I understand your thinking and agree it a good starting point on some personal disagreement. However if someone makes a blatantly sexist post it shouldn't fall to a women who came here to enjoy watches to instead spend her time trying to educate.
There's truth in that. I don't mean to say that messaging someone is mandatory nor a cure-all.
At the same time, miscommunication happens all the time, in families face to face, in offices, in the best of conditions. Here, where communication is stripped of the nuances of vocal inflection, eye contact, etc, with the added elements of anonymity, distance and public ego, it can sometimes make us respond more emotionally than we might otherwise if we were in person. The personal messaging can serve to step out of that energy and reset.
While this can be a bit of hippy-dippy wishful thinking, sometimes it helps me to stop and try to understand who the other person is, as opposed to scoring points in an argument.
As to your point about putting the burden on a woman to explain why she feels uncomfortable or belittled, that's no different than racism or gay-straight or young-old or country to country stereotypes or any other prejudices that we hold. If we are to avoid killing ourselves, we have to dialog. As a 65 year old white American male, i have learned a lot about myself in the last decade. It wasn’t because I sought out new experiences, although I thought i was open to them. It's because other people presented different ways of thinking or took the time to tell me why what i said/was thinking was exclusionary. They could have said fυck you, but that would not have changed a thing or helped me change my thinking.
I wish i could remember the circumstances but my memory is not so great. But I can tell you I have two wonderful daughters who are brave and kind. The example i can't remember ended with my daughter saying "but Dad, you think that because you're a man" and then she explained it from her perspective. I just hadn't seen it like that. Lightbulb.
For that to happen, i can't hate someone. I have to see them as a reasonable person and not an oppenent or opportunity to prove I'm right (very tempting for me.)
You also said blatant sexism. Nobody should put up with abuse, blatant or otherwise. If something is blatant and over the top, definitely call me out. Maybe I was being a lazy thinker or falling back into cheap stereotypes for what i thought was an easy laugh. That's no excuse for saying it, but perhaps i would be grateful for the correction. If someone refuses to back down or apologize or acknowledge the injury, that's on them and not your burden.
This is a stream of consciousness post so feel free to TLDR. The short of it is that our little world on the forum carries the same crap as the larger society so we shouldn't be surprised when sexism or anything else appears. It seems like the forum is in many ways a more civilized place. But while the forum has opportunities to connect with people from across the world that we could not hope to meet in our real lives, there are extra challenges from the anonymity and lack of physical presence. The PM is a tool for reaching behind the veil.
And because this is a watch forum, here's a picture of a 1967 Glycine Airman that came in the mail today.
😀
