belittle a very real problem.
OK, now we’ve got a thread just for this issue, I’m going to place some rules.
- This thread is about a discussion of thread restrictions.
- This thread is NOT a place for another discussion of the ins-and-outs - so to speak - of either FGM or male circumcision. You want to fight that fight? Do it in another forum.
- Whatever beef you might have with specific other posters concerning this topic? Keep it elsewhere. We have too many entrenched rivalries on the SDMB. Let’s keep this thread at the 50,000 foot level.
I hope that’s clear. I think this thread has a significant chance of falling into the ‘going off the rails’ bucket. I think we’d all like to avoid that.
O.K. then-is there a way to have a focused conversation on a particular subject without deliberate interference aimed at either changing the topic or shutting it down completely?
I would support such a “don’t be a dick” rule outside the Pit. Absolutely. Maybe a little more leniency in the Pit, but I do agree that the current thread in question is being hijacked past the point of such leniency. I hadn’t looked in on that thread until seeing the threads here. Start a new thread if you need to discuss the male issue.
Do me a favor, go ahead and pre-ban puns, too. I’m having a hard time resisting with so very many openings and if someone swoops in and triggers it, I might just let it all loose. :eek:
You know what? You do you.
Free pass for puns in the first 50 replies.
I am benevolent.
You are a masochist. 
This thread is too self contradictory not to go off the rails, in fact it seems to be rooted in anti rails territory. The title is about misogyny, the OP is about circumcision, and the first mod post is a declaration of not discussing circumcision. So what are we really talking about?
It seems silly to specifically give misogyny special status. Whatever the rules are and whatever they should be, should just cover how we deal with bigotry in general, and how we deal with personal insults specifically. There is no need to separate out a particular subset of bigotry for special notice.
With regard to circumcision, how ever you feel about it personally, you can make an argument that bringing in gender comparisons is a derailment in some cases, but it is impossible to separate the two in any thread about the United States because of its particular and very unusual history with the issue compared to the rest of the world. And even beyond that, why are we even having new threads about GM in the first place? What’s really new to debate or discuss even assuming we ignore the gender comparisons aspect? Why single that out as the point of exhaustion when everything else has pretty much been settled?
To get back on track, let’s just list whatever the relevant current rules are here, and then let people chime in with whether they nominate any modifications.
It makes no sense to consider the mutilation of infants, for whatever reason, a gendered issue. No more than, for example, it being misandrist to talk about women who become homeless despite it being a problem that predominantly affects men.
More to the point, if you are fighting these people on the grounds of misogyny, you are fighting people who agree with you that infant genital mutilation is wrong. It’s absurd.
So, in what forum could a discussion on Female Genital Mutilation be held with at least a little reassurance that mods will do something more to help keep it on the rails than “Both sides need to tone it down”, soon followed by some variation of “Since both side can’t behave, I’m shutting this down”. Since it seems that some want to stifle talk on this subject, just shutting it down when the thread is hijacked seems to play into their hands.
Here’s the thing. FGM and MC are two separate issues. One is experienced by men, one by women. They are different issues. Not just because the physical acts are different, but because of a lot of the context involved.
This is true of other issues faced by men and women as well. Sometimes even if the particular issue DOES apply to both men and women in similar ways – say, domestic abuse – there’s STILL the fact that context means that it’s a much bigger issue for women then for men.
So when someone creates a thread to discuss the issues faced by women, and certain posters find whatever they thing is an equivalent issue faced by men, despite the fact that the issue faced by men is much less serious, that’s a hijack of the thread, and it creates a culture of misogyny on the board.
Depending on the issue, the difference could be because the male issue is physically less harmful, or because in society the issue affects women way more often than it affects to men, or because the power dynamics in society mean that most men facing this issue can deal with it much more easily than most women can. The exact cause differs. But the point is, the issue is NOT equivalent for men and women, and when you hijack a thread about the women’s issue with your men’s issue, you’re saying “very serious women’s issues only matter as much as minor men’s issues” which is clearly a misogynistic thing to do.
So if the mods want to help get rid of the misogynistic environment on the board, as soon as a poster tries to redirect a women’s issue thread to men’s issues, they should be censured by mod note or, if it continues, with a warning.
This really isn’t a hard concept to grasp and it saddens me that it’s still being discussed instead of having been handled already.
Wow we are really dancing in circles here. We have some people saying bringing up circumcision as being a derailment of topics of misogyny, and others saying talking about circumcision is in fact, the predominant source of the misogyny we are trying to stomp out. So which is it folks? Is there a general problem of misogyny, or is this really just mostly a complaint about GM threads?
More importantly what would you change about the wording of the rules that doesn’t just highlight one form of bigotry over another?
You keep relabeling FGM threads as GM threads, and this is a part of the problem-not recognizing that one is a subset of the other and that it is possible to focus in on that subset as a topic of conversation.
What the hell are you talking about?
People are using the FGM thread as an example of the type of misogyny that’s going on. Namely, someone will pop into a thread about female issues, and begin the cry of: “But what about the MAAAAAAALE version of this issue? Won’t anyone think of the MAAAAALES?”. What we are saying is, this needs to stop.
I don’t think we need a new rule for this. To me, it’s pretty clearly threadshitting, which is already against the rules. We just need enforcement.
I think popping into such threads to claim that one cannot discuss one without discussing the other, then proceeding to talk almost exclusively about the latter is akin to claiming that a vehicle is a piece of crap…and making sure of that by pouring maple syrup into the gas tank.
The best way to actually prove that one cannot be discussed without the other is to let the conversation proceed sans hijack and see if it holds on its own.
The problem is not misogyny, and the problem is not what the forum is, the problem is the OP itself. It should be made more clear what the subject and purpose of the particular thread is. Is it to answer a specific question, is it to discuss the general topic, is it to debate a particular aspect? It seems to me this particular outbreak had to do with a specific case of FGM in the US where FGM is already illegal and frowned upon. If that is being legally challenged, than there is simply no way that the peculiar way MGM is treated in the US is not relevant and is not going to be a factor in any serious legal challenge in the US. Now depending on the particular OP in question, MGM in a thread obstensively about FGM might or might not be a derailment, might or might not be vaguely be misogynistic. But if we are seriously going to argue about derailment, a thread about FGM legal challenges in the US is not the example to go to for that cause, and comparisons of GM in the US is not the example you want as the mainstay of combatting misogyny.
If we are debating GM, or misogyny, they should be dealt with separately because they are very different issues. I suggest closing this thread and creating two separate ones, because combining the two is not helping, an neither is banning either subject.
Unless we want a third topic specifically and only about the misogyny of talking about GM, which seems to be its own peculiar thing.
No one has brought up subject banning.
The original post was about SMDB misogyny. One person decided to use that topic as a place to complain about a very specific topical derailment, which seems to me to be itself a derailment. The issue of that particular phenomenon is much more about the peculiarities of that particular thread and has little to do with misogyny as an overall issue. If that’s really the best example we can find I’m not sure why the OP brought up the issue. My point is, there seems to be a general disagreement with regards to the way the title, the OP, and the first mod post vagrantly contradict each other about the purpose of this thread.
Thats all we have been talking about! Fine, call it derailment.
I said that that thread was the most recent example of misogyny on the SDMB. Not really that difficult to understand.