Off My Chest
RULES:
I am looking for mods!
1. The "good" part of our community means we are pro-empathy and anti-harassment. However, we don't intend to make this a "safe space" where everyone has to be a saint. Sh*t happens, and life is messy. That's why we get things off our chests.
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3. Frustrated, venting, or angry posts are still welcome.
4. Posts and comments that bait, threaten, or incite harassment are not allowed.
5. If anyone offers mental, medical, or professional advice here, please remember to take it with a grain of salt. Seek out real professionals if needed.
6. Please put NSFW behind NSFW tags.
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As someone who's been online since BBS's etc, and early days of online gaming...
The earliest calls of "Tits or GTFO" in gaming was a response to women bringing gender into the mix -- this was back even before voice comms were common. What would typically happen is a woman would ask for special treatment/consideration, because they were a girl, and guys would respond by basically saying "Unless you're willing to prove you're a girl online, we don't owe you any additional courtesy", in an incredibly crude fashion. Unfortunately that sort of seems to have evolved in some areas to be just straight up misogyny.
But, even demanding polite / respectful language, is something men don't tend to do to each other online on most forums. A woman or a minority demographic demanding that language be changed because "they" are there, is basically asserting special privilege. Gender is entirely a construct in an online / virtual space, where anyone can claim to be anything, so someone bringing it in / forcing it in to the conversation is basically an attempt to force others to change patterns based on your whims. If gender doesnt matter, don't get fussed demanding to be addressed like a woman.
Its sort of like, consider an old timey garage, with pictures of pin-up calendar girls on the walls, guys covered in grease, farts un-checked, crude language and swearing all over the place. Add a couple women to the work crew with giant fine-prone govt orgs to back them up, suddenly all that 'guy freedom' goes away / shifts. In an online space, there're no genders unless they're forced into the conversation -- but once they are, you're not as free to be open / honest about things as a guy. You gotta hold your farts. Guys would rather be free, so they push back against gender entering those spaces -- any talk of 'gender equality' is very similar to talk of masculine suppression.
Sounds like you're pretty sensitive about this topic.
Hm? Not particularly. I do have an interest in the gender stuff in politics a bit more, and in the workforce -- in part because I had my early-life career goals dramatically changed after receiving rejection letters explicitly stating I was removed from the government worker app pool here in Canada for not identifying as either a woman, or a minority race. Almost all the friends I graduated with were in those categories, and got easy job placements with worse transcripts and less prior work experience. So I recognise that my personal history has a reason for a negative bias to these topics that others may not have experienced. That said, my personal take for what it's worth, is that DEI and equity efforts are worthwhile/valuable, but that their implementation is poorly done, and is indiscernible from discrimination on an individual basis. So, not black and white as it were.
For online discussions, I do think it's misguided to get annoyed about gendering, and that introducing explicit gender oriented stuff causes equity issues in weird, unnecessary ways. So I disagree with both the idiots going overboard about gender stuff on a car forum, and the op attempting to claim gendered-privilege on a digital forum. I think it's just as reasonable for someone to take a stance of "You're a man until proven otherwise online", as it is for someone to get pissed off that people don't believe their a stated gender of some sort; none of that gender stuff has much point in a digital space, so they're equally silly.
And while we talk about toxic masculinity, we also fail to really coalesce behind a definition of positive masculinity -- and we don't tend to talk as much about toxic female traits. So, like another item worth highlighting, particularly for the ops case, is that it's been a known 'thing' amongst people on the net for a long time, that the best way to get help for something like a problem, was to post up a question on a 'female' looking account, and then to respond to your own post with a male account and an incorrect answer talking down to the woman for being stupid. White-knights tend show up to make corrections and hand-hold the supposed woman, downvote the mean bad man, and so on. That sort of structure is another issue introduced by bringing gender into digital spaces -- but because it tends to work in favour of women it's generally ignored/accepted.
Feminism, in both meat space and digital space, isn't about equality but about removing pain points for women exclusively -- so cases of discrimination that benefit women / disadvantage men are generally ignored by supposed 'equity' movements that are fundamentally pushed by feminist interests. That disjointed equity/feminist division is one reason, I'd theorize at least, that things like the manosphere and harsh women's rights pushbacks gained popularity in some segments. If you're going to bring gender online, and complain about the issues women face when they attempt to assert their gender, without looking at how it impacts others' experience of those online spaces, nor are you looking at the positives they get for asserting that gender, I think it's wrong. I try to maintain a more egalitarian mindset, or at least I like to think I do, where people online should generally all be treated equitably.... as non-gendered faceless anonymous entities.
And to that end, as gender doesn't matter for posting to some car forum, the op should've just posted stuff as a non-gendered faceless blob. Then she'd get treated as a non-gendered faceless blob. No one would care to respond to her, or rather, they'd respond to her about as much as they'd respond to a guy, or any other non-gendered blob.
Do you expect people to read this and think, "Wow, she hit the nail on the head with that 5 paragraph essay explaining why she's not particularly sensitive?"
No, I expect most people are so addle minded at this point that they can't read, or write, more than whatever the character limit is on twitter/x these days. People look for short pithy remarks and zingers, and then they whine and bitch about click-bait titles etc. The general readership/audience of any social media platform, is pretty lowest common denominator in terms of their appetites.
But if someone asks me a question, I'll still try to put together a somewhat thought out and transparent remark to clarify my position.