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posted by n1 on Wednesday August 20 2014, @06:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-time-to-grow-up dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:36AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:36AM (#83845) Homepage Journal

    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.