Not Picky

I don’t find it too “hot” when my girlfriend is on the Xbox, if only because it means I can’t play on it myself; Damn Skyrim!

Aww. How… sweet?

It sure is hot to be on your xbox. I swear I could cook an egg on mine at times.

The xbox sure gets hot when you sit on it. The guy has a point.

That is why me and my boyfriend each have our own XBOX and our own T.V to go with it :)

Is it scary that this is the closest any of our submissions have gotten to progressive thinking.

Women still don’t like being hit on by strangers, though.

Do you really feel you can speak for all women?

I’m sorry, I didn’t realize other women might like being asked if they’re “puuuurdy.” Out of the blue. While they’re playing video games.

Your reply seems pretty sarcastic, so I’ll respond to it as such.

First off, your reply describes something way more specific than what I was responding to.  Secondly, it doesn’t really matter, because it still holds true.  Not every woman is you.  Not all women are the women you personally know well.
I have noticed that humans have this uncanny ability to surround themselves with people who support their world view.  It works so well, that they don’t realize they can’t see beyond it.  Even if they see something that contradicts their world view, they immediately dismiss it as an outlier.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why guys randomly hit on the ladies online?  Do you say, “because they’re assholes” and leave it at that?  There are other ways of being an asshole– it doesn’t explain why it manifests this way.  The reason why guys “randomly” hit on women is because it’s eventually fruitful.  I used the quotation marks because it isn’t really random, they’re sending messages to anyone they think is female.

This tactic takes no thought, it’s just a brute force way to try to hook up with someone.  The beauty of if it is that pretty much anyone shallow enough to respond to a message like this, is probably shallow enough to give it up to the douchebag asking for it.

Being hit on randomly by assholes is actually a symptom, not the problem.

I really enjoy your contributions here, JPS– you’re a voice or reason and you’ve got a wry sense of humor that constantly makes me laugh.  Am I really wrong to call you out when you said, “Women still don’t like being hit on by strangers”?  Is this really something, when you look at all the facts, you know to be deep down in your heart to be true?  I was just trying to keep you honest to yourself.  If that’s unwelcome, then maybe you’re not as reasonable then I had believed you were.

I understand that I can not and should not assume I know what all or most women enjoy. I was too general with that comment and I’ll take responsibility with that.

However, the idea that “Some women like to be hit on by strangers online,” is an excuse so many of the X-Box trolls we see on this site use to justify their actions. When we had that one respond a couple weeks ago, all he kept saying was that girls liked the attention. While I can admit that my statement was too general, saying that an asshole’s behavior is a symptom instead of the problem is also far too general and takes away the responsibility of the person in question.

And for the record, I really, really doubt that most of these trolls get any positive responses. I could be wrong on that; it would be interesting to find statistics on that, but I’m sure the applicants would be lying.

Warning! An endless speculation black hole has been detected! 

Anyone can argue symptoms, intent, cause until the cows come home. The common knowledge in social justice discussion is effect is what matters. You can be racist or sexist in a positive way (“oh you’re so good at cooking/math/sports”) and it’s still a problem. The intent comes from a good place but the effect is still harmful. (holding someone up to false standards – what do they do when they don’t fulfill this expectation?)

Let’s all remember what FUoS focuses on here — effect, and how we as a culture react to an effect. Just because those idiots decided to tell the world that the Hunger Games characters should have been white and then deleted their twitter accounts doesn’t change 1) their internal opinion on race, 2) how wrong their opinion is, 3) how we can all, collectively, easily, combat them by talking about it. It’s really not hard to try and do Good Things as a person, and they failed at that. It’s really that simple, without getting into motivation. 

But more than that, just like the guy we had who apologized for his messages, perhaps a seed of “hey, maybe I should re-think my bullshit on race” has been planted. It takes a while for change to grow in a person, and a while for an idea to shape itself. My hope is that more folks have that “hey maybe I should just be a nice person” seed planted by seeing FUoS — regardless of how long we can argue the ’cause’ of idiocy, because the way to ‘fix’ it in a person is partly how FUoS can (and has!) help. 

This is me kindly asking for a re-focus and dropping this line of questioning here. I’ve seen endless discussions of “ya but he just did that because of X” (he’s just 13, she wasn’t very good at the game, he was showing off for his dumb friends, etc) and it doesn’t get us anywhere. It comes off as an excuse and doesn’t offer solutions. It’s very close to “well it just IS, so stop whining.” The effect is very close to silencing.

”
saying that an asshole’s behavior is a symptom instead of the problem is also far too general and takes away the responsibility of the person in question.”

You’re completely right– I’ve done a disservice and I sincerely apologize.  These assholes are as much of a problem as anything else.  I suppose I should have said that these assholes are part of a complex system of relationships within society and it won’t be possible to get rid of them if we focus exclusively on them.

“And for the record, I really, really doubt that most of these trolls get any positive responses.”

I don’t know how successful it is either.  Perhaps these people do it for the same reason people compulsively buy lotto tickets.

I like much of what you said here, but there are a few things I’d like to respond to.

“The common knowledge in social justice discussion is effect is what matters.”

Perception of an action and choosing how to react to it has as much to do with offense as the action itself.  Look at the case of the pediatrician who upset people because they confused the word with pedophile.  The doctor had done nothing wrong and yet caused great offense.  Context is very important in these matters.  We need to be above having witch trials.

