I don’t think anyone intended to give her “a hard time” or treat the remark as anything less than harmless and casual. But when you draw attention to your own assets, you’re not really in a position to object if people follow your lead by paying a bit of attention to them as well. So why was her initial remark “harmless and casual” but others who responded in the same spirit – or what they took to be the same spirit – are “sexist”? I recognize that’s not YOUR assertion – but it is hers, and that’s what people are objecting to.
If I say my breasts look spectacular, even facetiously, then I’m not really in a position to complain if other people follow up on that comment. And if they do, they’re not necessarily trying to give me a hard time, nor do they necessarily find the comment unusual or obnoxious. Nor are they sexist pigs. I mean, they may be, for all I know, but that’s not why.
Well, it certainly looks to me like several posts in this thread ARE criticizing her original remark, not just her later reaction. Several posts have suggested that she mentioned her breasts in the first place just to brag about how great they are, and I don’t think that’s fair.
Jaysus.
I believe I started lurking this board in '03; I was working an overnight security job where nothing ever happened and started reading message boards to pass the time and keep from losing my mind. Could be the board has changed, could be I’ve just gotten older. But sometimes I feel like I keep visiting this board for the same train wreck reason I keep watching The O’Reilly Factor.
I don’t spend much of my time on the internet, all told. I can’t claim to know what’s ‘normal’ and ‘inevitable’ according to internet standards, but I do know that as a late-twentysomething working class individual I’m a bit shocked and appalled at the responses to Tracy Lord’s various threads. She made an offhand comment regarding her appearance. A couple of internet mouthbreathers leapt upon that comment like rabid dogs, and she firmly but politely asked them to back off. Now she’s the one to blame!? She was asking for it?!? This claims to be a website dedicated to eliminating ignorance, and yet I’ve not seen this level of ignorant frat-boy mentality in quite some time, on any of the internet sites I visit, or in any of the real life communities I live in. And I work in a goddamn kitchen (for those of you without a service background, the commercial kitchen environment isn’t exactly known for its progressive social attitudes).
Nowadays, the company I work for puts signs on the wall with various platitudes and mission statements. A while back, I worked in a place that had only one handwritten sign on its wall; it simply said “honour and respect”. That’s still the one I try to live up to, though maybe I fail as often as not. But it’s a good guideline, no matter how educated or cultured you are or claim to be.
I’m too tired to re-read the whole thread now, but skimming back over the current page that’s how posts #108, #111, #120, and #130 strike me. They all seem to be suggesting that Tracy had some ulterior motive in mentioning her breasts in the first place: getting attention, being a tease, or maybe even setting up a scheme that would allow her to play the victim later on.
Which was fine, you clarified, I acknowledged (and maybe I should have used a joke smiley) that you weren’t addressing me directly, I was just engaging you in a dialogue because it seemed like you were saying something you apparently weren’t.
Eh, matters little to me. I have to say I don’t necessarily understand you getting snarky at me even though we’re staking out roughly the same basic position (idiots are idiots and should stop), I’m just taking it an extra step (but they likely won’t, so ignore 'em), but this is seeming more like the kind of thread where everyone, myself included, needs to take a deep breath and step back from time to time.
Maybe in the long run it’s a good sign that young women can get so easily confused about what sexism actually is. Forty years ago when I was first introduced to the idea of feminism and had my eyes opened to have different things could be, sexism was suddenly so obvious. Men were allowed and expected to do certain things and women were allowed and expected to do other things. And those things were practically carved in stone.
Some of them are still sitting in the back of people’s minds. I see it ever now and then in little ways – (someone addressing the participants in Great Debates as “Gentlemen,” for example) – but it’s still there and just as ignorant.
Since I am #108 (but I am aware we are just driving in circles at this point), I will respond and probably never look back on this thread again (what is the point?).
If I have a problem, such as wanting to get a really close shave, I would probably word it “how can I get a really close shave? Suggestions?”. Maybe I would include info on what I am using currently (electric razor, etc).
If I go into a whole rant about why I want that very close shave, and it is something along the lines of “my SO has very sensitive privates and when I practice oral on her, it irritates her”, I have just stepped SO FAR away from the PURPOSE of my post, that I should expect all kinds of flak from the upcoming comments.
Everything we do (say, write, etc), is done for a reason. She (consciously and purposefully or unconsciously and self-servingly), went out of her way to rant about how this shirt, was her favorite because it accentuates some of her girly bits. Please realize she didn’t say she loves the shirt because it fits her really well. She went all the way to say it made her boobs look amazing. Its in there for a reason. However, AFAIAC, there is no harm done so far.
But lets assume it isn’t. She didn’t mean to bait anyone.
So a couple of guys (only a couple and not me), take the “could be” bait and make a very common and easily predicted joke. OH JEEZUS! Slap me silly HOW COULD YOU?!
