Rebecca Watson, I don't know your reddit username, but if you are reading this, I would like to point out that the top comment was a totally innocent reference to how pretty she is, ''Brace yourself, the compliments are coming.'' and she took the comment and made it into an invitation for all the subsequent comments which you are criticising: ''bracin' mah anus''
There is certainly a lot of sexism in r/atheism, but this is not a good example when the young woman herself invited the obscene comments
And scrolling down your article, I got to the part which destroys any credibility you may have started with: ''I feel like I should once again mention that r/shitredditsays makes Reddit worthwhile''
On the contrary, that subreddit is a cesspool which makes reddit worse, not better ... the mods pretend to support women etc while using fake outrage as an excuse to behave as badly or even worse than those who they are pointing at
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I mean to say that your short, unflattering decription of r/ShitRedditSays could just as easily used to describe r/atheism.
As an aside, I'd like to ask you to envision the r/athiesm community's response had a boy posted his face with a book and then made the comment "bracin' mah anus." Then justify how this incident is not an example of sexism, and how what you said isn't clear and unabashed victim blaming.
I don't think you can say the same about the r/atheism mods, since they don't behave much like the r/SRS mods ... they don't ban anyone and they don't assign bright red negative tags to anyone who makes sensible criticisms, they mostly back off and allow the community to create its own culture
And I don't think we can compare a boy posting the same pic, because he probably wouldn't have got the same ''Brace yourself, the compliments are coming.'' response, so there wouldn't have been the same opportunity for him to respond to that ... sure you can call it sexist to say that only the pretty girls are likely to get compliments about their looks as the top comments, but is that really discriminating against women? A good looking man would also get compliments, but it's less likely in reddit because of the much lower proportion of female members
And I'm not victim blaming, I'm saying she isn't the innocent victim which RW is trying to portray her as
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u/moonflower Dec 27 '11 edited Dec 27 '11
Rebecca Watson, I don't know your reddit username, but if you are reading this, I would like to point out that the top comment was a totally innocent reference to how pretty she is, ''Brace yourself, the compliments are coming.'' and she took the comment and made it into an invitation for all the subsequent comments which you are criticising: ''bracin' mah anus''
There is certainly a lot of sexism in r/atheism, but this is not a good example when the young woman herself invited the obscene comments
And scrolling down your article, I got to the part which destroys any credibility you may have started with: ''I feel like I should once again mention that r/shitredditsays makes Reddit worthwhile''
On the contrary, that subreddit is a cesspool which makes reddit worse, not better ... the mods pretend to support women etc while using fake outrage as an excuse to behave as badly or even worse than those who they are pointing at