“I’ve seen endless discussions of “ya but he just did that because of X” and it doesn’t get us anywhere. It comes off as an excuse and doesn’t offer solutions. It’s very close to “well it just IS, so stop whining.” ”

Perhaps, in these cases, no solution is offered because the point is that there isn’t a problem.  Is it really beyond impossibility that the reaction to some of the stuff posted at this site is more severe than warranted?  When these cases come up, they aren’t excuses, it’s context.  If you’re asking for people to stop doing this, it’s very close to “I’m set in my world view and I don’t want to be introduced to anything that may conflict with it”.

Please, please, please don’t confuse this as a description of all harassment on this site.  Clearly, FUoS hosts a menagerie of terrible fuckin’ people who make the world a worse place, and they focus on women.  I do think, however, some submissions slip in here which could easily be a case of misunderstanding.  I think it’s wrong to condemn these people with the rest of the wretched scum.  Innocent until proven guilty, and all of that.

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a principle of law. We’re not a court of law. We don’t have the ability to summon witnesses or compel testimony. We don’t have the ability to sentence.

All we have to go on is the message received. We can’t see into the sender’s head. I’m not terribly worried about a reaction “more severe than warranted” because I really don’t think there’s any harm done there. We’re not doing anything more than saying “this person sent this message, and this message is not okay.” If you think there’s more to it than that, I suggest you’re reading that into the site.

I have problems with everything you said here in this comment.  Since how a point-by-point rebuttal seems to go unappreciated, and that others rarely do me the same courtesy, I’ll just focus on this one sentence:

“We’re not doing anything more than saying ‘this person sent this message, and this message is not okay.’”

If that was truly your only intent, then you would never have posted names with the messages.  Forever memorializing people with their supposed evils in the timeless space of the internet does much more than say, “this is the kind of message that we don’t like seeing”.  If you say this is untrue then you’re lying to yourself.

Let’s be fair– they’re calling attention to the message and forcing the senders to bear responsibility for their actions. It’s pretty simple. By naming them, the responsibility for their message isn’t a distributed to a random, unknown mystery person– it’s smack-dab “this person is real, and their assholery is real, and it’s not okay.” If they see it, and they see peoples’ reactions, something might just hit them. 

 What it comes down to is this: If people don’t think there’s anything wrong with what he said, they’ll chuckle and shrug their shoulders. If they do think he was a jerk (as I do), they’ll roll their eyes, shrug, and chuckle. Indeed, all we’re saying is, “this person said this”.

If no one agrees with me and think this guy is a toad, then fine. No harm. In fact, there’s no harm done regardless, unless someone takes it to the extreme and messages this person with threats or bad language. Which should never happen, regardless of what he said.

“they’re calling attention to the message and forcing the senders to bear responsibility for their actions. ”

And I’m 100% behind that.  It’s in part what I love about this site.  My issue is that some of these entries don’t deserve this.  There are some submissions here that show a very small, one-sided glimpse of what happened.  There are some entries that look like they were provoked, yet the provoker isn’t held to the same level of accountability.  Then there are people posted here for being merely awkward.

Clear cases of sexism and general doucheiness should be punished with the scorn of society.  Not everything here fits that bill, unfortunately.

“…there’s no harm done regardless, unless someone takes it to the extreme and messages this person with threats or bad language. Which should never happen, regardless of what he said. ”

And yet this happens.  Here.  At this site.  Thankfully, I’ve only seen the more clear-cut and extreme examples riling folks to dig up dirt and contact (via YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc) the people featured here… This is something I’m not really against– I’m down with mob justice if it’s used responsibly.  But that’s the trick, though, getting the mob to be responsible.

The internet has a long memory, and there’s a timeless quality to it that makes something a decade old seem just as relevant as something a day old.  Sure, content is being generated all the time and information gets buried, but a simple filter easily exhumes this information in a state as fresh as it ever was.  People have lost their jobs over blogs and Facebook entries.  These are real world consequences.  FUoS is popular, and that popularity is only growing.

Also, what contributes to the problem is that being featured on this site makes it difficult for people to judge incidences objectively.  People treat this place as an authority of sexism in gaming.  The Four Who Rule This Site have said that people tell them that they wish people get banned for being featured here.  The Four will say that they do not wish that to happen– that the point of this place is to laugh– yet the interpretation for the site that “everyone here is a terrible person” persists.

This site wields much more power than people are giving it credit for.  That power needs to be respected in order to be a positive force for the world.

I don’t know if you realize this, Ogre, but we also put your name above every single one of your comments.

(The horse is dead. Please stop flogging it.)

Hilarious.

Do I really have to explain to you the difference between my willful participation in these comments, and being unwillingly featured on this site?  C’mon, Jon.

“(The horse is dead. Please stop flogging it.)”

This statement is particularly infuriating, coming from you.  Given how much you like to demonize folks for dismissing or derailing arguments, you’re a friggin’ master of it.

How would you feel if someone said that about feminism?  I expect that you would lose your shit.  Sometimes I think you keep your head a little too close to the ground.

If girls find this offensive, gtfo the internet.

I couldn’t see he “harassed” you anyhow here.

Well “laddies first” XD