manic_depressive13 said:
cerebreturns said:
People don't use it as a defense for rape except in cases of where the woman's character comes into question. It's the same way as a woman who's constantly going to bars, who is known for being a slut and so on.
If enough tags up then it can be considered circumstantial evidence against her case of rape.
There are a lot of cases of women later on coming out and saying that the person who "raped" them in fact didn't rape them but they said it.
The Unworthy Gentleman said:
They don't use it as a defence for rape. It's a way of giving the person who wore as much as a bra and some knickers some responsibility. Dressing like a slut means you're only going to be seen and treated as a slut by some stranger, hell probably even to a lot of people who know you well, so some responsibility needs to be accepted for that.
For me, I think, part of the issue comes from how words are targeted rather than which words are used. Sentiments like "EA is filled with bastards and whores" isn't really actionable in any major way because it's a loose target of displeasure rather than a targeted attack on an individual or group, even those both insults are gender-associated. In the same way that "Bronies are a blight on forums" isn't really actionable, even though we have user groups and threads devoted almost exclusively to brony subculture. It's a question of what we can theoretically police versus what would be impractical.
I will state that if we would attempt to police that much of that much of the language of Escapists, one of two things would happen:
1) Moderators by and large would be overwhelmed by the input. "Bastard" ceases to become a statement and more a bannable offense, so does "slut," and "whore," and "dick," and "pussy," and "asshole," and almost any word that becomes contextual to a certain degree. Language is just too wide and too varied to be universally applicable. So if we start putting blanket bans down on certain types of language, it restricts how much freedom we have to isolate actual problem cases, and how much of it comes down to whether or not one or two words are "too offensive" to some, but not others.
2) Huge outcries of "Censorship!" would pick up. "Who are [we] to quash someone's right to call a slut a slut?" will become a thing in the same way "troll" had that very argument
ad nauseum on the Religion and Politics sticky thread. It would either result in mass-protests, mass-banning, or both.
It becomes wildly impractical to be Policemen, Janitors, and Minsters of Taste. We just can't do it, and further, I'm almost certain the users wouldn't have it. I hate the idea that people can openly post offensive things, but its also a side effect of a wildly disparate set of persons with different cultural acceptances, life experiences, and thoughts on acceptable language. There are memes and subreddits and forums entirely devoted a precise cultures and even they will have arguments and disagreements about what language is acceptable in context. You open that to the entire world, and everything becomes ridiculously complicated. Ask an Englishman and an American how bad the C-word is, and you'll get a wildly different scale. Ask the same about the word "fanny" and you'll get very different answers. There's just too much there for one word to have that much power. In the same way that I can dislike "Your mom" jokes for one of my life experiences, and another could find them uproariously funny. There's just too much variance. Which is
precisely the reason users have the option to use the Ignore function and avoid certain threads.
I hate it, I hate that there are things out there that people can be offended by and nothing can be done about it. But the fact of the matter is regardless of how much we dislike or don't mind certain pieces of language, we have to look at a global context.
Do you find "slut" sexist? Clearly the answer is yes.
Does someone else? Maybe.
Can someone just find it a genderless insult? Also yes.
Consider moderator's role more of a beat cop rather than a judge. We have to follow laws as they're written otherwise there are powers to be abused. Would a policeman offer help to someone being raped? Absolutely. Would a policeman arrest someone for calling someone else a slut? No, they'd just say "break it up" and move along. That is our job.
AnarchistFish said:
I feel like most insults are less offensive (I'm not even sure how some of these are even found offensive or considered insults) than the passing aggressive remarks stringent rules like these encourage. People won't usually respond with those words unprovoked.
And this is precisely what I'm talking about. Language has too much context for it to be a simply "yes" or "no" as to why one word or one insult is more or less actionable. We can't be the absolute judges of whether or not language is good or bad. That's for lawmakers and courts. We're just cops.
Superbeast said:
I cannot conceive of any discussion involving sexuality, gender or race that needs the words ******, slut or ****** in order to be a "serious debate" (unless the debate is over whether those words are offensive). Given the threads that have kicked this off, people can criticise Anita Sarkeesian or discuss rape-prevention without needing to label women as "sluts". I do not see how stopping people use sexist insults stifles discussion in any way at all, and I do not think that is would be "oppression" to enforce the rules of the Code of Conduct. If one wants to criticise the "Tropes Vs women" video they can in a polite manner, if one wants to express that they feel gay rights would be detrimental to society/religion/thier own personal values then they can do so in a polite manner. I am not calling for any topic to be banned but rather insulting and demeaning terms. They make the forum a less pleasant place for certain minority groups and do not actually contribute to any discussion surrounding their related subjects aside from being needlessly antagonistic.
It goes back to increasing inconsistency - if someone contacts you personally and you act upon "sexist language", yet a different poster reports a post for "sexist language" which goes unmoderated because the moderator in question does not feel the language is actually sexist, then there has been a net increase in the inconsistency as well as a general sense of vaguness as to what that line in the Code of Conduct actually means - both whether it can be said in the first place, and whether it is right to report such posts.
I do apologise, I was hoping to give constructive criticism (to the Staff as a whole) with my post[.]
Which brings us back to a position of instability. Moderation by and large will be a little inconsistent, and there's actually very little we can do about that. To make the rules uniform would either make the rules too brittle, or too loose. That's just a side effect of varying opinions.
But more accurately, I think that saying "No argument needs pejorative" is the wrong approach because the rules address insults and aggression. I'm pretty sure we're mostly in agreement there. What should be attended to is that the language itself is called into question, not that insults should or shouldn't be acceptable. How do we define what is and isn't acceptable in terms of what are simply words, and which are or aren't insulting enough to be actionable?
Further, we have to establish targeted language. While you agree that there is variance in language's offensiveness, mods also have to determine which targets are in breach of the Code of Conduct. It means that while "slut"
can be a blanket insult to all women, we have to determine its use as such rather than simply using it as a word for hypothetical individuals.
Without those distinctions, moderation becomes modifying rules on the fly on a case-by-case basis rather than applies the consistent rules as seems most accurate to the situation.
