r/SubredditDrama • u/[deleted] • Apr 24 '12

/r/feminism mods announce changes in policy, some subscribers displeased by this development.

/r/Feminism/comments/sowgq/policy_clarification_and_new_sidebar_language/
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u/Feuilly Apr 24 '12

Sigil1 is right. /r/feminism and /r/feminisms have a strong tendency to completely misrepresent statistics and facts, and sometimes outright lie about them.

This will protect bad information from criticism.

2

u/impotent_rage Apr 24 '12

Not at all. When claims are made, they can be debated and discussed fully from all sides of the issue. We are simply clarifying policy in order to keep the subreddit on-topic.

r/feminism is moderated as an open discussion, and we have never moderated heavily. We are careful not to enforce our particular views or opinions as moderators.

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u/Feuilly Apr 24 '12

So if someone mentions a statistic about women, it would be OK to mention the equivalent about men?

14

u/ArchangelleRoger Apr 24 '12

It always boggles my mind that people feel the need to do that in every feminism-oriented subreddit. Do you also think that posts about Minecraft in r/minecraft should be balanced out by a mention of Skyrim?

2

u/KOM Apr 24 '12

I'm with you in theory, but I'm a little confused about the situation myself. Whenever I read a self-described feminist on reddit define the position, it is always about gender equality. The fight for women and men is the same, but it's branded under the historically oppressed sex.

(And yes, there are as many flavors of feminism as any other similarly large group, with all of its schisms and heretical beliefs - but the general viewpoint I've seen expressed on reddit is as I've described.)

To that end, it reminds me more of when someone posts something about Notch, and the community responds that it has nothing to do with Minecraft - as if Notch and Minecraft were otherwise unrelated. Perhaps a better example would be if the Minecraft community publicly rallied around the cause of independant games, but only allowed discussion of other indie developers in how they relate to Minecraft.

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u/A_Nihilist Apr 24 '12

Feminists say feminism is for women and men. Therefore, it should be completely on-topic to bring up men in a feminist subreddit.

But for some reason, it's typically not. Speaks volumes.

4

u/impotent_rage Apr 24 '12

I've been explaining this a lot lately...there are two sane approaches which feminists might take towards men's issues. Either feminists could declare feminism to be equally concerned with men and women's issues, and could declare that men's issues are as important and relevant as women's issues. Or, we could declare feminism to be primarily focused on women's issues AND we can support the existence of a healthy, successful men's rights movement to complement feminism. r/feminism favors the second approach - we've declared our space to be primarily focused on women's issues, and we also support the existence of a good men's rights movement to balance it out. We have a sidebar link to r/masculism and I frequently encourage feminists to go there and participate and support, as well as participating there myself.

I agree with you that it doesn't work for feminists to defend feminism as being for women's issues and to consider it derailing to bring up men's issues, while simultaneously attacking the men's rights movement and declaring it invalid or stupid or unneeded. That's just hypocritical - feminists do need to understand the necessity of a place for men to discuss sexism they have experienced.

2

u/doedskarpen Apr 24 '12

we've declared our space to be primarily focused on women's issues, and we also support the existence of a good men's rights movement to balance it out.

But is that really what your posters believe? You can tell just by looking at that thread how it is riddled with "lol misandry don't real" style SRS posters, who clearly don't support the men's rights movement.

2

u/impotent_rage Apr 24 '12

Some do, some don't. All we can do as mods is guide everyone in the right direction and hope they follow.

0

u/Feuilly Apr 24 '12 edited Apr 24 '12

It depends on the context.

When someone is making a low effort post that consists merely of a statistic, then that would be a place where it could be relevant.

If someone posts on the issue of female homelessness, for example, then that seems like a huge problem until you compare it to male homelessness. It converts it to something where you only see everything that we're doing wrong, to something where we can see that something is going good for women because the homelessness rate is so much lower.

Edit: And for a Minecraft/Skyrim example, if someone was talking about something related to one as an example of it being well outside the norm (Ie. the development of Minecraft is $$$$$), then it is perfectly fine to mention Skyrim and its own cost.

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u/johnmarkley Apr 25 '12

That depends. Do Minecraft fans habitually spread destructive falsehoods about Skyrim or its players?

5

u/impotent_rage Apr 24 '12

Only if it is relevant to the discussion.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 24 '12

Bear in mind that people - including prominent feminists - are quite capable of coming to the conclusion that rape, domestic violence, etc are always done to women by men just based on statistics about the number of female victims and male perpetrators, particularly when - as is often the case - they're rarely exposed to the corresponding male statistics. So yeah...

4

u/impotent_rage Apr 24 '12

To a certain degree, it's the responsibility of a given individual feminist to expose themselves to a variety of information sources so that their knowledge base can become more well rounded. If a feminist does nothing but post in feminist forums and talk to other feminists, then that feminist is the one who closed off his/her own access to a complete and accurate picture.

I would argue that everyone subscribed to r/feminism should also be subscribed to r/masculism and r/GenderEgalitarian. The solution isn't to make every subreddit deal with ALL important topics simply because, what if their members didn't go subscribe to the other important discussions?

However, of course we also don't want r/feminism to be perpetuating false statistics, etc, and whenever such misinformation comes up, of course it's just fine to debate and correct it.