I’m calling your bluff.
LOL. 
My vengeance will be fearsome and when you least expect it.
Sorry for the long post now that the thread is winding down, but I wanted to reply to some of the replies to me from earlier.
I really do think Tracy made a mistake in mentioning her breasts in the red wine stain thread, in the sense that she did something that was likely to provoke a response she wouldn’t like. She’s been here long enough to have observed, as I have observed, that any reference a female poster makes to her breasts in any context will likely be met with “SHOW US YER TITS!” type replies. So I agree with you and others who have said she’d have done better to leave out the bit about the shirt making her breasts look good.
What I object to is the suggestions by some posters that she must have had some ulterior motive for mentioning her breasts. Considering all the incredibly intimate details various people have posted on these boards over the years, I don’t see how a passing remark about a shirt that “makes my waist look tiny and my boobs look amazing” constitutes attention whoring.
Now, I would be less sympathetic towards Tracy if the same remark had been made in a different context. If she’d started a thread solely to describe how great she looks in her favorite shirt then that would be pretty frivolous even for MPSIMS. I could understand concluding that such a thread was really about bragging/flirting. But Tracy had a legitimate question about stain removal, and only briefly mentioned her breasts as part of a longer explanation of why she liked the shirt so much. I don’t see any reason to doubt that she meant only what she said she meant – that the shirt made her look good in specific ways that other shirts do not and that this was one of several reasons why it was special to her.
She did that though, at first. Her initial response in the red wine stain thread is here; she says “I would appreciate it if you would not say things like that to me again”. That COULD have been the end of things, but it wasn’t.
While it’s true that Tracy could at any time have decided to ignore the obnoxious comments, other posters could also have recognized that she’d said she didn’t appreciate such remarks and decided to not be jerks about it. Tracy definitely could have handled the whole thing better, but other posters could even more easily have stopped trying to provoke her. Certainly no one needed to bring the incident up in other threads.
And again, her original comment wasn’t about how amazing her breasts are. She said the shirt made her breasts LOOK amazing. It’s like the difference between saying “I love this dress, I look really good in it” and “I’m so beautiful”. If making her breasts look amazing was part of what made the shirt special to her, that suggests that her breasts don’t normally look amazing.
FWIW, I used that specific phrasing because in the red wine stain thread Tracy said she trusted Dopers not to be sleazy. She was wrong. I wish she were right, though.
By my count there are at least three and maybe four such comments. (G0sp3l’s remark about how women shouldn’t wear bras MAY have been motivated by something other than prurient desire to see more women braless, although I doubt it.) And that’s in a thread with a totally non-sexual OP that didn’t directly mention breasts at all, and where none of the “jokes” were rewarded with attention.
*Perhaps this is overly idealistic of me, but given the stated purpose of this board I think it’s those who make the “har-har boobs” jokes who should recognize what this board is and isn’t and learn to post accordingly. I don’t think there’s anything inappropriate about asking others for help with finding a good bra, and I don’t think such a thread deserves “har-har boobs” jokes. Not even one.
As I said, she was wrong to trust a bunch of strangers on the internet to be anything. But as it happens, her trust was not misplaced, because the vast majority of posters in every single thread mentioned here – including this one – behaved appropriated. And apparently mileage varies greatly in how the situation is viewed, because I find characterizing any of the comments she received as “sleazy” is as hysterical (in both senses of the word) as talking about “broken trust.”
God, first her boobs, now her uterus – will the madness never end?
And for the vast majority of people, though, it was–the further mentions of it were started by the same two people, and one of those (Koxinga in the Signals thread) appeared to me to be honestly trying to get to the root of signals sent vs. signals received.
This attitude is why I joined this argument in the first place. DOPERS are not sleazy. Less than half a dozen people who post on this board–that is, less than 1/10 of one percent of the active userbase–made off-color comments to Tracy after she asked people not to. That brush that paints the dope as accepting of “sexist” behavior is several dozen leagues too wide. (leaving aside the whole question of whether flirty responses to apparently-flirty, as many of us read the way Tracy phrased her remark in the wine stain thread, are sexist at all–I do not believe they are.)
Not really. Because to me, bringing up that thread is unfair. Not sexist, but unkind to Tracy. If she has learned anything in the years since she posted that thread, bringing up ancient history just makes her look more youthful and self-centered. (I do not believe her to be inappropriately self-centered in general).
And if she hasn’t learned anything, bringing up that thread just rubs her nose in it.
I think Tracy has some boundary issues, but I’m not certain that her issues are as severe as some people have made them out to be (most likely to create a hostile work envirnment?) I hope she will mature into a confident woman capable of handling some obnoxious teasing on the internet–and cautious enough not to share stuff she’ll regret.
And I regret that events have made it unlikely that I will be able to observe the process, because she has decided to depart this message board for other territories.
So what you’re saying is that the sexual aspect of how breasts look is so overriding that men can’t be trusted to read for context and respond appropriately? Really?
The idea that this has anything to to with any kind of “trust” is ludicrous here. She stood on a street corner in mixed company and declaimed upon her “amazing boobs.” That’s sexuality-tinged conversation. Period. That’s the context.
She did not declaim upon her amazing boobs. She said she had a shirt that she really liked, and it made her boobs look amazing. There is a meaningful difference here that you are choosing to obscure to justify people making shitty comments. I don’t think she was inviting comments about her breasts in saying this, and I think attempts to twist it so she was are nothing more than rationalization for obnoxious behavior. Just because most people would shrug it off doesn’t mean it’s acceptable behavior that you should be defending.
Whoa whoa whoa. She comments on a shirt and amazing boobs. And why did she like the shirt – because it made her boobs look amazing. And why is that particular shirt so important to her – because it makes her boobs look amazing.
