This post is a weird experience. It makes mostly reasonable claims but it’s aggressively objectifying-male-gaze-y in a really unpleasant way and I strongly feel that content with that property should not be on LW without at minimum content warnings to that effect (which in this case would, uh, need to come before the title somehow) but preferably at all.
(Trying to say more about that intuition:
it feels like it assumes the audience will be male (and having LW contain posts that are assumed-male-audience feels quite Unwelcoming (this word is overused but I think this is centrally what it’s for))
it feels like it sticks the reader straight into an objectifying frame without warning; I think warning/consent to engage with this frame is somewhat necessary here)
I think this problem might be largely due to automatic crossposting? I think it’s, like, okay for blogs with these properties to exist in the world (though I don’t want to read them) and I expect the blog itself provides enough “content warning” through context. But pulling the post onto LW by default seems bad.
I think ozy has written posts I’ve liked where they said a lot of similar stuff in a less intensely annoying way.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I think that norms about e.g. warning people about writing from an objectionable frame only makes sense for personal blogs and it’s not a very reasonable expectation for a forum like LessWrong. These things are always very subjective (the three women I sent this post to for review certainly didn’t feel that it assumed a male audience!). While a single author can create a shared expectation of what they mean by e.g. “warning: sexualizing” with their readers I don’t think a whole community can or should try to formalize this as a norm.
Which means that it’s on the reader to look out for themselves. I’m not going to put content warnings on my writing, but if you decide based on this post that you will not read anything written by me that’s tagged “sex and gender” that’s fair.
This is a much more elegant way of making the criticism I was vaguely gesturing at in my comment. It’s not an objectively bad post, but I agree it feels something like unwelcoming
This post is a weird experience. It makes mostly reasonable claims but it’s aggressively objectifying-male-gaze-y in a really unpleasant way and I strongly feel that content with that property should not be on LW without at minimum content warnings to that effect (which in this case would, uh, need to come before the title somehow) but preferably at all.
(Trying to say more about that intuition:
it feels like it assumes the audience will be male (and having LW contain posts that are assumed-male-audience feels quite Unwelcoming (this word is overused but I think this is centrally what it’s for))
it feels like it sticks the reader straight into an objectifying frame without warning; I think warning/consent to engage with this frame is somewhat necessary here)
I think this problem might be largely due to automatic crossposting? I think it’s, like, okay for blogs with these properties to exist in the world (though I don’t want to read them) and I expect the blog itself provides enough “content warning” through context. But pulling the post onto LW by default seems bad.
I think ozy has written posts I’ve liked where they said a lot of similar stuff in a less intensely annoying way.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I think that norms about e.g. warning people about writing from an objectionable frame only makes sense for personal blogs and it’s not a very reasonable expectation for a forum like LessWrong. These things are always very subjective (the three women I sent this post to for review certainly didn’t feel that it assumed a male audience!). While a single author can create a shared expectation of what they mean by e.g. “warning: sexualizing” with their readers I don’t think a whole community can or should try to formalize this as a norm.
Which means that it’s on the reader to look out for themselves. I’m not going to put content warnings on my writing, but if you decide based on this post that you will not read anything written by me that’s tagged “sex and gender” that’s fair.
This is a much more elegant way of making the criticism I was vaguely gesturing at in my comment. It’s not an objectively bad post, but I agree it feels something like unwelcoming