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Just to give you a small update - I've opened a discussion with admin regarding the possibility of the trending tab having affecting the forum. You'll have to leave that with us for a while as it could take some time to come to any conclusions.

starling

clairefontaine wrote: »

That's reasonable enough but if the topics are about men, like saying thousands of men a day are raping women, or feminist men, or anything a about men, then do you consider it changing the subject of someone says, hold on a minute... Lets think about that again.

If the topic is the fact that thousands of women are raped every day, let's discuss this from our perspective or talk about how it affects us, then it's not really about men, and we don't need someone dropping in because they're offended that anyone might think they're a rapist. It is a derailment of the thread if we have to stop talking about our own viewpoints in order to explain that we know not all men are rapists. And knowing that you're going to have to defend your own experiences against people who drop in to ask "why didn't you fight back" or "what did you expect to happen when you got drunk/danced with him/went back to his house/fell asleep in his company" makes it harder for people to talk about things that were already hard to talk about in the first place.

If you make a statement that's factually incorrect, someone might (and possibly should) correct you. Like just there when Stheno corrected me about DV. But we all know that that's not whataboutery.

clairefontaine wrote: »

One thing that bugs me is when an individual prefaces an opinion with "from a woman's point of view..." Or "from a man's point of view...." " No it's not. It's from YOUR point of view, don't try to universalise it as if you can speak for the entirety of your gender.

I don't like that either. I especially don't like it when other people point to a particular man or woman's viewpoint and take that to represent the whole gender. If nothing else it's completely illogical.

It's the kind of logical fallacy that a lot of people make: assuming that one experience is representative of a universal truth. For example "all the women I know are bad drivers. Therefore all women are bad drivers." People do it all the time. Like the thread about the bus strike: someone there said "There is a huge increase in the number of people getting free bus passes" and they based this solely on the fact that they themselves had noticed more people using bus passes.

But I do think there's a difference between that and saying something like "as a woman this thing affects me in a different way from how it would affect a man". We do experience things differently and sometimes that difference has to do with what sex we are, so sometimes it's relevant to mention your sex. As long as we keep in mind that not all men or women are the same it's fine.

Well the lovely admins and developers have already sorted this for us and they have removed tLL from the trending forums list. Let's keep an eye and see if it makes any difference.

Thanks for that Ivy, I wouldn't have copped it at all

clairefontaine

I have a question.

Sometimes if not often very big questions and assumptions come up here about men and women. Sometimes references made or links are from other countries, most often the US and the UK.

Is the assumption on this board for an Irish women's point of view? I ask this because its an Irish website. However, its also on the www. And even though its on an Irish website, Ireland still has many people from different countries living in ireland or having lived in Ireland.

The other question is when talking about men and women, is the assumption that you are talking about Irish men and women? And if this is the case, it can be confusing when someone starts a thread using a US or UK link.

Can you clarify?