"jokes that women just don’t get"

MGHOW · 05-01-2012 6:12am

Kaden wrote: »

most men just don't realise how privileged they are.

The perceived "male privilege" on the internet only exists due to the virtual world being the only place left in Western society where men are able to seek to be dominant; something men naturally tend to do. In the real world, this natural tendency has been completely shunned and repressed.

Females are without doubt the privileged sex, especially socially. Men are just seeking to regain the natural male dominated social environment on the internet because it has been artificially reversed and repressed in real life.

PrincessLola · 05-01-2012 6:49am

MGHOW wrote: »

The perceived "male privilege" on the internet only exists due to the virtual world being the only place left in Western society where men are able to seek to be dominant; something men naturally tend to do. In the real world, this natural tendency has been completely shunned and repressed.

Females are without doubt the privileged sex, especially socially. Men are just seeking to regain the natural male dominated social environment on the internet because it has been artificially reversed and repressed in real life.

Male dominated society is 'natural' and therefore anything that slightly hints at giving a voice to women must equal male repression, is that right?

I'm not buying it, sorry.

MGHOW · 05-01-2012 8:19am

PrincessLola wrote: »

Male dominated society is 'natural' and therefore anything that slightly hints at giving a voice to women must equal male repression, is that right?

No, when did I say that?

I'm just saying that male dominance is the natural order of things.

No matter how much feminists like to spout pseudo-science theories that gender is a social construct, men and women are in fact very, very different. One of the many differences is that males have a much stronger presence and character than women, meaning the internet will always appear to be male dominated, even if there is an equal amount of woman. This is because there's no agenda to control men's influence on the internet, unlike there is to subvert and marginalize men's role in society for greater control of it.

How do you think liberal-fascist PC pretentious nonsense has become so widespread like it is today? It's a result of feminism and women gaining power and say in society. Women are emotional, not logical; which makes them highly manipulable. And unlike men, they always look up to an authority figure. But to look up to men is "oppressive" in their minds, so they do so to government.

Just wait and see the end result of all this.

Wibbs · 05-01-2012 10:06am

MGHOW takes a break from the forum. Given his posts here and posting history elsewhere I'm calling troublemaker.

PS quite the funniest thing I've read for a while. Word to the wise, avoid PUA sites.

Larleane28 · 05-01-2012 3:10pm

Deleted User wrote: »

Blatantly obvious it may indeed be, but it took me asking the question a couple of times to get the words "Surely admins or mods should tell those causing such grief to quit it." to appear.

I'm sure we'd all have a more peaceful time of it on the internet if everyone else only posted stuff we liked and agreed with. The reality is that it doesn't tend to work that way.

I think you are missing the point. I'm sure most women would prefer if mods and administrators didn't need to intervene at all. I can assure you women would prefer to live in a world where men understood that since 97+ per cent of rape victims are women, directing rape 'jokes' at them is so blatently inappropriate that they would not make them in the first place.

05-01-2012 11:49pm

Larleane28 wrote: »

I think you are missing the point.

I don't doubt your sincerity, but with respect.....

Larleane28 wrote: »

I'm sure most women would prefer if mods and administrators didn't need to intervene at all. I can assure you women would prefer to live in a world where men understood that since 97+ per cent of rape victims are women, directing rape 'jokes' at them is so blatently inappropriate that they would not make them in the first place.

I know all this. And for the complete avoidance of doubt, I think the kind of behaviour you and others have described is ugly, nasty, immature and just plain wrong. So I think it's safe to say that I get the point. The point is not missed, not missed at all.

My point - which seems to have been missed or given a wide berth by a number of posters - is about what one can or should expect to be able to do about that. In a sense, my point is about what the internet is, how we relate to it, and our expectations of it.

Someone posted to say (and I am paraphrasing here) that something ought to be done about this kind of behaviour. I posted to ask what should be done. The answer (after a fashion) was that site admins and mods should intervene. I don't argue with that, for the simple reason that I do exactly that somewhere else on the web.

But the question I went on to ask was what happens if a site owner or admin decides to let that behaviour carry on happening? And the answer to that is important, because it has much to do with how we interact with the internet and the material we see on it.