They drop it.
Then, in a different post about her wondering about jumping a guys bones, one guy (jokingly) makes mention of this shirt thread as in “your boobs look great in that shirt, you should wear it to get his attention”. Holly moses will you please climb back up that mountain and find a commandment to stop this insanity!!
THEN, she creates a whole new thread, to label all this, as sexism as a matter of fact.
Clearly, most of the board disagrees with this (men and women), and after a while, it just comes across as hypocritical. I say this because, if you want something forgotten, you don’t continue to bring it up (as she has done by creating this thread).
To me it is all pretty plain and simple. I think most people here have only tried (at least in the beginning) to put it in perspective for her a little, but she is hell-bent on looking at all of us as being dead wrong.
Tracy Lord has apparently ducked out of the discussion here, but something that nobody seemed to mention (most obvious, in my opinion) is the nature of the internet.
Saying something on the internet is like letting a very destructive genie out of the bottle. Once you post something, you lose control of it in a way, since people are going to interpret it their own ways and often they do so in ways that make you upset/angry/offended.
But its the nature of the internet. Either you have the stones to take it, or you find some other way to pass the time. Annonymity has a tendency to cater to the lowest denominator, and its no surprise an innocuous conversation would get spun in naughty ways.
Eh I don’t think Tracy Lord’s post and subsequent reaction has been malicious or manipulative as some have implied, probably just naive. When you talk about your breasts you are giving authorisation for others to talk about your breasts. It’s the same in real life, if a work colleague were to talk about her breasts to me, I’d feel that I was allowed to engage her in a conversation about her breasts too, if she then got upset, I’d be confused. If I was in a trolling mood and thought I could get away with it, I may continue to talk about her breasts because I know it annoys her, that is because I’m sometimes an arsehole (I do generally pick up the firm STFU! signal though, I’m not totally clueless.)
I actually don’t have any pants that make my cock look big. I find that it’s my cock that makes my pants look small ;).
I think Tracy Lord was doing some attention whoring and realized that if you attention whore and then complain about the attention, you end up with twice the attention. Bowing out of the thread would be typical since it’s not really about anything more than squeezing one more drop of attention out of the whole thing.
If your reading this, I hope you get over yourself. Nobody cares about you or your breasts or your pat reactionary stance.
Wow. If you don’t care about her and think she’s an attention whore, why post to say so? You’re just giving her what you think she wants, right? So she wins and you look mean.
The one thing that gives me pause here and makes me wonder if Tracy Lord doesn’t have a point is the way men post to bra threads. Usually these threads are about how bras are so annoying, uncomfortable, it’s hard to find one that fits right, etc. They are not about women bragging about their boobs or trying to flirt. It’s too early in the morning for me to dig up cites, though I will later if people insist, but in damn near every one of these, some men enter to post things like, “Well, I’d need to see a picture to judge,” or “I could just walk around behind you and hold them for you,” or “Cite?” when a woman mentions her bra size.
Is that sexism? I don’t care what you call it, it’s annoying and unnecessary, and makes the guy who posted it look like a cackling frat boy. It’s also a form of threadshitting if you ask me. That’s why it doesn’t surprise me that Tracy Lord felt as she did. You can’t mention breasts, no matter how clinically or non-sexually, without some idiot making a lascivious comment. I realize it’s par for the course, it being the internet and people being what they are, but it does lend some credence to Tracy’s thesis that there are some mouthbreathers on here who can’t handle the merest mention of breasts.
Where I think that some of the confusion lies is that women don’t always think of their breasts in a sexual way. Sometimes they’re just something that can ruin the fit of clothes or enhance the way a blouse looks, to stay on the topic of clothes. And when Tracy Lord posted that, to me it seemed that she was posting in that frame of mind. She was concerned about the blouse and thinking of the breasts as just flesh to be confined in a flattering or non-flattering way, not thinking about them in a sexual manner, and so wasn’t expecting the remarks she got.
Had she posted that remark in a flirting or attractiveness thread, it would have been fair game. But she didn’t and it seems to me that she’s right; it should be okay to be able to mention a female body part without getting those specific kinds of remarks back. It’s about context, for the guys who are confused. Read the thread for context. You’re Dopers, you should be able to do that, right?
Although it wasn’t linked, Marley mentioned that TL’s comment had been brought up again in the thread about signals as well as in the linked thread about the new hot co-worker. I haven’t read the unlinked thread so don’t know if it’s the case but did read the co-worker thread. If true in the signals thread as well, that does seem to be a case of the unwanted remarks following her around the Dope. Since she asked politely for them to stop in the first thread, that should have been enough right there to end the thing. I don’t agree with her that it’s sexism, but I can understand why it’s offensive to her.