Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT 3611 to 3615 (13th to 17th November 2017)

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Case:
Apologies for double-post & wall of text - Allow me to make an idiot of myself trying to 'mediate' here:


--- Quote from: oddtail on 17 Nov 2017, 01:11 ---To me, it doesn't read as overeager behaviour. To me, it reads like an automatic response of a kind that's more than a little disconcerting. I know I'm probably reading too much into it, but such drastic shifts of behaviour for a minor reason suggest to me that she's been brainwashed, or abused (and not in a comedic way), or otherwise forced to "help" Hannelore to the exclusion of everything else. This is one step beyond "comical" to me, especially considering who her employer is. Tilly was never funny to me, but now her downright Pavlovian responses are more chilling than anything. YMMV.

--- End quote ---

My apologies if I'm trying to explain to you stuff that you already know by heart:
There's people who display that kind of behaviour deliberately, and it is part of the abuse they wreak on others. Yes, they may have been abused themselves in the past, but note that some habitual abusers are very well-versed in turning this into a tool to get their victim to postpone insisting on their boundaries being respected

What happened in the past to a stalker/abuser always matters less than their stopping their shit, right now.

(Yes, personal experience, btw - though mine was so brief & comparatively harmless that I hesitate even mentioning it knowing what others here have gone through. It wears you down into a shadow of yourself in a matter of weeks. Even if you're a six-foot, 180 pounds guy - I remember considering changing my ringtone because my old one made my heart race. I remember almost giving up trying to explain to my family why they please neverever tell this person anything about my whereabouts, don't accept any letters, messages or gifts for me and the feelings of shame and confusion and the fear that they'd think I was the one going crazy. I remember my steadfast belief in my sanity becoming frazzled.)

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong for seeing Tilly the way you do - I'm just saying that it looks a bit like you're trying to make sense of abusive/boundary-disrespecting behaviour from within a normal-person view of interpersonal interaction. Not only is that nigh impossible, that view can be insanely frustrating to someone who experiences stalking/abuse, because a lot of abusers are the world's leading experts in making their abuse appear to bystanders superficially like normal interactions. This can be part of the abusers strategy of isolating their victim socially and cutting them off from their emotional support - the freaked-out, emotional person struggling to explain how a superficially harmless and mundane interaction brings them close to tears of rage is always in a worse position explaining themselves than the ostensibly calm, concerned person they're freaking out about. If the victim is rebuked and believes they were over-reacting this can seamlessly lead into heavy-duty gaslighting and other shit that' hard to come back from. I acknowledge not knowing who Tilly is in Jeph's mind - let's just say that if I saw someone behaving like this, I wouldn't consider it a red flag so much as 1982 Red Army parade.


TL; DR - Way I see it, this is less about what you post, or how you view the interaction, but about the past interactions some of us had and that your view reminds us of those bad experiences, of how difficult it was to convince our friends & loved ones that we're not going batshit, and that the harmless person we're freaking out about is not harmless at all. That's not your fault - it's just ... bad memories, k?

P.S.: Your gut-feeling of 'feeling disconcerted' - for a lot of people, the first time they had that feeling marked the point when they should have run like hell. Best advice I ever got from a head-doctor was "Trust your instincts in situations like this".


--- Quote from: mercykills on 17 Nov 2017, 07:12 ---jfc. No.

No. No. No. No. No. To ALL of this, 'No'.
...

This is a serious issue that thousands deal with everyday but I guess we'll ignore  our collective skin-crawling and treat it as cute and funny cause Taffy's klutzy and she calls Hannelore ma'am or some shit. >.>

--- End quote ---

Solid copy & and agree on the message in general - but I'm pretty darn close to a 100% sure that oddtail is not trying belittle or downplay a serious problem and/or bad experiences of others. It's frustrating exhausting/horrifying/crazymaking/horrible when 'normal people' with their wonderful normal-people-view of social interaction don't 'get' why you're freaking out about that 'harmless' dude/girl, why your face is flushed, why you're close to tears or even shouting at them and why you can't finish your own goddamn' sentences. I remember having that normal-people-view of social interaction, and I remember how I lost it.

Bearing all that in mind: He is not the 'enemy', IMO.

Pilchard123:

--- Quote from: JoeCovenant on 17 Nov 2017, 04:37 ---
--- Quote from: JoeCovenant on 15 Nov 2017, 05:03 ---
Maybe Hanners just needs to give Tilly a sock...?