Jack B. Badd · 06-01-2012 8:32am

Deleted User wrote: »

My point - which seems to have been missed or given a wide berth by a number of posters - is about what one can or should expect to be able to do about that.

I doubt that there is any one thing that can or should be done that will resolve the issue. It's a question of a large number of small things that over time will contribute towards a change in societal and cultural attitudes - just like it has been for racism where the attitude shift is still ongoing as well. As part of this, I would hope that site admins, etc would take a zero tolerance approach to sexism. If they don't then, as the attitude shift amongst their potential users progresses, it's reasonable to expect that less people will use the site.

Dudess · 06-01-2012 10:41am

Ulysses1874 wrote: »

Larleane28 wrote: »

You'd think that'd be blatently bloody obvious wouldn't you? Apparently it's not though.....

Blatantly obvious it may indeed be, but it took me asking the question a couple of times to get the words "Surely admins or mods should tell those causing such grief to quit it." to appear.

I'm sure we'd all have a more peaceful time of it on the internet if everyone else only posted stuff we liked and agreed with. The reality is that it doesn't tend to work that way.

Who is looking for that?

07-01-2012 1:28am

Dudess wrote: »

Who is looking for that?

Not me, at any rate. I'm not sure you are either, though you do want some people who say some things to be told to rein it in.

I can't remember who it was who said that "we choose who to love", but they would have been at least as accurate to say "we choose what to get offended about".

07-01-2012 1:45am

Jack B. Badd wrote: »

I doubt that there is any one thing that can or should be done that will resolve the issue. It's a question of a large number of small things that over time will contribute towards a change in societal and cultural attitudes - just like it has been for racism where the attitude shift is still ongoing as well. As part of this, I would hope that site admins, etc would take a zero tolerance approach to sexism. If they don't then, as the attitude shift amongst their potential users progresses, it's reasonable to expect that less people will use the site.

Fair enough, and I don't actually disagree with you, but I suppose I'm saying something like "I dunno".

At the risk of causing offence, what age are some of the contributors to this discussion? Me, I'm a middle-aged saddo, and I was already adult in a time when sexism was the norm - and I mean the official and legal norm as well as the social norm. Maybe it's a generational thing, but young women have it better than my wife did, just as she had it better than her and my mother did. You may not realise that, but it is true. The chances are that your daughters will have it better again - we live in hope.

As for the web, I think part of the problem is how we perceive it. For all practical purposes, the internet is transparent to the user. That means that we don't really see the technology any more, and we just consider the content. And so the internet appears to us to be something of an amorphous and continuous space to which we can apply constant and universal rules and values. The problem is that the internet is no such thing. It is in fact a very granular and decentralised space in which the rules and values that apply to site owners and contributors depend very much on cultural contexts that are not universal or constant.

Sometimes the people who say the things that are so ugly and nasty aren't going to stop - even though many of them would never dream of saying the same things in real life.

Sometimes the mods and admins are going to say "no" to the idea of "reining them in" - for reasons that they believe to be perfectly valid and consistent with their values and philosophy.

The above are facts, and even though we may not agree with them or like them they remain and will remain facts. Realistically, that leaves us two options whenever we encounter such people in internet space that we want to inhabit:

* Engaging in flame wars;
* Walking away to some other part of cyberspace.

My tendency is to migrate. Whichever you choose to do is a matter for you, but either way you will be exercising a real choice.

yawha · 07-01-2012 2:30am

Jack B. Badd wrote: »

I doubt that there is any one thing that can or should be done that will resolve the issue. It's a question of a large number of small things that over time will contribute towards a change in societal and cultural attitudes - just like it has been for racism where the attitude shift is still ongoing as well. As part of this, I would hope that site admins, etc would take a zero tolerance approach to sexism. If they don't then, as the attitude shift amongst their potential users progresses, it's reasonable to expect that less people will use the site.

Are you familiar with Reddit and how it works? It's not very feasible to expect that level of moderation. It's completely different to how Boards works, for example.

On Reddit, anyone can make a subreddit instantly, and they become the mod of that subreddit. They can appoint anyone they like to be a fellow mod. They can be as lenient or as strict as they like.

