@englad - Fast Becoming a Super-Sweep Little Dude in my book.
1. What woke you from lurker status to the current state of post-mastery you throwing down on the boards?
2. If vegetables participated in the Winter Olympics which vegetable would medal in pairs figure skating?
3. If you could claim absolute power would you? If you did what would be your first global action?
Cheers MickeyLee, I think your humorous word smithing helped a lot to the quality of my posts too. "Nutless nugget of fuckery" is easily the most evocative insult I've ever seen.
1. Short answer:
Privilege check cruising mode was enabled. Tired of bullying and fuckery.
: Longer answer:
Basically I joined a while ago when I was 19 and deeply closeted (think the first percentage stats I had written down were around 70-30 the other way lol to give you an idea of the self-denial at the time), so most of what I used to just use of the site was essentially related to getting comfortable with my sexuality. I did from time to time jump into the forums, but this tended to be rare. I was aware of plenty of bigotry on the site, and did call it out from time to time when I was in the forums. But the main ones I was dipping into (outside of sexuality specific sub forums), were politics (that sub forum actually honestly just feels like one group shouting into one cave and the other group shouting into the other lol) and I was fairly often in the chat rooms lol.
I think in terms of why I spoke up, there are many factors I could mention. But I think the most important one is just, for my own personal experience, being part of one marginalised group made me want to understand other ones to get an idea of why world the world is the way it is. So I've always been interested in hearing other people's life experiences, to understand what they have to go through, particularly when they don't have privileges I do have (white and male). I am also particularly interested in the topic of intersectionality when it comes to privilege too. Both in offline settings (e.g. my first gay clubbing crew were mainly gay women and we often would go to lesbian venues, as well as gay male venues) and online settings. As for forums, been on a few different ones too, so a wide variety people have provided inspiration for shade throwing skills. And I binge watch documentaries, particularly about society generally.
I had looked up a lot on how privilege and lack of privilege affects people differently before, but sometimes it could be harder to connect the dots and see how they interrelate if that makes sense or how they can overlap. But that realisation had been setting in for a while, it's just I'd mainly been looking at each set of privileges in isolation. One thing that really struck me as an overlap between the privileges was quite key, so many people don't seem to want to encounter any uncomfortable questions on the topic of privilege, but it can be so unhealthy if you don't, because you won't understand what other people experience, based on things like skin colour, sex, sexuality etc. And if you don't understand that, it's so hard to fix societal injustices and have a society that values human dignity. I saw that with the thread because many of the guys weren't comfortable talking about the topic, I've seen so many parallels online regarding racism, homophobia or transgender issues. On the topic of patriarchy though to quote one example, I knew women experienced harassment regularly and I knew men were conditioned to hide emotions, but bizarrely I am not sure I had properly put factors like that together into a broader picture of gender conditioning. So I could see the different parts, but not the sum of the parts before.
I got emotionally invested in the thread, both on a personal level and empathetic level for others. I saw some similarities that were particularly poignant too with many of the posters, particularly when I was being dismissed, and the thread made me emotionally articulate more than I had done before. I think sometimes I had the tendency of not combining emotional and rational responses together, I kind of overused rational responses but underused emotional responses, the sarcasm was always there though. Now I see how effective the two are if you combine them with equal measure. The biggest emotional trigger for me easiily was the concept of using some victims to bash other groups, it was sickening frankly. I ended up turning what I saw as a particularly extreme and deeply unhealthy combination of misogyny and a lack of self-awareness I don't think I'd seen properly on here before, I turned that into a kind of microcosm of societal injustices to hit back at, if that makes sense. I also threw back some of his own tactics back at him. I also was reminded of the power of satire to illustrate poignant statements.
Banal extra detail, tethering internet connection, due to wi fi problems, means I have to stick to text based forums on this site and can't watch youtube videos or streaming services.
I made a conscious effort to make myself more woke because I wanted to find out more about how the world actually works, I think the reaction in the threads was not only due to a contempt for misogyny, but beyond that it was also a simple anti-bullying reflex. From what I'd be able to guess I'd say women here make up 10% of the site, and something about that ratio alone struck a chord with me, for pretty transparent reasons. It was just cruel to see good natured female posters on a male dominated site in two of the only female orientated spaces, be bullied and attacked. It was the first time I had personally seen anything like that extent, cos I didn't check the women's issues thread that often before, though I did on occasion because I was aware that there were quite a few regular posters who were witty and sharp on here, that's actually how I ended up on the thread. I knew it was satire and was up for that sort of thread, it just ended up being very serious.
I knew virtually all of this before, but saw the picture taken together more clearly afterwards. A cathartic, mutually compassionate experience all round from the rest of the posters crucially though.
2. Clearly grapes, no contest. Simply take a couple out and those bits the grapes are plucked off would work perfectly as skates for the pairs figure skating.
3. Sounds really bizarre and accidentally facetious but yes, and I'd do a controlled test where the socially accepted drug is changed from alcohol to ecstasy and we analyse the results after a three month period, and vote on which one should be the main one. The reason for that it raises your empathy levels and oxytocin levels, so thought it might end up in a little more conflict resolution.
@LaFemme So I'm tagging you because I remember you leaving a dangling carrot in one of the last threads, where you said you were pleased to not have accidentally ended up in the "Internet Warriors" documentary:
1. What is your personal favoured method of trolling?
2. Nowadays rocket (aka satan's leaves) seems to be the massively overused restaurant ingredient of the age, just like sun dried tomatoes were before, What do you reckon will be the next one?
3. Can you give me five great documentary recommendations please?
