Wonko, please find some other way to amuse yourself.

The BBQ Pit
1

In a thread about gynecological exams, Wonko the Sane has been deriving great joy from taunting the women in the thread about not ever having had a gynecological exam, and never planning to. Concerned women explained that there are many good reasons to get an exam, that it didn’t matter if one was young, celebate, and had no family history of cancer, that one should still look after one’s reproductive health, and in post after post, Wonko poo-pooed them and their advice. Wonko claimed immunity from the life-threatening diseases and conditions that could be found in their early stages in an annual exam. No exams for Wonko, no siree!

If you don’t know, or haven’t guessed, Wonko is male. (And if you think that first paragraph was easy to write without pronouns, think again!)

Hooo! Hah! Hah-hah! What a great joke! Uterine cancer, now there’s a laughing matter! See, Wonko dropped little clues like bunny pellets, but he didn’t just come out and say, “Girls, I was havin’ some fun with ya. I don’t need pelvic exams because I’m male.” No, 'cause that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun as stringing along the people who foolishly took his posts at face value and thought that he was actually a woman who should be presuaded, for the sake of her own health, that she really should have regular check-ups. Dopers, take note: even if you’re in a thread about a life-and-death health risks, you need to be on the alert for pusswads yanking your chain. If you don’t get the joke, to hell with you and the fight against ignorance.

Wonko, fuck off. You are not cute. Your behaviour was extremely disrespectful toward the other posters in the thread, who were just trying to be helpful. Moreover, if your disingenuous antics persuaded one woman that it was okay not to get a gynecological exam, and she suffers any harm because of it, I hope that you get a testicular cancer the size of a grapefruit.

What a shame. Women (and some men, too) gathered to ask questions and share information about a serious health issue openly and honestly, and the thread was disrupted by a dickheaded twerp trampling through the middle of it for his personal amusement.

2

Actually I thought Wonko was being pretty obnoxious as well. I knew that he was male but it was still sucky that he was practically dancing around singing “You have to get this shitty exam and I dooon’t.”

Jeez - grow up a little, would ya guy? Cervical cancer is both common and scary.

Al.

3

I don’t believe this. Freakin’ mild-mannered, nice-guy, inoffensive Wonko the Sane has a pit thread dedicated to him and I, the snide, arguementative, opinion-spouting bitch has never gotten a (serious) even midly rebuking thread.
This is a crazy, mixed up world we live in.

4

I just read through the thread and to be honest, I thought it was just a lighthearted joke that got out of hand due to the audience not knowing what Wonko assumed they knew. I don’t honestly believe that he intended to mislead as much as he eventually did.

I thought that when he realised what was happening, he was quite good about it really.

pan

5

It’s because you might very well be the Queen of Sheba, Biggirl. (you said so yourself). Smart people don’t go around flaming Queens.

Well, actually I like to go around (and over and under) with Flaming Queens. But I don’t actually flame them. Although some people say I do flame. But compared to some Queens I know, I’m downright low-key.

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I’ll certainly agree that it started as an innocuous joke, kabbes. But I’d think that being “good about it” would take the form of an apology and a clear explanation. I don’t begrudge Wonko the happy privilege of not having to worry about sexually transmitted diseases or cancers of the femal reproductive system, but enough women in that thread related stories of their own disease, and diseases that their friends and family members had suffered and even died from. This wasn’t a place for light-hearted jokes, especially jokes which could be misconstrued by the casual reader–and clearly tripped up even SDMB veterans.

I just cringe at the thought of a young woman reading this thread and thinking, “This Wonko lady has a good point. There’s no cancer in my family, and I’m not having sex with anyone. I’ve got no more of a chance of getting cancer than Wonko does.” And who knows if she stuck around long enough to figure out her error.

7

True.

Anything to say for yourself Wonko?

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The only reason I took issue with Wonko is for precisely the reason Podkayne states: I thought it was irresponsible for an assumably female poster to post saying “I’m never having exams because I’ll never get sick, and I’m 32 and if I was going to develop these diseases I would have by now” – all of which is totally incorrect for a woman.

When it occurred to me he may be male, I asked him: Why are you posting to a thread about gynological exams, just to be a jerk? He replied “I prefer the term ‘asshole.’”

Now, when people profess to be assholes, I generally take them at face value and I’m perfectly willing to do so in Wonko’s case. I’m not sure that’s worthy of a Pit thread, but I do think that Podkayne is correct that his posts added nothing but confusion and misinformation to a thread about a fairly important subject. Maybe that wasn’t his intention, but that was the result.

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Knowing Wonko was a male…I just found his posts superfluous and annoying…and the greatest crime was they were NOT funny at all.

Sort of like a little clutch of gnats around my head.