--- End quote ---

<snip snip>

Yeah, given that my comment was all but ignored but someone "quoting" Dobby's line after it has been liked off the planet - I don't think you were alone!

(Or maybe I'm just not well liked!! Sob!!!!)   :wow:

--- End quote ---

If it helps, I first figured you meant "a punch upside the face" rather than "an article of clothing. I (thought I) was deliberately misinterpreting it with the Dobby allusion.

KnightRider007:

--- Quote from: Case on 18 Nov 2017, 03:18 ---
--- Quote from: KnightRider007 on 18 Aug 2017, 03:52 ---... You can't apply population averages to individuals.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: KnightRider007 on 17 Nov 2017, 18:09 ---If Tilly had been male, they would have been arrested three strips ago...
--- End quote ---

I thought the first post was rather insightful - don't know whether we'd agree on much in our politics, but its always refreshing to see someone using their headmeats for its intended purpose. Certainly can't be said for all people in discussions around gender/social justice issues.

Second post seems like your forgetting your own (sensible) stance, though. I guess it's pretty rare for someone - regardless of their gender - to be arrested for stalking without someone else pressing charges against them first. The impact of stalking is in the mind of the victim, and most definitions require a pattern of behaviour rather than a single action - without additional information, it's not easy to for a cop passing by to determine at a glance whether someone is being stalked (unlike, e.g. witnessing a burglary, theft or assault).

So no, I don't think a male Tilly would have been arrested by now, all other things being equal.

--- End quote ---

Yes and no. The original post concerned race as a causal or correlative factor regarding privilege, which I stand by. However, gender (of both the person carrying out the act, and the person being acted upon) is, among other things, a causative factor in how acceptable people find certain behaviours. And this applies in both directions. I freely admit that there are behaviours that are generally socially tolerated in men that are not in women.

I contend that Tilly's behaviour is an example of the reverse. You are of course correct that charges would need to be pressed. I believe it would be far more likely to have happened (and police action more likely to have occurred) had Tilly been male and acting in exactly the same manner - stalking, invasion of privacy, interrogating personal AIs, suggesting outfits (often quoted as a form of controlling abuse), refusal to leave when explicitly asked...

As a hypothetical, I would also have been willing to bet small sums that "he" would have received less sympathy and fewer posts on this forum attempting to justify "his" behaviour.

On a separate note and out of sheer curiosity, what was it about my very short post, one sentence long, that prompted you to make the effort to look into my profile for other posts?

Neko_Ali:
You are new here, and the fact that you are new and it was a short, one line post that read a lot like something Mens Rights trolls have shown up to try and argue about and cause problems over in the past set off alarm bells. The comic features a lot of strong female characters, more then male characters. And it has some pretty strong liberal and feminist leanings. So does the forum membership. This has caused trolls to show up in the past with the intention of cause a scene. While we work to keep the place open and friendly to people of all viewpoints and opinions, we also work to keep it polite and respectful. So when someone makes a comment like "If Tilly had been male, they would have been arrested three strips ago..." that sounds like someone trying to stir controversy over how men are so poorly treated it's sensible to look back and see if this is a pattern in their posting, and should we be paying close attention to see if this is going to become a problem.

Case:

--- Quote from: KnightRider007 on 18 Nov 2017, 05:09 ---As a hypothetical, I would also have been willing to bet small sums that "he" would have received less sympathy and fewer posts on this forum attempting to justify "his" behaviour.
--- End quote ---

Can't say much about that, since IIRC I was amongst the first to use the word 'creepy' for Tilly's behaviour - and it was exactly my above-mentioned past experience with a cute, diminutive, bespectacled 120 pound woman that has sensitized me to boundary-violations, gaslighting and all the other nice stuff that makes you feel all warm & fuzzy inside. That being said: While I cannot completely comprehend women's experiences, I can extrapolate - and part of that is the realization that while my being no small guy didn't help at all with defending myself against (pretty mild) attempts at boundary violations/emotional abuse (wouldn't dream considering myself a survivor, though - I had competent support that helped my to quickly realize what was happening), I have zero trouble imagining how an abuser could use that physical superiority as a tool. Actually, given my ability to read & hear, I don't have to rely on my imagination - it's not like there aren't countless accounts, very often from women, only a mouse-click away.

