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Jessica Roy reports at NY Magazine that news aggregator Fark has became one of the first original link aggregators to ban misogyny from its community making moderators responsible for ensuring that misogyny doesn't make its way into headlines or comments. Banned headlines include rape jokes, calling women as a group "whores" or "sluts" or similar demeaning terminology, and jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it.
There are lots of examples of highly misogynistic language in pop culture, and Fark has used those plenty over the years. From SNL's "Jane, you ignorant slut" to Blazing Saddles' multiple casual references to rape, there are a lot of instances where views are made extreme to parody them. On Fark, we have a tendency to use pop culture references as a type of referential shorthand with one another.
On SNL and in a comedy movie, though, the context is clear. On the Internet, it's impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point.
According to Roy, Fark's new guidelines are a "refreshing departure from the misguided free speech arguments that sites like Reddit that bend over backwards to defend the handful of misogynist communities that are among its ranks, not to mention the free-floating slut-shaming that snakes its way into regular comment threads."
(Score: 4, Informative) by mojo chan on Wednesday August 20 2014, @12:12PM
Saying it's not okay to hate black people does not imply that you think it's okay to hate white people. Saying it's not okay to hate women does not imply it's okay to hate men. Saying misogyny is not okay does not imply that misandry is okay.
Fark doesn't have a major problem with misandry. When men say perfectly innocent things they don't usually get a torrent of abuse and rape threats from women. That's probably why they neglected to mention it, but I'm sure if it ever did become a problem they would have something to say. You are just trying to make a controversy out of nothing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Boxzy on Wednesday August 20 2014, @03:03PM
The important thing isn't to be fair and even handed, it's TO BE SEEN to be fair and even handed. These arguments that you don't need even and equitable rules are ignoring the facts, if the rules applied to everyone equally we wouldn't be arguing about it.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 20 2014, @03:59PM
Men get it just as much as women. The real problem is one of perception, because part of the male gender role is to take any abuse without showing physical or emotional "weakness," while women are very quick to begin damselling upon the slightest infraction. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you have a penis, your abuse is greatly amplified if you squeak at all.
(Score: 1) by Lazarus on Wednesday August 20 2014, @04:22PM
Fark has had a serious bigot problem for a long time. They should deal with all the racism and homophobia too, so we don't have to individually block all the idiots to get to a reasonable signal to noise ratio.
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:36AM
I have a story to tell:
Emperor Akbar called Birbal because he wanted to prove that he is indeed his most brilliant adviser among other rivals advisers. They had drawn a line and were asking Birbal to make it longer without modifying it.
Birbal drew a smaller line.
In other words, putting a lens in front of one problem does make the other problem look bad. There *is* misandry in real life. You don't see it often because we are still in a patriarchal society that teaches women to talk 'women stuff' to women only. You will never see public misandry because most women don't get involved directly - they have their brothers, boyfriend, father etc. for that. If you are thinking a time will come when women will talk about raping men, you may be talking about a future that might never pass and will not pass in at least 1000 years at its best estimate. Men are raised to be confrontational, with the idea that they need to be 'alpha' (guess who teaches them that), so you will always find misogyny being propagated, on a loudspeaker, from average men.
Misogyny doesn't exist in a void, independent of what (most) women think of men.