Just as a thought experiment, keep everything the same, except instead of a woman and her breasts, make it a man and his cock. Is there any way that it comes off as non-sexual?
Wouldn’t it be a more accurate thought experiment if a man said a shirt made his pecs look amazing? Would you assume that’s a sexual comment? I wouldn’t. Likewise, if a woman said a skirt made her vagina look amazing, I would assume it was.
But you have missed my point: you are saying she had no such ulterior motive when you cannot know that, either. We are both speculating as to her “reasoning” (which I have found, over time, to be murky at best). Her choide of words is either suggestive or innocuous–and perhaps it’s neither or both. That is what is so fascinating to me about this thread: if you see it one way, the dominoes fall into one line; if you see it another, the same dominoes fall into a completely different pattern.
This thread has a lot to say about men and women and how both are perceived in modern society. There are myriad spinoffs possible from this mess.
The problem is that much extrapolating about her motives has taken place beyond the initial comment. She’s been called an overall attention whore, an offense troll, a cocktease, and a host of other things. All those things are attributing motives to her when, as you point out, none of us really knows what her agenda was. If you’re inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and take them at their word, then the worst you would think of Tracy is that she was naive and oversensitive. The rest seems overly harsh and judgmental to me, but YMMV.
I didn’t say that they were flirting with you, I said that they like the item of clothing because they thought the item of clothing made them more sexually attractive. Not knowing your friends, I can’t say if they’re hoping for male or female attention but claiming something makes you “look great” inherently has an audience in mind.
There’s the whole “I dress to look good for myself” thing that people claim when asked if they dress to impress the same sex or the opposite, but I doubt shut-ins do a lot of primping.
I’m not saying that attractiveness doesn’t enter into it, but most men don’t like clothes the way most women do. I doubt most men would even notice what a girl is wearing unless it’s quite suggestive. On the other hand, women notice what other women are wearing. I really think most women dress for other women most often, but that’s another thread.
Also, I currently work from home for an insurance company’s Ask-a-Nurse line. Nobody can see me and if I wanted to I could work in my pjs. I fix my hair and often put on a little makeup (eyeliner, lipgloss) because I feel better when I am “put together”. I do that for me. Like I said, it isn’t ALL about doing it for ourselves but more often than not, it is for me.
Why don’t we make it a man and his pecs or abs? I think it’s bizarre that you and others keep trying to say that a woman’s breasts = a man’s penis. The breasts aren’t part of a woman’s genitalia.
Now, if a male Doper posted about how he wanted to save a favorite stained shirt that made his chest muscles look amazing then I wouldn’t have taken that as an invitation for flirting or photo requests. I’d have either advised him on how to get the stain out or moved on to another thread without comment.
I don’t believe I’ve ever said that I know for sure that she has no ulterior motive, just that I see no reason to doubt her stated reason and I think it’s unfair to assume that she’s lying. Several posters, yourself included, have suggested that no woman would say such a thing unless she were trying to be provocative, but it’s my experience that young women often say such things casually.
I can’t KNOW what Tracy really meant, just like I can’t KNOW what anyone here really means. But her original comment didn’t seem strange to me and I see nothing implausible about her stated reason for making it. If this is all an elaborate trolling scheme, well, she sure fooled me. Even if she jumps back in here and shouts “GOTCHA!” then her fake persona still had a point about how obnoxious those “Please post a photo of your sexy body!” comments are.
Well, if they weren’t flirting with me then it would be either very rude or very clueless of me to respond to them as if they were. I certainly wouldn’t ask for them to give me photos of their breasts.
They are inappropriate in some contexts, and not in others. In the example given in the linked post, they are inappropriate. In Tracy’s thread, not inappropriate.
Tracy posted to a mixed gender message board that she had a shirt that made her waist look tiny and her boobs look amazing.
There is nothing wrong with that, and I have no interest in guessing at her motives. I’m just saying that the responses were not out of line with her original post.
If she told that to a man in real life (who couldn’t already see her in it) they might well jokingly ask her to wear it sometime. The “cite” thing is even more mild, since it is more of a metajoke anyway, not a literal request.
Things didn’t take a turn for the worse until she made accusations first of sleaze and then of sexism.
It makes no sense to say people should have dropped the matter once she made the accusations. The accusations themselves are the “matter” which people were responding to from that point on.
Riiiiiiight.
I know you don’t intend this, but the wording makes it sound like people were asking for naked pics.
Two people jokingly asked to see her in the shirt.
Well, I think it was inappropriate there, and so did Tracy. It wasn’t a flirt thread, she was asking a question about stain removal. People could have focused on that instead of a passing remark about her breasts.
I’m going to go a step further and say that I don’t think “I need a cite, such as a photo of your sexy body!” or “I’m masturbating as I read your post!” comments should ever be considered appropriate here. I would be happy to never see anything of that nature on these boards ever again. I realize I’m not going to get my wish, but that’s how I feel about it.
I have no feelings of hypocrisy here, given that I’m on record both expecting such comments to be made by a small subset of posters, expecting such comments to nonetheless show up in a relatively high percentage of threads which directly or indirectly mention breasts, and I have also in fact called out people who did so inappropriately as jerks, both in specific and as a class of people.
You’re probably right here–I myself accept them when they appear to be a response to a flirting mention of breasts.
Sure, but look at the bullshit Ruby is still piling on. When it’s pointed out that men react in sexual ways to overt sexual signals, she turns that into a claim that men just can’t control themselves and have to be rude. And then she’s such a coward and so dishonest that she has to claim it’s men who stated that they’re simply out of control (ayieeeeeeeeeee!). And little old her is just describing how men have admitted that they’re berserk, sex crazed lunatics.
