Breaking The Silence Online

@replaced said in #626:
> My opinion that it's not a big deal was done in good faith.

That might be, and it's kind of sad.

However, your opinion is light years ayaw from the facts, your complaigning about the mods decision is out of place, and I don't really see how you could make such an affirmation while you obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
What you proved in your different posts by inventing numbers, refusing to read sources, quoting sources that contradict your own position.

So you can keep writing here how you are proud of not caring about women getting on average harassed much more than men. How it's not a big deal compared to car accidents, or wathever else. Every time you do so, someone will contradict it. With your kind of arguments, that's easy anyways so you're not wasting too much of our time and energy.
By doing so, you allow us to build a collection of answers to your basic (and wrong) anti gender equality points. It's a bit of a pitty that it hinders the discussion to reach a better level of exchange and go further than debunking bigotery, but that's to be expected anyways. Since this is quite a big platform, there are probably a lot of people who didn't invest too much time in informing themselves about these issues, and learned quite a lot with these "exchanges".
You have been a really good help in giving examples of many usual fallacious arguments that are thrown in this discussion. each and every one of your arguments have been countered in several ways.
You have made it easier for anyone who read this thread to counter these basic invalid argument of yours next time they are confronted to this discussion.
And if I want to be optimistic, I would even think that quite a lot of people learned a thing or two about your rethoric as well. the nitpicking, the provocating, the reversing the burden of proof, the cherry-picking, the changing the subject when you hit a wall and are proven wrong, etc.

I don't know about the other, but if I kept answering you it is surely not with any hope to change your mind. Who cares about that. It is because you have been a good example for an illustration on how to resist and debunk bigotry.

PS: now if the past is any indication, you give me a thumbs down and comment with a couple of lines on how it is you that thank me to show everyone that feminists are wrong and not smart and such. *horsey*

@let-me-cook said in #631:
> the less there is to identify you out there, the less likely you'll be in a such situation. regardless of your gender.

yes but if you want to have a picture of yourself or wathever, then you get harassed if you are a woman but much less if you are a man. So you have less options on how to live your online life as a woman. Which was my point. Not getting harassed should not come at the price of reduced options. For no one, but this is mostly (not only but mostly) the case for women.

Again, this was adressed a lot because user Jade-1 basically repeated this argument here over and over again, so I invite you to read some of these.

@Nikita-Molod said in #625:
> As usual, offended women of Europe and USA write that they are being harassed. They themselves want attention from famous men, do not get it, and try to rip off millions of dollars. Fortunately, we don't have such a thing in Russia.
>
> Как обычно, обиженные бабы Гейропы и Пиндостана пишут, что их домогаются. Сами хотят внимания от известных мужиков, не получают этого, и пытаются содрать миллионы бабосов. По счастью, у нас в России такого нет.

When I got up this morning and read this you actually made me laugh, so thanks for that!

To summarise your points then:

Only women from the USA and Europe complain about harassment - ok... evidence?

How blessed all the women are in the rest of the world to either not suffer harassment, or to bravely put up with it in silence... probably (definitely) nonsense!

> They themselves want attention from famous men, do not get it, and try to rip off millions of dollars

LMFAO at this ^^^

> Fortunately, we don't have such a thing in Russia.

Well thank goodness for that! God bless Russia!

Have a lovely day! xxx

@replaced said in #626:
> No it's not different. Please elaborate. Also you need to look at context. When I said "sexual harassment" the discussion revolved around online sexual harassment. Not in person which is far more likely to be serious. I find sexual harassment online where there is anonymity not that big of a deal because the problem can be dealt with almost immediately. In person sexual harassment sometimes cannot be dealt with and may involve physical touching and many other forms other than just purely text.
>
> My opinion that it's not a big deal was done in good faith.

I'd like to know if your point of view is as a man observing, or as a woman who has had online harassment but doesn't think it's a big deal

@let-me-cook said in #631:
> if you think that being a man equals to less harassment that is..
I, and pretty much everyone except a couple of people, agree on this point, yes. It goes both way, but not with the same frequency and intensity. this is pretty much a consensus.

@TurtleMat said in #636:
> I, and pretty much everyone except a couple of people, agree on this point

@TurtleMat said in #633:
> much less if you are a man

̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄

@TurtleMat said in #636:
> Not getting harassed should not come at the price of reduced options.

i agree on that. however the solutions are either very intrusive, or requires you to anonymize yourself. what can the community actually do about it?

@Nikita-Molod said in #625:
> They themselves want attention from famous men, do not get it, and try to rip off millions of dollars. Fortunately, we don't have such a thing in Russia.
What, millions of dollars?

