the treatment of women on wrongplanet

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thank you for your support. a have received a few suggestions and will be doing some research on them tomorrow. when there have been further developments i will post them here, and if any group action comes of it i hope everyone here will participate if they feel comfortable doing so. whoever does wish to get involved in a positive change, please keep checking back for updates.

Sounds like a good place to start.

to be fair, as i said earlier, i have spoken with the moderators--they have all been wonderfully supportive and willing to listen, btw--and their hands are tied by the policy set down by alex. he has specifically directed them NOT to deal with sexism in the same light as other types of discrimination (for whatever his reasons were--i don't claim to understand them as stated.) they really have done as much as is withing their power to do to help. it is up to us to get alex to pay attention and recognise that many of the site members are not okay with how policy stands.

Well whatever I can do I will do.

This feels less about fighting sexism than it does about censoring divergent opinions, specifically those that offend the sensibilities of a few particular schools of feminism, those that define sexism far more broadly than the world at large does in particular.

I would also challenge the assertion that women are treated worst than any other group here on WP; I notice that the case being made in this thread is tellingly lacking in examples, despite the demands for such being made of posters challenging the narrative. We pretty regularly debate various stereotypes and prejudices here on WP, with numerous threads created dealing with racial, cultural, national, political, sexual, and yes, gender, issues, and I've yet to see any evidence provided that women are being singled out in particular, let alone to the extent that would justify a new policy of top down censorship.

What I do see here is an attempt to force a "right not to be offended" on WP, which would stifle discourse and lead to even more contention than our infamously murky ToS already does as various factions fight over what is and is not "offensive", when the entire concept is so subjective as to be completely unenforceable.

awesome --allies are very welcome.

this thread is not meant to be a debate as to whether sexism exists on wrongplanet and whether anything should be done about it. if you wish to have such a debate, feel free to create a thread on the subject. my thread is specifically asking for suggestions on group actions that might get the attention of the site developer. if you have any such suggestions, please share them. if not--why are you posting here?

Dox, just like most of us were completely unaware of the fact that we had AS, people on here can be very offensive without realising. I'm not saying that someone being offended means that they're right - but someone being offensive should be at least informed that they need to start thinking about it differently when they can't understand why other people are offended.

also, i can answer this challenge directly: i have been told by the moderators that alex has specifically instructed the moderators to deal with sexism differently than other forms of discrimination and hate expressed on wrongplanet--they were instructed to go easier on that issue than on the issues of other oppressed groups. if you doubt me, ask the moderators if this is true. i believe some of them have posted about it previously (possibly spongy, if memory serves).

No? You've put forward a premise, that WP is a hotbed of openly tolerated sexism, proposed a solution, pressuring Alex to change the rules, and various people have either agreed with you or disputed your premise and solution, both male and female. Intended or not, that's a debate.



Group actions that would have potentially negative repercussions for me as an active user of this site, giving me standing to challenge both your ideas and proposals in the venue where they're presented. As far as I know, limiting a thread to people who already agree with you is not an action allowed by the site, so in creating the thread and then engaging with other posters who were arguing, you have opened the door, to use the legal parlance.



As I said, you're attempting a course of action that would affect me as a site member, so I'm going to present my own case and potential remedies here, so that people are presented with an alternative take rather than an echo chamber.

That, if accurate, reflects the way the moderators approach the issue, it doesn't actually speak to the prevalence or tolerance of sexism on WP. Further, it does not explore the reasoning behind the policy, which I would speculate has more to do with the wider spectrum of views on what does and does not constitute 'sexism' vs the more agreed upon definitions of other forms of bigotry than with any tolerance for sexual discrimination.

Very true, and in my own observation, a large part of the nastiness in L&D in particular comes from the bad faith so often extended to others who unwittingly stumble into offensive territory and are excoriated for it without any benefit of the doubt being extended, which is particularly egregious on a support site for people with communications difficulties. Do you think that making these faux pas a moderator issue would make the site a more civil place? I personally doubt it, having suffered through several periods of over-moderation, which tended to make everyone feel singled out and picked on, and fearful of expressing themselves lest they draw official attention.



Would you say that does not occur now? It's fairly rare that I see a bigoted remark of any sort go unchallenged on WP, with the notable exception of remarks directed at certain political/religious affiliations. What the OP is suggesting is not informing people that they're being offensive, but instead sanctioning other people for their views, as can be observed by her recent posts in the moderator attention thread.

The point is that they approach the issue differently when some feel it should be approached the same way (hate being hate, regardless of who it is directed at), not about which form of hate is more prevalent.

It's true that most bigoted opinions are swiftly opposed, but a moderator acting as a neutral third party could point out to both sides of an argument where their argument falls short. You're right about the lack of benefit of the doubt, but it's just that which makes opposition from other members come across as too hostile to be a reasonable objection, meaning opposing views are rarely considered anything other than whining.
How easy it would be to find a moderator capable of this I can't say as I don't know any of them, and there will always be those who will feel like they've been treated unfairly when the moderator disagrees with them. It wouldn't be easy to keep everyone happy, and whoever had to moderate it would have their hands full. They'd have to be extremely adept at communicating with aspies, and ideally have a lot of experience with them, too, which is a lot to ask of someone to volunteer for.

You're actually hitting several nails square on the head here, as finding a moderator who is capable of and willing to act in such a manner, for free, and to be available often enough to step in before things escalate, is highly unlikely, to say the least. Worse, I'm not sure that even if such a unicorn of the volunteer moderating world could be located and persuaded, that it would be that effective, since as you pointed out, the overruled party is likely to always resent the interference, whether we found a mod who was more sympathetic to the broader feminist interpretation of sexism, or one who took the more narrow view similar to that used to define other forms of bigotry. Asking the mods to act as debate refs is also a bit outside of their role, which really is to ensure that a standard of conduct is adhered to, not analyzing and critiquing arguments.

What unfortunately tends to happen when the mods are more actively interventionist is that you get differential enforcement of the rules from mod to mod, and as they do have differing opinions and are loath to overrule one another in public, once people figure out which mod most closely shares their interpretation of the rules, you get cherry picking and double standards depending on who reported what to whom and in what order. Trust me, it's better to have a more hands off approach and use social pressure to deal with the grey area stuff than to have overbearing mods with differing standards enforcing a patchwork of rules over the different forums, that way leads to confusion, fear, and disappearances.

Do they though? I don't particularly see any differential enforcement, as any explicitly sexist comment is moderated similarly to racist or homophobic comments, the issue seems to be more that some people want the definition of actionable sexism to be broadened to include various opinions that they don't like. I would be curious to hear this policy of Alex's explained a little bit more fully by a moderator, as it is we're basically going on hearsay.