On top of that, there's the whole up and down vote system. The ethos behind Reddit is really that mods should only really have to intervene when things get really bad. Otherwise, the community polices itself. Comments which receive a lot of downvotes get buried. Depending on the subreddit and who is a mod there, some have more active modding and some rely mostly on this up and downvoting.

Your assertion that people would leave Reddit if the admins did not enforce a zero tolerance is kinda false. As attitudes change, more sexist/racist/homophobic etc. posts will get downvoted and buried by the users, and in the meantime, these users can simply use alternative subreddits where there is stricter moderation.

Also, there can exist subreddits for the sole purpose of criticizing shitty comments by other users and challenging them. /r/ShitRedditSays is an example of this.

I think I prefer that kind of freer approach, where users can call others out on their bs, to strict moderation, which really just sweeps the problem under the carpet IMO.

Morag · 07-01-2012 3:40am

Bottle_of_Smoke · 07-01-2012 9:54pm

Sharrow wrote: »

What is the message in this cartoon?

I get that these are things said in discussions about gender politics and general life - but I genuinely don't get the overall message in this picture

Kadent · 08-01-2012 3:49am

Bottle_of_Smoke wrote: »

What is the message in this cartoon?

I get that these are things said in discussions about gender politics and general life - but I genuinely don't get the overall message in this picture

don't want to sound like I'm stating the obvious but the message is clearly written there, in black and white.
Surely all that's required here is a little bit of acknowledgement, I don't think Sharrow is asking for any more than that.

Jack B. Badd · 08-01-2012 7:34pm

Deleted User wrote: »

Maybe it's a generational thing, but young women have it better than my wife did, just as she had it better than her and my mother did. You may not realise that, but it is true. The chances are that your daughters will have it better again - we live in hope.

Yep, I totally agree. Things have gotten better...and they still have a long way to go imo.

Deleted User wrote: »

Sometimes the people who say the things that are so ugly and nasty aren't going to stop - even though many of them would never dream of saying the same things in real life.

Sometimes the mods and admins are going to say "no" to the idea of "reining them in" - for reasons that they believe to be perfectly valid and consistent with their values and philosophy.

I think it would be foolish to believe that any bigotry or prejudice (sexism (towards both men AND women), racism, homophobia, etc) will ever be totally wiped out. Even if people don't express it, even if it lives only in the confines of their own head, it'll still exist in some shape or form. The situation to aim for is that it isn't accepted as the norm, that it becomes socially unacceptable to express one's prejudices as a matter of course and that people can go about their day on-line or off-line without having to fight against uninformed perceptions of them based purely on other peoples' prejudices.

yawha wrote: »

Are you familiar with Reddit and how it works? It's not very feasible to expect that level of moderation. It's completely different to how Boards works, for example.

On Reddit, anyone can make a subreddit instantly, and they become the mod of that subreddit. They can appoint anyone they like to be a fellow mod. They can be as lenient or as strict as they like.

On top of that, there's the whole up and down vote system. The ethos behind Reddit is really that mods should only really have to intervene when things get really bad. Otherwise, the community polices itself. Comments which receive a lot of downvotes get buried. Depending on the subreddit and who is a mod there, some have more active modding and some rely mostly on this up and downvoting.

I've never gone near Reddit but from what you say it sounds like a user-based moderation system, similar to slashdot, rather than boards.ie hierarchical moderation system.

yawha wrote: »

Your assertion that people would leave Reddit if the admins did not enforce a zero tolerance is kinda false. As attitudes change, more sexist/racist/homophobic etc. posts will get downvoted and buried by the users, and in the meantime, these users can simply use alternative subreddits where there is stricter moderation.

Also, there can exist subreddits for the sole purpose of criticizing shitty comments by other users and challenging them. /r/ShitRedditSays is an example of this.

I think I prefer that kind of freer approach, where users can call others out on their bs, to strict moderation, which really just sweeps the problem under the carpet IMO.

People may not leave Reddit if people post unacceptably prejudiced views but,, based on your description, the outcome would be similar - essentially, through user voting, the socially unacceptable views wouldn't be tolerated. The same result from two different systems and the user-based moderation is probably the one that, on-line and off-line, will be of the most use in pushing prejudices to the fringe and away from the core attitudes in society.

