Hi comrades, want to give you all an informal update on the discussions around the site's misogyny problems that've been happening over the last several days. I wanna make sure you know that the admin/mod team has seen all of that discourse and we've been actively discussing solutions in the matrix mod chat. We're taking this shit very seriously and acknowledge that we haven't used a heavy enough hand on misogynistic rhetoric. As some of you saw we nuked that cheating thread from a couple weeks ago and handed out temp bans to the most egregious offenders. Idk how that was allowed to run it's course but we apologize for that oversight. We're going to do better.
We've come up with some ideas for how to improve this part of the site culture and we want to get suggestions from y'all as well, since the alarm was sounded on this by our beautiful c/traa posters to begin with. Our ideas so far include:
-
A zero-tolerance policy towards any even remotely misogynistic/patriarchal posts or comments, as too much has slipped through the cracks on that, establishing a clear protocol for bans for violating rules against misogyny, and ideally tracking repeat offenders in a way that makes deciding a course of action easy when they reoffend.
-
Uphold TC69 thought by starting up a book club (and hopefully more to follow) on feminist theory and encouraging mass participation, particularly from the he/him's on the site. "The Will to Change" by bell hooks has been suggested by multiple people as a great starting point but please feel free to suggest any other works.
-
Relaunching /c/menby with a trusted educated mod team and a specific focus on countering mainstream narratives about masculinity, relationships and sex that breed reactionary, patriarchal attitudes
-
Encouraging [namely femme] participation in /c/womenby and taking steps to revitalize that sub as an excellent source of discussion on feminism and intersectionality
-
Holding another mod drive to get more folks into mod positions in our communities who can help weed out reactionary attitudes
-
Encouraging users to use the report button often on any post that seems even remotely sus, with the promise that no one's going to be punished for "report abuse" for reporting posts in obvious good faith
Please let me know your thoughts on the above or any other ideas you have for making the site better, safer and more inclusive for our femme comrades. Once we've fully hammered out plans and updated policy we plan to make an announcement post highlighting these changes for the whole userbase. Thank you all for being here and being who you are 
While we're at it, can we also ban loss: the longest running miscarriage meme?
yes, hadn't thought about it that way but it's been thoroughly taken out of context as a meme. The "funny" is the clash of the subject matter and the webcomic format.
We then forget the actual people who go through this experience, i'm not sure if a CW would be enough if we would continue using the meme
I'm sure it wouldn't. CW's apply when discussing problematic content. Problematic content shouldn't be the subject matter of the joke. It would also exclude people from social participation.
Is the woman the butt of the joke, or is the author the butt of the joke? I always thought it was the latter.
I think it's moved past the author being the butt of the joke, but rather the joke now is how it can be hidden in plain sight. The fact that it's about miscarriage might be incidental but I think the shock value of the topic "adds" to the joke. Like for instance there is a small poem about trees and the seasons and it sounds really nice until you realise it's about miscarriage and the crass juxtaposition I belive is played for laughs.
And even if it's not the joke, it's an integral part of it.
I don't think about someone miscarrying when I see a Loss joke. I think about Ctrl-Alt-Delete being a dorky tryhard.
It seems to be somewhere in the span of
Stage 3: The sign marks the absence of basic reality. The image calls into question what the reality is and if it even exists.
and
Stage 4: The sign bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.
No, I'm not thinking about sex when I look at rockets either, I'm thinking about rockets.
is this maybe related to your life experience? I've always seen the whole "is this loss?" thing as a tortured joke about miscarriage that can be kinda forced into being funny if it's in enough of a ridiculous juxtaposition, but it's never stopped being a dark joke about miscarriage to me
but also I've been pregnant and birthed, and I know many of you haven't, so maybe it just comes across completely differently for me than it does for you
That’s your experience. It can be far removed from the comic, but if you know the context behind it, it doesn’t really change the original association—someone drew a horizontal line over a comic woman after a miscarriage. One in 10 women experience a miscarriage in their lives, about 23 million every year—also think about the partners who, like in the comic, grieve too. That’s a lot of people to be reminded of a possible traumatizing situation. It’s okay if you want to keep the meme, but please don’t act like it’s extremely funny or original. It’s old, and the meme deserved to fade after a long and edgy life.
Yeah, the joke isn't even about how bad the webcomic is anymore. It's completely dissociated from that such that the very layout of the comic popping up in unexpected places is the whole joke. It's not a miscarriage webcomic, it's Loss I Ii II I_
I meant we who continue using the meme without thinking of what it actually makes fun of, I will not be part of that group going forward
You know what's sad is that the webcomic handled it with surprising sincerity and showed just how much grief losing a child/pregnancy by miscarriage is... yknow despite it being ctrl+alt+del. "We" all laughed cause it was B^U that made it and it's surrounding context was it was a mostly unfunny video game webcomic that tried to be emotional and sincere (and ensconced next to comics where the ending was ridiculous violence or very cringe dated humor from the 00s). There was a while when Buckley altered the last panel so the character look back on the audience sardonically, statically wiggling his eyebrows, instead of in obvious grief (actually that might still be up right now afaik). But it's gotta be a painful reminder when you're just trying to live your life after that kind of tragedy and someone points out this unrelated comic is arranged like loss intentionally or not
Yeah please, it was never funny, and it triggers trauma for me.
spooky, i just remembered it exists & was wondering what the stance would be on it now. i mean, it's a tagline here, correct?
tagline removed
Oh no we lost a nearly twenty year old meme the west has fallen
Amazing things are happening in Hexbear
wonderful, thank u
How is this not a perma-ban? This person is making the exact miscarriage joke as a response to someone who doesn't want to see it, directly next to it a comment talking about how this exact joke triggers trauma??
That's 4channer brainrot to me; agreed with the 'how is this not a perma'. It takes a nigh-incurably sick fuckup to look at someone copping to a trigger, then deploy that exact trigger.
yeah the mods are actually kinda fucking up here, all these misogyny bans appear to be comm-level? as in they're banned from traaa but not the rest of the site. probably just because the traaa mods are the fastest guns in the west but there should be some procedure to make sure the correct bans are being issued (temp site bans is fine for most of them IMO, but for this brand new user showing up specifically to do misogynist harassment, just perma for sure)
Yeah out beautiful /c/traa mods are getting to these shitters first, then admins are going through and issuing temp/perma sitebans to those users. All the bans are in the modlog so its easy for us to reference for permas but you're right that we need a tracking system, which we are implementing.
why did you choose to be a dick?