What Jragon said. Or put another way, nobody in this thread has wholeheartedly defended Ellen Cherry’s decision, though many have offered apologetics. Including me - I considered it experimental. Not even ladyfoxfire thought the decision was properly conducted.
And FTR and with due respect to the posters in question, I’m not especially enraptured by the POVs expressed by the loudest and staunchest opponents of sexism on this board, as they probably have grokked. So I’m certainly not advocating that the mods outsource their policy making.
Honestly I’m just talking there should be disciplinings for truly egregious levels of malicious shit-stirring that couldn’t possibly serve any purpose other than to inflame. I’m talking more Drunky Smurf and Rand Rover type offenses than Der Trihs and pannacione stuff.
I think it would be useful for the mods to list some examples of hypothetical jokes and comments related to sex that would still be permitted under the new policy. Because I am having a hard time understanding where the limit is.
Is there, for instance, any way to make a sex-related comment in the thread linked in the OP which would not fall afoul of the new policy? Or is any sex-related comment, in a thread about sorority girls, off-limits? Perhaps only comments made by men?
It seems to me the problem is that a certain fraction of women seem to take offense at the mere suggestion of a man having sexual thoughts about a woman without her mutual participation. That is certainly the impression I got from the other thread.
While I’m sure their offense is genuine, I don’t view it as especially justifiable, especially if it is to be used as the basis for setting policy on an informal, general-interest message board.
But she was obviously referring to sexual activity when she politely asked her sorority sisters to stop being awkward boners when around their paired up frat. If she wasn’t talking about being flirts and what not then what do you propose the young lady was alluding to?
I am happy to see that the Mods are trying to improve the culture of the board, although I think the comments made in the sorority email thread were a bad place to start. The author of the email isn’t an SDMB member and the thread seemed to be just a “let’s laugh at this stupid person who’s been in the news” sort of thread and not anyone attempting to have a remotely serious conversation or ask for advice.
That said, it seems like whenever there’s a complaint about “Heh heh, BOOBS!” responses to posts where women make any reference to their breasts, someone attempts to defend this by claiming that decent women don’t allude to their breasts in mixed company or in front of strangers. Even a post like this:
is considered so close to being pornographic (see for instance Absolute’s post in the locked “Misogyny on board” thread) as to render men powerless to refrain from making crude jokes. Yet on this very same board, it’s so common for men to post about their erections or how they are/will soon be masturbating that it’s considered shocking that a Mod would even suggest that perhaps they tone it down.
Again, Happy Lendervedder’s post in the sorority email thread is far from the worst example of an erection joke in SDMB history…but that’s kind of my point. While that particular post didn’t really bother me, it does bother me that these kinds of jokes – even in more serious threads where it’s not just dumb but offensive to make such remarks – seem to be regarded by some as such a well-established part of SDMB culture that those of us who tend to find them obnoxious and creepy are just supposed to shut up and accept it. But at the same time, women who ask for medical information or advice on buying bras are treated by some Dopers like they’ve gone so far outside the bounds of propriety that they shouldn’t expect to be treated with respect anymore. That’s messed up.
I personally hope the Mods continue to discourage Beavis and Butthead-ism around here.
One of the things I really like about the rules here are that they are clear and mostly objective.
I wrote this in another ATMB thread just a couple weeks ago:
“I think the rule set also helps to bring about a more disciplined response, leading to more fairness than I’ve seen on any other message board. The mods should get more credit than they do for staying as faithful to the rule set.”
Having the experience of posting on message boards where the rule set is nebulous and ambiguous, I’ve really appreciated that the rule set here is more clear.
I disagree with the direction the moderation has taken in reaction to the misogyny thread in ATMB. Yes, I read the whole thread. I was waiting to see what definitions and proposed actions were going to be put forth. Before that even happened, there was moderation about an issue that wasn’t even clearly defined.
I hope this turns out to be more of a blip than a trend. In almost every issue I’ve been watching in ATMB over the years, cooler heads prevailed at some point. I hope the same happens here.
As to the issue of misogyny, although it’s a worthy goal to increase gender equality, I don’t believe that increased moderation of some jokes over others will bring more respect to women in general. There might be a possibility that the moderation of some off-topic jokes might decrease some annoyance for some people. But I don’t see that as the same as decreasing misogyny.
There was a wonderful Miss Manners column a few years back in which she basically said that political correctness is nothing new, except that it used to be called “good manners.” In that respect, you could rephrase your sentence as, “It’s all nothing but good manners and common decency.” Same idea, nicer spin :).
I agree with Steophan. Marley also very conveniently didn’t respond to this
I think the mods do an excellent job in general. In this situation however, they’ve clearly been over-eager to “improve” the board culture, and have now backed themselves into a bad corner. Admit you were in the wrong, withdraw both the note to Happy and Munch’s warning. Start afresh guys, and this time, do try to make it clear what it is that you’re starting.
Well like I said earlier, I think they are going to have to find a middle ground between “moderate obvious misogynist trolling” and “can’t say anything about sex” but I think that will come with time. As MOL stated, there will be some misfires but it isn’t the end of the world.
I think the important point for me has always been “was this directed at a poster”. A lot of the examples we brought up in other threads were obviously misogynistic comments directed at other posters in a pretty evident trolling way. Meaning designed to elicit a reaction from somebody here.
I was ok with just getting a note. I backed off because my joke wasn’t even that funny or clever and I didn’t want to get in a silly argument with a mod. However, I do think the note was a little knee-jerky.
I’m also curious to know whether I had called the sorority girl a disgusting pig (instead of what I did say) if I would have attracted mod action.
So add that to the list of questions I submitted in post 13. I really do want to understand what is acceptable and what isn’t here. And why.
That being said, I do appreciate the humility Ellen has displayed in explaining her actions, and accepting that there may be misfires as they deal with some shit around here. I hope the rest of the mods can follow her example.
Neither has political correctness, FWIW. But not being a jerk has been a rule, and if you need to do so, you can just swap in “not being a jerk” for “political correctness” in all the sad posts about this change.
You are using the loosest possible definition of “misogynistic” I’ve seen in some time. Making a joke, even is a sexual one, does not constitute misogyny, or anything close to it.
A fundamental misunderstanding of a word should not pave the path for supposed rule violations.
I disagree. Unless you consider good manners to be based on the content of speech rather than it’s form. In that case I despise good manners as much as political correctness. If this was an issue of manners than the OP in the thread at question should have been warned and the thread closed.