Seriously though, you're being offensive to europe, USA, AND russia with this post. you are making oversimplified generalizations about 3 continents (Edit : not quite whole continents to be precise) in 2 sentences. My quetion is : For what? Why do you have to add some wierd patriotism to your misguided wiews on gender equality?
I guess it's because you thought none of these points through.

@let-me-cook said in #637:
> i agree on that. however the solutions are either very intrusive, or requires you to anonymize yourself. what can the community actually do about it?

That is for the technical solution that we can think of right now. But as i said earlier, the technical solutions are only one part of fighting the symptoms. What we are doing by having this discussion is to inform and hopefully slowly change mentalities.

Trying to shift some people from not knowing to knowing. Some other from knowing but not doing anything to knowing and being supportive with some small words or reactions. Etc.
To allow more people to be more informed about the how and why.
Most people with sexist behaviors don't want to have these behaviors, they just don't know any better. informing is hard and takes time to get results, but it gets results.

It has to be a community thing, we can not expect a solution from a small group of individuals. A couple of devs developping the ultimate tool would help, but not solve the problem.
Making the discourse public and liberating speech on this subject leads to more accountability from offenders. Impunity is one of the reasons why this happens so much.
Understanding that sexual harassment at this scale can only exist in a sexist context is also a big thing. it allowes to protect oneself before situations arise. Etc.
Informing is a really powerfull tool in this case.

That is what the community can do. and it's actually huge.

@let-me-cook said in #627:
> i'm sorry, but i find this to be such a first world problem. sick people have existed throughout humanity, you're not the first to hear about them... learn to ignore please.
>

Firstly, welcome to the comment section of my blog. If you look at the (many) pages of previous comments, some of the points you try to raise as valid arguments have been discussed (and debunked) at length already.

Sexual harassment and abuse is and has been a universal problem everywhere, probably for as long as there have been men and women. It is not limited by social status or wealth status or geography, this is such a nonsense argument from you that I won't give it a lot of time.

"Ignoring" a problem like this does nothing to address it, and in fact, such advice suggests to me that you would like the harassers to be left alone to do their harassing in peace without being challenged. It says to me that you think not only is it acceptable, but the onus is on the harassed to just take it without any resistance. Telling me to "ignore it please" is dismissive and patronising.

> there's people dying in wars as we play chess right now,

Yes there are, sadly, the news is full of horror and war at the moment. And your point is...?

> we're truly blessed to be in a sterilized environment exercising our activities already.

We are indeed truly blessed to be able to play chess on Lichess, and my view is that it is a great site and well-moderated. But saying that worse things like war are happening in the world, so this sexual harassment is not an issue, is just plain whataboutery. I wasn't writing about the wars in my blog, that is a red herring.

> i'm not trying to say harassment messages shouldn't be a problem or anything but if chatting on lichess has downsides that surpass the benefits, why not stay anonymous with a neutral username, or turn the chat off entirely as they have given you the option to? i thought about this from lichess' side, aside from basically running every message through a filter and IP banning people based on it, i couldn't find anything else to fix this issue. and as a regular chill chatter, i hated the idea of a filtering. i don't want no filter spying on my messages.

It sounds to me like you have an unqualified opinion, as in you have one, but have had no experience of this particular issue so have no idea what it is like. Your suggestion to stay anonymous with a neutral username is indeed something a lot of female users have had to resort to but should not be and is not the best solution. Why should we as female users hide because some small minority of men can't behave properly?

I have a clearly female username and that is by choice, as I said in the blog, I want to be visible as female to encourage the other female users that they are not alone, seeing as we are in such a small minority in chess, and as a result of my female username, many other females have reached out to me either in friendship or because they were also experiencing harassment.

I am fully aware that it may attract unwanted attention from some men, and it does, but that is unfortunately a cost of being female. It doesn't mean however that I accept this harassment as something I must endure and ignore as I am sure the ones in favour of harassment would like me to.

As I have said before, turning off chat, really? Do you want me to cut myself off from the whole Lichess community as a response to harassment? Sounds like that's just hitting the "resign" button on the whole issue. I am a very sociable person and run a few large-ish teams and also regularly organise online chess tournaments. So the ability for me to communicate freely with friends and non-friends alike is essential for this. I mean, that's why we are here right? To play chess and enjoy a chess community. If I had to turn off chat and messaging I wouldn't even be here, there would be no point.

Also, how do you know your messages aren't already being run through a filter for certain keywords? Obviously, someone who wanted to write offensive things wouldn't want any kind of monitoring like that. We all enjoy a degree of privacy but we have to accept that in using this site, anything and everything we write in public and private chat can be viewed by moderators if necessary.

Woman here and have not encountered any sexual harassment. I think the idea that this is common is pretty dubious.