Lady Chuckles · 12-01-2012 11:35am

I have to confess that to and from I get saddened by some male comments, especially in AH. I know AH is extreme and everything is allowed, but still... It hurts a little to read what they write about women. Mainly because it happens so often, I'm guessing...

Now, I haven’t come across any threads where women gang up and bash men and make little of them (not that, that would be any better of course) and if there’s any post containing any form of generalization of men there’s suddenly a whole bunch of male posters writing aggressive comments and personally attacking whoever started the thread.

It just doesn’t seem fair.
Why do we have to put up with it when they clearly don’t?

*prepares to get hated for posting this*

Giselle · 12-01-2012 5:58pm

Lady Chuckles wrote: »

Now, I haven’t come across any threads where women gang up and bash men and make little of them (not that, that would be any better of course)

*prepares to get hated for posting this*

I've seen comments from few male posters claiming, quite seriously, that thats what the Ladies Lounge is all about, and that men aren't welcome/are hated openly here (usually ones who've been cautioned for Yes, buts and What if's).

I've never seen any wholesale man-bashing either.:)

I don't hate you Lady C

Morag · 12-02-2012 1:54am

Y'know what I've been treated as one of the lads and that was fine, I'm used to it both in real life and online and in a gaming context. But you are not being treated as one of the lads when you get asked to get your tits out or get hit on to the point it is disruptive to the game play.

Ickle Magoo · 12-02-2012 2:01am

Sharrow wrote: »

Y'know what I've been treated as one of the lads and that was fine, I'm used to it both in real life and online and in a gaming context. But you are not being treated as one of the lads when you get asked to get your tits out or get hit on to the point it is disruptive to the game play.

+1 - there is no way in hell some of the comment I've had would have been aimed at a "mate"...not without some serious questions being asked....I have friends, male and female, we rib each other - I think it's safe to say that in the majority of cases that is not the kind of thing that's being complained about.

Morag · 12-02-2012 2:21am

Dude there is Banter and then there is specifically being target due to being female.
Have you been hit on?
Have you been asked if you are single?
Have you been asked if you like to suck cock?
Have you been asked what size various parts of your body are?

There is a difference between banter and verbal sexual harrashment.

Morag · 12-02-2012 2:39am

I get that ****cock.jpg?w=640

But like I said there is a difference when you are (as is often the case) the only female, that coupled with the face women get hit on more then men and most women will have been sexually assaulted at some stage in their life.

While the internet at large as been pre predominately men due to computing and programing being seen as male interests this is not really the case when it's explored further. It's not a locker room and as more and more women come online the lads need to learn that hitting on them and verbally sexually harasshing them isn't funny, esp when for them they only do it once in a while, for the women who are the target it's damn near constant.

Ickle Magoo · 12-02-2012 3:30am

Domo230 wrote: »

How does one change the culture or social norms of an environment, Honestly I don't know. If I was a girl I would act like the girls in the xbox parody. I would give as good as I got and insult back. But ideally this would not have to be the case and as the internet is becoming more and more gender neutral things will have to change. With more female users, there will be more and more moderators, webpage creators who are female who will shape the internet into a more female friendly one through the addition of their values....

That would appear to me to be a direct contradiction...how do female users shape the internet though the addition of their values whilst mimicking the behaviours/commentary they wish to change? Surely standing up against the behaviours and commentaries and speaking out about them while creating safe spaces where the difference in tone and allowed behaviours, such as tLL, is stark is going to educate and trigger change much faster than feeling forced to play along or giving the impression that such behaviour/commentary is being condoned?

Lady Chuckles · 12-02-2012 10:42am

This type of behaviour is degrading… and it’s not just something that happens online. It’s easy for people who have never been in such a situation to say: “If it was me I’d give them insults back and never think back at it.”
… As if that would make it all go away and you’d feel less degraded afterwards just because you threw some crap back? It doesn’t.

When I was working at the train station I was harassed pretty much on a daily basis. An elderly male co-worker (bus-driver) was the worst. He always insisted on telling me to cook dinner for him, make him coffee and bake buns... Such talk doesn’t make me (or anyone) feel professional or respected. The day I realised I had had enough I was standing by the tracks with all of the passengers waiting for the train when I suddenly felt someone walking up really close to me and pulled my hair. As I turned around I saw it had been that annoying bus-driver.
"Are you standing here sun tanning?" he asked me.
"No. I'm waiting for the train." I replied.