She wants to claim that normal male sexual responses are aberrant and out of control, and when called on it, her response is “But see, you just said men respond sexually to sexual stimuli!” And, of course, a rousing tu quoque about how it’s okay for her to spew slime on male sexuality itself, because, why, some people still use terms like “tramp” “slut” and “whore!” It’s not surprising coming from her, as she already admitted to diving people up into “women” and “the guys” who are having a battle in this thread, totally ignoring that there were posters of box genders on both sides of this issue. To her, it’s the battle of the goddamn sexes.
Fuck that noise.
There is a real problem when some people think that they can elevate their status by being a Victim and having to find someone who’s Oppressing them. When it’s women pointing to polite, perfectly reasonable displays of male arousal, there aint enough rolleyes. Sexism and discrimination are absolutely real problems, and they’re cheapened by victim pimps who use the fact that men are, by evolution, the half of the species that generally peruses and initiates contact as proof that men are out of control sex maniacs unfairly oppressing women with their filthy, filthy sexuality.
That they’re reduced to such logical absurdities as claiming that a woman telling a group of men over the internet that she has hot tits hasn’t actually said anything sexual? Or Ruby’s incessant lying by claiming that “My boobs look amazing” was dishonestly being twisted into a statement about how someone said they had amazing boobs?
Without a trace of shame or intellectual integrity, Ruby was the troll who actually stated "Tracy Lord never said, “I have awesome tits.” She simply said a shirt made her boobs look amazing. " As if, evidently changing the word “tits” to “boobs” meant that something totally different was being said. I have no desire to grant someone the most charitable analysis of their actions if, repeatedly, they show that dishonesty is a much more likely explenation.
And yes, dishonesty is one of my major pet peeves.
And it is telling that their little outrage party could only be supported with such rank dishonesty.
Such as:
.
Yeah, because “live topless women!” isn’t a sexual statement, at all. In fact, many parents would have no problem bringing children to a “live topless women!” show, because it’s obviously non-sexual. In fact, it’s the exact same as just going to the beach and seeing men without shirts. In fact, in western culture we don’t even have such a thing as topless beaches, because we don’t differentiate between a man’s chest and a woman’s, at all.
Western culture doesn’t differentiate, at all, between which zones on an man’s and a woman’s body are considered ‘private parts’.
You’re honestly confused on this point. Yep.
Never spent a day in western society, fresh off the boat, you two.
Sure.
You’re not playing fun little games to maintain your outrage with poor, put upon Tracy.
You have no idea that in western culture, a woman’s tits are considered sexual parts of her anatomy. This is news to you. Why, low cut dresses? Bikinis? Sexy lingere? The Miracle Bra? Never heard of 'em. After all, breasts aren’t genitalia.
And the phrase “tits and ass” isn’t sexual either, since, after all, those aren’t genitalia. When people talk about “tits and ass”, in fact, they’re talking about the production of milk and feces. Since neither breasts nor buttocks are genitals, of course, “tits and ass”, “topless girls”, “look at the ass on that girl”, “wow, nice tits!”, all must be equivalent to mentions of a guy having nice pecs.
That’s what you really think, you’re not putting us on to further the Outrage Show.
You expect people in this thread to believe that you are really that stupid.
To believe that you really don’t understand what “live topless women!” would mean.
Right. You can pretend to be that clueless, but it’s not exactly convincing.
Trolling by feigned idiocy is a new one. Generally even trolls have more self respect than to pretend to be drooling morons in order to cause conflict.
Takes all sorts, I suppose.
This is the other thing I was planning on pointing out on the re-re-read. It seemed like most of the comments were talking about this G-rated thing and not the R-rated one that’s been the focus of the discussion.
And yeah, it SHOULD go without saying that asking for pics without the shirt, or the masturbation references etc. that Lamia is talking about from the other threads are pretty much inappropriate and wrong everywhere except in the very rare case of a thread designed to accomodate them comfortably (the only one coming to my mind at this point is the “Doper NSFW picture thread”, as an example.).
I need some kind of ray guy that can zap the “contentious idiot” out of Finn’s posts and leave the few lines from each one that are making a valid point, like his comments on the fact that in the culture the majority of board members share, bared breasts are as sexual a thing as penises or vaginae.
They did. The responses actually stayed on the topic of stain removal much more than the original post, which mostly emphasized that the shirt was her favorite, and why it was her favorite, while leaving out details (fabric type) relevant to stain removal.
Personally, I thought she was looking for commiseration rather than advice.
Again, there is nothing wrong with her post… but the responses are not out of line with it.
She posted on a public message board that she has a shirt which makes her waist look tiny and her boobs look amazing, and in the midst of posts which don’t mention it, two people jokingly say they would like to see her in it (one in passing, after giving advice).
Even in real life, someone might jokingly ask her to wear it sometime. This is pretty darn mild stuff here, as was the original post.
OK, maybe you did intend it.
Awe man, a coworker spilled red wine on my favourite pants. They’re the ones that fit me perfectly around the waist and make my cock look amazing.
Can anyone tell me how to remove the stain?
The one on your pants, or the one on your character? :dubious:
Within its entire context, and with ‘amazing’ italicized as in the original, the statement has more of an impact:
Bother! I was at a great birthday party tonight – or at least it was great until a drunk girl jostled my arm and spilled red wine on my Very Favorite Beige Pants. The ones that are the only pants that go with my great white shirt, the ones that I can wear to work and to the theater, the ones that fit perfectly and have an excellent cut that makes my thighs look great and my cock look amazing.
My honest reaction? I wouldn’t even post in the thread because I don’t know a thing about red wine stain removal. The explicit mention of the ‘cock’ is an irrelevant detail to me and I would have glossed right over it.