Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
150
In the one experience I had of that with Chowhound, it didnt happen. There was a post made to the UK board which used a word which, in our culture, is very racially offensive and had, I am sure, been used without intent as not an offensive word in their culture. A couple of us responded, suggesting the poster change that word. Nothing happened. A couple of days later, I flagged the post to the mods. Nothing happened.
I then sent an email explaining the racial slur in our culture (inlcuding mention of the public outcry when a mmeber of our royal family was reported to have used it). I received a reply saying that because it hadnt been used with intent, then they were going to leave it. At which point I sent them another email saying that, now they knew that it was offensive, they were now directly complicit in allowing racist language on their site. I got no reply and nothing happened to amend the post over the next several days when I kept going back to check. What I suppose is good news is that the thread resurrected several months later and the word had been removed at some point - presumably a decision by management rather than the mods.
I am not here to argue for an automatic tech censor (which, by the way, in quite effective on the movie website I referred to), but to say that the idea that posters aren’t “taking responsibility for his/her own language in the interaction with others” is mildly insulting but moreover just plain confusing.
I fully take responsibility for posting 'I am getting off my ass and to the supermarket before it closes" or that “I’m up to my tits in flour” – or “I’m cancelling my subscription to Cocktails of the World now that it’s become more about boobs than booze.” I’m pleased to have written it and have no intention of offending or attacking anybody by those posts.
What I can’t possibly be responsible for is whether somebody somewhere (Philadelphia?) reading that will be offended by the mere sight of these words on a food discussion board. You are worried about it. I am not. If you want to me worry about with you, and take “responsibility” for my verbal interactions with unknown others who might be offended, then you need to spell out for all of us what is deemed offensive on this website and what isn’t. If you are opposed to censoring for “saltiness”, I honestly don’t know why you started this thread. Why didn’t you just tell the poster who privately complained to you about “tits” what you just told us?
I don’t doubt your story, and certainly there are some categories of racial slurs and stereotypes that are still so firmly embedded in the cultural as “truths”, they are the daily fare of the internet. Also, my impression of a lot of moderators is that they are under 25, or have no education in critical thinking or history.
Whoa…nobody is slamming them! Just stating personal opinion and observation as a visitor to their site. I’m an East Coast resident, (NJ) and their east coast boards had -0- posts. Also most of their General Topic(s) boards had very sparse activity. At this point unless you have strong ties to the West Coast, which I don’t, there is very little draw to the site.
God Bless and Good Luck to them, but there is no draw or attraction for me there. Many fine and respected contributors there…no slamming at all.
Yes, and what that particular schtick is can be named and shouldn’t be euphemized. It’s “hooters” – jugs, tits, boobs. It’s not “femininity” or “beauty” or even breasts. The low bar for degrading language and attitude is set by the employers of those women. They’re a laugh.
So when their business is discussed on a website as “tits and boobs”, it is rather bizarre to complain. If you don’t want to hear about tits and boobs, keep hooters out of people’s faces.
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Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
154
Indeed so. My other hopefully relevent story concerns an American friend who inhabits another board,as I do, and who is politically on the left,as I am. In all innocence, he posted a phrase not uncommon in Britain many years ago which included a word which is even more of an accepted racial slur than the one I referred to earlier ( we have no need for the “N” word, when we have all these offensive remarks of our own). I saw it a couple of hours later after there had been the inevitable criticisms and posted that he could not have known the meaning of the word. I also immediately emailed him (the time difference meant he was then asleep. He was absolutely mortified at what he had done even though there had been no malice.
I flagged and commented that the term “white trash” is the white equivalent of the n-word. Which it is. I know this because I grew up in Atlanta in the 50s and 60s. They argued back that because there’s the cookbook “White Trash Cooking” that the term was fine. It wasn’t but they (always) had the final word.