°

10

Well, look at it this way, the prostate exams he’ll eventually most likely have to experience can be thought of as some degree of ironic kharma. It’s certainly not an even trade, but it’s hardly fun either.

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Listen, I’m tagging out of that thread. I meant it as just a smart-ass comment meant to be silly, but when I got such passionate responses from people, I figured I would see how much of a reaction I would get. My profile clearly has “Computer Guy” as my occupation,(not “Computer Gal” or “computer person of indeterminate gender with a vaguely gender-inspecific name”) so it wasn’t like I was hiding anything. Also, I -never- said that any female person should avoid going to that kind of doctor, nor did I claim to be any kind of expert whatsoever. I also never disagreed with anything other than that -I- should not go to that kind of doctor.

[angry bastard rant o’ evil]I also believe that anyone who goes to an anonymus message board for medical advice, instead of an actual real doctor, is probably a person that shouldn’t be reproducing anyhow.[/angry bastard rant o’ evil]

Doesn’t anyone look at profiles anymore?

Wow, I finally posted in the pit, and with the right attitude.
Ahhh…

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No, I never look at profiles. Why should I have to?

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ya know, expecting some one to look at your profile is absurd.

and here you admit you were doing that just to yank people’s chains, and get them all concerned about you etc.

assholic indeed.

I’d seen your first posting in that thread and knew you were male, shrugged and did the mental ‘rolleyes’ at you.

BUt this - why in the world would you find it defensibly amusing to get strangers concerned for your welfare, knowing that it was a put on?

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This brings up a pet peeve of mine. Wholly aside from the fact that you acted like a jerk in a serious thread devoted to health issues, you did it in General Questions.

Why, oh why, must people post sarcastic crap in GQ? If you don’t have an answer, don’t post. It would still have been, in my opinion, uncool for you to have done this in a MPSIMS or IMHO thread, but doing that crap in GQ is particularly annoying.

I know the Mods are trying to crack down on this and I applaud them. But it is still damn-near impossible for a thread that even tangentially addresses politics without somebody coming in to take a shot at President Bush/Clinton/Bush/Reagan. If you cant be constructive, don’t post. But I digress.

Wonko’s posts were helping to defeat the very purpose of GQ which is to provide intelligent answers. The clever “I’m a man but I’ll be vague” technique wasn’t clever, it was annoying and counterproductive. Posters aren’t expected to check out everything about you to determine if you’re full of shit or not in GQ. You gave what appeared to be very bad advice. The fat you were joking doesn’t mean squat, I’m afraid.

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I am not in the habit of looking at the profile of everyone who posts in every thread I read. In a serious thread, I assume that people are being honest and straightforward. I am, clearly, a big chump.

You are quite correct that you never actually discouraged anyone from getting an exam. The cleverest lawyer could not find a single place where you lied about your gender or gave poor medical advice. However, you also never discouraged anyone from thinking that you were a woman. Everyone who responded to you, up until people started to catch on to your little joke, responded in a spirit of honesty and concern, and in return you played them for fools.

And, er, you might want to be a bit circumspect in explaining your motivations, since “see[ing] how much of a reaction [one] could get” is generally referred to as trolling.

Obviously you have no idea what it is like to get the phone call from your OB/GYN about your Pap smear being irregular. If you are lucky, you probably don’t even know what it’s like for your mother or your sister or another woman close to you to find a lump in her breast. If you did, you would know that a thread on that subject is not a good place to dick around with people.

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I must cry foul on this. Anyone who enjoys trolling should be the least circumspect that they can manage–by so doing, it should make life easier in general for both mods and the participating public in nigh-inevitable “Why Was…” follow-up thread.

Ordinarily I bristle at mention of Zero Tolerance anything–but it’s an increasingly appealing idea to apply it nonetheless to GQ. Frankly, I think it would be the only way for hijacks there to get under control. Eggs would be busted here and there, but that’s omelettes for you.

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Wonko-

I can certainly see why.

Eat a slice of hell.

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Erm. In the interest of calling an annoyance an annoyance, leave us not call an annoyance an unpardonable sin.

Wonko, you should be spanked. As noted above, posting to get a reactions out of people is trolling. Bad Wonko, bad.

Guin, you need a margarita. Or three. :slight_smile: Let’s not lose our perspective here, 'kay?

19

Personally, I think instead of trying to justify his actions, Wonko should apologize to the women that participated in and read that thread for making light of a very serious medical issue, which, as he pointed out many times, he will never have to worry about.

I think his behavior was jerkish. A woman asked for information in General Questions. His bizarre stand up routine was totally inappropriate.

20

Wonko the Sane is actually a gender specific name, but I don’t expect everyone to know that. It’s from the same trilogy of five as my nickname and in my sig.

I though it was a bit assholish for a GQ thread, but the same could have been argued of my slight hijack.