To be upset about boob comments is simply dizzying in terms of sheer… cluelessness.
Boyo Jim
Fan of boobs and shirts to the extent that they make boobs look amazing
To be upset after someone drags it up in an unrelated subsequent thread, and further upset after people persist is not cluelessness. It is just about exactly how one would react in the real world if confronted with that behavior.
But you’re right, there really is much ado about cluelessness in this thread…
I’m not sure why you’re overreacting to the word ‘trust’. Would ‘rely upon’ or ‘expect’ suit you better?
And the context is the shirt, not the boobs. Just because you feel that any mention of boobs that aren’t strictly related to disease or motherhood is sexually tinged doesn’t mean that it’s actually the case. The intent of the person who posted the word, which was clear to many of us from the beginning and made clear to the rest of you by the OP later on, is the standard which a well-mannered person who is actually interested in communicating with the OP would accept.
[quote=“Rubystreak, post:230, topic:490037”]
Please don’t put words in my mouth. Review my comments again. I am reacting to Suse’s statements that “boobs are not always sexual.” If you are in the company of men, except for certain very limited circumstances (cancer, nursing), yes, boobs are always sexual. They are not simply a physical feature of a woman’s body; they are a sexual feature of a woman’s body.
And having perused some of the other links offered in this thread, might I add that I know know more about her deflowering than I know about anyone else’s except my own. That’s also the context.
She was offering her sexuality as an appropriate topic of discussion. She didn’t say “I look great in this shirt” or “This shirt makes me look great.” She said “My boobs look amazing in this shirt.” There is only one way in which boobs look amazing and that’s sexually.
Maybe her tone at the start was off, and if you want to make a mountain out of that molehill then I guess that’s cool, but if a woman asks you to not talk about her chest, you should probably not talk about her chest. Unless you think that by mentioning it once she was asking for it, despite any future statements to the contrary.
Some of you are deconstructing sentences down to each individual word just to make some sort of logical beachhead to prove your point but I think in cases like this it might be best to just say “sorry I thought you were ok with it, won’t happen again.”
And yeah, I know this is the pit, but goddamn, “stop talking about my body” isn’t really the most outrageous of requests under any circumstances, is it?
Depends. Someone minding their own business and they’re being leered at? Bad form.
“Hey everybody, my tits look really hot! Don’t talk about my tits!” No. Then the fault is on the person who is, essentially, trolling to get people to say things that they can take offense at. It’s obnoxious to start talking about yourself in sexual terms and then feign outrage when other people continue.
It reminds me of a classic freakout in I Heart Huckabees.
"Don’t look at me. I just want to be left alone.
I’m sick of this. I’m sick of you all looking at me.
Look at me. Please, please, please, everybody.
Everybody look at me now. I am so pretty. I am so pretty. Look at me. "
Really? I thought the fault was the people who turn into giggly idiots at the mention of tits. God forbid they’ve done wrong. :rolleyes:
Yes, it must be either/or. And what’s more, it’s the fault of millions of years of evolution. If a woman were to walk down the street stark naked, any men who stared would be total bastards and if she deliberately stripped down to the buff precisely so that she could make make stare at her and then yell at them, it’d just show how horrible men are.
How about this, men who respond inappropriately (and no, not every response to a deliberately sexual remark a woman makes about her anatomy is inappropriate), they’ve crossed a line. And if a woman deliberately makes a sexual remark about her anatomy in order to troll for offense. she’s at fault too.
Do you really think this was the intent? Does this poster have a history of that? I mean, I just don’t think this is terribly far out there. Don’t you think maybe it was something she thought was a throwaway comment that got more attention then she wanted and she tried to stop it?
Funny that you’re emphasizing how few people actually made such remarks, when from the beginning one of the criticisms of Tracy’s reaction has been that such “jokes” are so common that she should have expected them. For instance, back in the red wine stain thread Dag Otto said they were inevitable. So she was wrong not to expect that Dopers would inevitably make jokes asking to see her breasts, and yet she was also wrong to later say that such behavior is accepted here.
Regardless of what percentage of the board actually makes “SHOW US YER TITS!” posts, it seems clear enough to me that most of the membership is perfectly willing to accept them. If any thread that has anything to do with breasts should be expected to get a “har-har boobs” remark or two (or three, or more) and hardly anyone ever objects then that such looks like acceptance to me. Especially when the rare poster who does object to being the subject of such remarks is treated like a hypocritical humorless attention whore who was asking for it in the first place.
I think you were one of the people who said that Tracy should just have ignored the remarks. I’d agree that it probably would have been better for her if she had. Threads that have attracted similar comments, like the comfortable bra thread or even the recent female masturbation thread, have continued on fairly smoothly with everyone just ignoring the sleazy “jokes”. But just ignoring it in thread after thread is not the way the Dope normally reacts to behavior that is not considered acceptable here.
Now, I’m guilty of not objecting to this kind of “joke” myself, so I guess I’ve contributed to the atmosphere of acceptance. I had originally opened that thread about finding comfortable bras fully intending to give some advice to the OP, but once I hit the first “humorous” remark (within the first ten replies) I did the same thing I usually do. I decided I wasn’t going to post at all. I didn’t feel it would be right to reply without also saying that it was inappropriate and offensive for men to cyber-leer at the OP because she had dared mention women’s undergarments, but I also didn’t want to derail someone else’s thread into a discussion of what a frigid feminazi killjoy I am.
I’ve been here long enough to feel certain that’s what would have happened. This thread has not inspired any doubt in me on that point. The SDMB is a lot more accepting of men who ask women to post photos of their breasts than it is of women who object to such things.