Sorry, I was away for the weekend watching Stanford football (where the classy host fans chanted “F#@k Stanford”–karma won, 30-28). IMO:
There is plenty of warmth and welcoming here already. Using a few choice words won’t diminish that.
The only proper “balance” errs on the side of free speech and letting the coarse and impolite among us tar themselves as such.
Salty expression frequently adds value (and is sometimes essential) to the discourse, yet rarely truncates or ends it.
IME, literary prudes aren’t justifiably offended unless a vulgarity is directed at them. Rather, they see themselves as protectors of others who don’t need protecting. Or of the language, which is especially ironic, since the objectionable words are obviously constituent parts of it.
As I’ve written before, there really is a slippery slope when you start policing word use. For instance, re-read my last sentence of the previous paragraph–was I actually baiting someone to place ‘tit’ between "cons’ and ‘uent’? In 2015, are we really expected to put literary pantaloons on our prose piano legs?
I think the policy that strikes the right balance in a PG13 site like this one would be a policy only prohibiting language when used as a weapon or epithet. Name calling is an easy one to spot (e.g, “Dear S@#!head:”). Deprecation (e.g., “What a Shi!!y attitude!”) is a little harder, because it’s not really about the word itself; it’s just the bullet in the gun. I also think, in rare cases, if one poster CLEARLY baits another (e.g., “Ti!!ies, ti!!ies, ti!!ies, nah nah nah!”) is worth prohibiting, but again the word itself ought not to be the punishable offense.
Here in Italy, I went to see Quentin Tarantino’s Django, which had been dubbed into Italian. While Italians can voice plenty of demeaning attitudes about Africans and similarly dark-skinned people, and even have some slang put downs, there really is no true equivalent to the N-word. It was almost comic to me to see a QT movie without it, but I could also tell the audience was left somewhat bewildered by a couple of the scenes, where if you didn’t understand the hate-filled impact and threat of that word, you just weren’t getting the movie at all.
Denizens of coastal America are often really surprised when they drive through parts of the country where white people are sick and tired of having their ways of speech and local culture mocked in media. Sort of reminds of the way some tourists mistakenly think that if they go to Sicily and tell mafia jokes, they’ll be the life of the party.
Anyway, I did want to say one more thing about the topic at hand, which is that it seems to me it boils down to 3 choices for the people who run this site:
a) get an automatic bleeper
or
b) tell people to flag posts they find offensive and Admin will take responsibility for dealing with it
or
c) tell people to please self-censor their posts to remove possibly offensive language before hitting the “reply” key
Good idea, but it would only work in some cases. In this specific case, it won’t help at all. One of the posters has already said that it wasn’t the word alone which offended her, but rather the image. So even if someone wrote:
“Hooters servers like to shoved their things to the customers’ faces”
It would have been offensive.
If anything, it was the verb “shoved” which triggered the compliant.
Just to clarify my feelings regarding Food Talk Central, I’m from NJ, here is a screen shot of the New Jersey page as of today. I’m not trying to “slam” them, but it’s not a very active site for my region.
You should get 1 cent per enumerated point. Mine are so weak I only deserve 5 cents for my 6 points. Yours are funny and pithy enough, you probably could get a dime for 6. Especially if you swear.
Leverage is necessary for making a threat. I have none.
On the other hand, I do have a position. It’s pretty straightforward and was offered up, in light of the context, with a smile.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, I think we have the potential to do something very cool here. Philosophical foundations and overarching principles are important to that. Banning words will prevent such ultimate success.
My take is pretty simple. I don’t mind the occasional f bomb in context. I DO mind anything hateful. I DO mind gratuitous, repetitive expletives, just because ‘you can’ - I think that’s just childish and imposes on my space.
I left Chowhound because the new design didn’t work the way I read the site, checking my email it looks like I requested they close my account on 9/9 and they confirmed it closed on 9/11. I wasn’t part of the acting out or the “Ooooh, look how bad and rebellious I am because I got kicked off of a food message board!” group.