I don't think that abuse is lesser, or less serious when it happens to a man, or inflicted by a woman - but I do recognize that when one of 'us' decides to hurt, they have some very dangerous additional tools at their disposal that most female abusers do not have to the same degree. Plus there's the fact that when men go from creepy-stalker-y emotional abusive shit to deeply scary physical shit, they tend to inflict vastly more harm, and do that significantly more often than female ones (though recent studies, especially ones using fresh NCVS-data (or was it CDC?), have shown that the ratio is not quite as one-sided as some have proclaimed it to be for a long time).

Weirdly, my experience helped me realize (later on) how threatening we (men) can be to people who are a good deal smaller and lighter than we are. We don't need to do much to intimidate - raising our voices and waving our arms around might be 'just' our being upset, but to someone almost a head shorter and 60 pounds lighter it's very hard not to think about what would happen if we stopped just waving our arms about.

And we haven't even started looking into gendered social expectations, e.g. in child rearing, or aggressive behaviour of men being implicitly condoned or even encouraged etc.etc.


--- Quote from: KnightRider007 on 18 Nov 2017, 05:09 ---On a separate note and out of sheer curiosity, what was it about my very short post, one sentence long, that prompted you to make the effort to look into my profile for other posts?

--- End quote ---

Since you asked, you probably already know - one-liners about "This would be totally different if she were a man!" are not a priori always wrong, but they are favourite staple of a certain set of people not rarely found in places that are ... a wee bit less liberal-leaning than this one, which means that 'we' do get the occasional anti-liberal/anti-feminist troll trying to stir up shit.

/begin_{spurious blurb}
Doesn't mean that heads are ripped off because of a first (or fourth) impression (least in my six years experience on the board) - after all, appearances can and do deceive. And IMO the modding-crew is pretty insistent and consistent about balancing the goals of creating room for constructive difference of opinion on the one hand and a safe and welcoming environment - especially for those of us who need it more than others - on the other, and afaics, that is appreciated by the overwhelming majority of forumites. (Mods: Feel free to contradict/shut me up/tell me to go mind my own goddamn' business)
/end_{spurious blurb}

<- Edit: Cf. Neko's post above.

TL;DR - I was curious, and asking doesn't hurt. In fact, now I'm glad that I did.  :laugh:


P.S.: Are you familiar with Guardian writer Ally Fogg and his blog (https://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/) ? I always felt that his stance was a good example of a 'third position' on male-specific gender-issues that is distinct from (but informed by) feminism on the one hand and most MRA-sites on the other. He denies being either a feminist or MRA, and is very often furiously attack by people on either side, but by myself, I think of him as a "standard 2.8-wave Feminist, except where it comes to issues specific to men".  Don't always agree with him, but I don't doubt his sincerity - and he does appear quite knowledgeable/well-read. If you're looking for a thoughtful, contemporary, not-quite-feminist view on gender-issues, e.g. abuse of men, that isn't also steeped in MRA-style rabid anti-feminism, his is one of the very few sane voices on the net that I've found.

P.P.S.: People curious about Ally's blog should note that the comments-section is not a safe space, for anybody (Though I'd wager that Ally's articles, while maybe challenging to some parts of the 3rd-wave, should not make people feel demeaned or hurt). IIRC, Ally has just one rule for comment-moderation, the ""HetPat Prime Directive - Thou shalt not generalise about gender activist movements or judge people’s arguments by their association." (My speculation is that this is due to large parts of the Men's Rights movement actually being anti-feminist rather than pro-men & him being tired of people discussing the relative merits of social movements instead of specific issues). The comments-sections can be kind of a social experiment, and you can find yourself next to a brawl between David Futrelle of WeHuntedTheMammoth-fame and AVoiceForMen-founder Paul Elam.

Advantage is that it's not an echo-chamber (at least it wasn't two or so years ago) and discussion is fast-paced, unorthodox and ... not complicated by some of the reservations & stranger-anxiety found in some parts of 3rd-wave feminism regarding some topics; disadvantage is that where there's a lot of friction, there's also a lot of waste heat (and waste-heat producers, I'm afraid) ... and it's definitely not a safe space, so sadly, you won't find that many people who have less than the average "number of spoons to give per day" ...)

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