I don't want to hear that idiocy. It's my working area, and I demand to be treated with respect. The final drop was when the same bus-driver told me to cook dinner for him again, that same day, just as I was done helping all the passengers on a bus.
I exploded and basically told him to feck off. The other bus-drivers laughed and the old man pretended to be hurt... Then saying that he will have to take out a revenge on me.

I lost it completely at that point and told him that this is where I work and I shouldn't have to listen to that kind of crap when I'm on duty. After a few more comments on how I should cook instead, he tried to tell me that they're just joking.
"I don't find it amusing." I said.
"I do. And that's all that matters." came the reply.

The rest of the day he spent mumbling what a bitch I was.
Thinking back at it, I should have reported that idiot.

My point is that this isn’t something that only happens online. It happens in the real world too, the same crappy kitchen-remarks, and when it does it’s hard to know how to handle it. You can’t predict exactly how you would deal with it until it slaps you in the face.
I never knew I would dare to stand up for myself like I did, and in all honesty, that “joke” or whatever it was regarding revenge really creeped me out.

Morag · 12-02-2012 12:36pm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/12/uni-lad-website-closure-banter

Life & style
The Eva Wiseman column

The temporary shutting down of the student site after it 'went too far' in a piece about rape, raises the question of why some men take sustenance from brainless boasting

Sometimes, when stood by the bar, caught in the witty back-and-forth between two strange men, it feels like you're out in bad weather without a hat. "Banter", for me, is like a spitty wind, one that either breezes past gently, or batters me round the cheeks with its mindless force. And smell. I associate banter with a very specific smell, like dirty shirts and oversprayed deodorant. Basically Ck In2U Him, sprayed on to an office chair.

We have reached a crisis in banter. In the wake of "Tricky" Dicky Keys and Andy "Grey" Gray's Sky Sports shame, where the pundits' banter leaked glutinously through the cracks in media and mutated into news, and the introduction of "banter nights" at comedy clubs, and a sacked postman suing the Royal Mail for unfair dismissal, explaining that what they called bullying was in fact just "a lot of banter", the Uni Lad story only added to the instability.

Unilad.com, a British site for male students, has temporarily shut down after publishing a piece that encouraged rape. "If the girl you've taken for a drink… won't spread for your head, think about this mathematical statistic," they wrote, "85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds." Under the subsequent apology ("We took things too far") some of the site's 8,000 daily visitors left their own comments. "Nobody minds a bit of casual rape banter," wrote Daena. "Rape only happens because lasses can't handle the banter," said Adam. "[This apology is] Proof women don't understand freedom of speech and banter," added Andy.

Maybe Andy's right. Not for the reasons he thinks, obviously. Obviously Andy is an awful, awful crotch of a man who will never be truly happy, who will die alone, in a chair, surrounded by framed pictures of him doing thumbs ups next to Top Gear presenters, the TV loudly tuned to Dave (the "home of witty comedy banter"), where David Brent is doing his arm dance again, and again, and again; the roar of regret echoing through Andy's carpeted rooms.

But maybe women aren't meant to understand banter. Bants. Top bants. Is banter just "boy talk"? Is banter – classless, bruising banter – simply the sound of men being funny at each other? Why does banter exist? Why do men joke like this? Laugh at things that you're not meant to laugh at – insult each other, test their hetero skills? Are they taking the piss out of their own intimacy? Their very manliness? Is banter the act of whispering "IDon'tFancyYouIDon'tFancyYou" with your eyes?

I wasn't shocked by the Uni Lad piece – not as shocked as many of the men I know, who reeled with offence. I was offended by their insistence it was comedy (no), sure, but I wasn't shocked. I wasn't shocked because this is what the internet looks like, often. Online, especially, say, under a comedy YouTube video, or comment piece about street harassment, Uni Lad-style banter thrives.

I wasn't shocked, but I was oddly troubled – it made me think about how confusing it must be to be an 18-year-old boy, frantically trying to stay afloat in a lido of banter, where everything's a laugh and what you say is hardly ever what you think, reasserting your sexuality every 10 minutes as if refreshing a screen.

But maybe we don't need to worry about banter any more. If we've come to the point where the banterers are having to explain and apologise for their jokes, then presumably the joy of the thing – the roaring of rape humour across a crowded internet, that beery, leery, Friday-night amour – has been lost? Banter has broken itself.

Cicero · 12-02-2012 1:45pm

Standup Comedians through the years have typically been male and the "jokes" of the 50's through to the 80s were typically at the expense of women ( think carry on films and mother in law Jokes )
The 80's brought alternative comedy which in some quarters became a backlash against the outdated world of The Two Ronnies with the very politically correct Ben Elton...
The 80s also brought us a new wave of female comedians - French and Saunders, Rosanne Barr, Jo Brand etc
None of these comedians resembled any thing that came before- their jokes were more stream of consciousness asides and observations which was refreshing ...

However, in the workplace, such old style sexist jokes still remained long into the 90s until legislation was passed over a number of years giving workers more rights in terms of how they should be treated (lady chuckles example above is a good case of what should NOT happen in the workplace)

While there are many female comedians out there ......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_comedians

....."jokes", in whatever form, tend to be told predominantly by men in my experience...so I would imagine that as a result, there is far more instance where women will potentially experience gender related comments about them....

Saying that, when the likes of Jo Brand get going In one of their stand up sessions...men definitely feel threatened and remain respectful..I don't think men could verbally take on Jo Brand or Rosanne Barr and come out the better for it.. ....:D

newport2 · 14-02-2012 2:40pm

Sharrow wrote: »

Y'know what I've been treated as one of the lads and that was fine, I'm used to it both in real life and online and in a gaming context. But you are not being treated as one of the lads when you get asked to get your tits out or get hit on to the point it is disruptive to the game play.

While this is true, I think Domo's theory still stands to some extent. When guys insult, they'll go for a sensitive point. Men and women in general have different - although overlapping - sensitive points. If they know the target is a woman, they still seem to go at it in a laddish style of no holding back, straight at a sensitive point such as looks, sex, etc.

So the girl is kind of being treated like one of the lads, but just has different points that are targeted. And in the same way, none of the girls will get a dig about the size of their dick, height, etc

Not sure if I agree with what I've written here 100% (:eek:), but I thought Domo's theory was an interesting one and might go some way to explaining part of the issue. I think that, in large, on-line abuse is down to a combination of being immature and insecure.

Ickle Magoo · 14-02-2012 2:55pm

I dunno, I think that's just a very simple way of looking at basic interaction on certain mediums - I think what is being described in the article and what posters are talking about is something that's much more than nudge-nudge "one of the lads" banter; it's being treated in a way that most lads don't treat each other and encountering issues that most lads won't have experienced, or at least no where near to the same extent....it's about making sexually suggestive, explicit and sometimes down-right creepy comments about and to women on-line, it's about women choosing a gender neutral name &/or deliberately not letting on they are a female poster because they are aware of the onslaught of sexist piggery, crassness, come-ons and chauvinism that would be heading their way.

You say that on-line abuse is down to immaturity and insecurity - I'm not sure, I think a lot of it is down to ignorance, cowardice even, coupled with anonymity - which removes many of the social norms and etiquettes of speaking face-to-face. You have people that can be complete trolls, misogynists or racists on-line and put their respectable, polite, day-face back on.

newport2 · 14-02-2012 3:05pm

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

I think a lot of it is down to ignorance, cowardice even, coupled with anonymity - which removes many of the social norms and etiquettes of speaking face-to-face.

Ye, I think I agree with what you say. I also think immaturity and insecurity are closely tied in with the three traits you outline above. I think anyone who verbally abuses someone from behind an anonymous alias is ignorant and cowardly, but possibly they are because they are insecure about themselves and/or immature.

Ickle Magoo · 14-02-2012 3:34pm

Possibly...in some cases...but there are also just a lot of people out there with some horribly archaic and warped views or carrying around some not insignificant baggage/bitterness/"issues" regarding certain groups in society and their behaviour can be quite deliberate - and as far as they are concerned - justifiably directed at the source of their particular bigotry/hatred/prejudice. Add that to the creepy stuff and the puerile humour and it's a fairly unpleasant mix.