If you think that is your best course of action, then by all means follow it. That wasn’t the point I was trying to make (like I said, I think decreasing creepiness is a good thing). Although I would suggest that if you really want to improve social skills, you can do much better by reading Luke’s post on romance and accompanying references. Also, by reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. Take this with a grain of salt as I haven’t read the books myself but am mainly going off of skimming the subject matter. (You may wonder why something on romance matters for non-creepiness; it’s not as directly related as I would like, but creepiness is essentially the result of unwanted sexual advances, which can be as implicit as a guy showing inordinately high amounts of attention towards a girl that is not attracted to him.)
The point I was trying to make was that this post would be analogous to the situation where, say, Luke or Yvain were to write a post that was substantially and obviously technically incorrect, but such that following the advice in that post was better than not doing anything. I therefore disagree with JoeW’s claim that poor reception towards this post indicates sexism (although there are plenty of comments elsewhere in this thread that do indicate sexism, or at least extreme social naievete, as well as plenty of comments coming from poorly-thought-out feminist positions; there are also plenty of comments that indicate not sexism but a valid critique of the poorly-thought-out feminist positions, as well as well-thought-out feminist positions; the story is not as black-and-white as most are trying to make it out to be, and there is plenty of noise and bias to go around).
You are looking at this as being advice aimed at the person being creepy, and evaluating whether the information in the links would be practical at helping them improve their social skills.
Have you considered it from the perspective of it being aimed at someone who is uncertain about the validity of their feeling there is something wrong in a group, and whether the information in the links would help them identify the problem and confirm to them that it is actually a problem that they do have a right to have addressed?
Ah, I misinterpreted your original comment and did not realize you were the OP. Re-reading the top-level post, I now realize that you did in fact intend this to be aimed not just at the perpetrators but at the community as a whole.
I now feel slightly confused about something, but it’s hard to point to what exactly. So instead of trying to figure it out, let me just re-iterate that I approve of the point that if anyone feels uncomfortable it is the group’s responsibility to fix that. I also approve of global over local (i.e. this person is here to hang out with all the other people here, not for my sole benefit). I suspect that a large portion of the people on this thread would also approve of both of these. The issue seems to be more the part where the links are also framed as social advice, where I now (I think?) see that they were not intended as such, but instead as a set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons.
I am probably at fault for this, but I did not understand any of that until I reread the OP. I interpreted it in the context of intended social advice. If other people did as well, I think that explains some of the reactions (but not all of them—I think some of it results from having previously had bad experiences with feminist memespace, in the same way that some of the anti-FAI / anti-SingInst discussion results from having had bad experiences with the FAI/SingInst memespace). If it is not too late, your cause may be helped by unambiguously reframing it in the way you intended (if I am correct about what you intended).
If you think that is your best course of action, then by all means follow it. That wasn’t the point I was trying to make (like I said, I think decreasing creepiness is a good thing). Although I would suggest that if you really want to improve social skills, you can do much better by reading Luke’s post on romance and accompanying references. Also, by reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. Take this with a grain of salt as I haven’t read the books myself but am mainly going off of skimming the subject matter. (You may wonder why something on romance matters for non-creepiness; it’s not as directly related as I would like, but creepiness is essentially the result of unwanted sexual advances, which can be as implicit as a guy showing inordinately high amounts of attention towards a girl that is not attracted to him.)
The point I was trying to make was that this post would be analogous to the situation where, say, Luke or Yvain were to write a post that was substantially and obviously technically incorrect, but such that following the advice in that post was better than not doing anything. I therefore disagree with JoeW’s claim that poor reception towards this post indicates sexism (although there are plenty of comments elsewhere in this thread that do indicate sexism, or at least extreme social naievete, as well as plenty of comments coming from poorly-thought-out feminist positions; there are also plenty of comments that indicate not sexism but a valid critique of the poorly-thought-out feminist positions, as well as well-thought-out feminist positions; the story is not as black-and-white as most are trying to make it out to be, and there is plenty of noise and bias to go around).
You are looking at this as being advice aimed at the person being creepy, and evaluating whether the information in the links would be practical at helping them improve their social skills.
Have you considered it from the perspective of it being aimed at someone who is uncertain about the validity of their feeling there is something wrong in a group, and whether the information in the links would help them identify the problem and confirm to them that it is actually a problem that they do have a right to have addressed?
Ah, I misinterpreted your original comment and did not realize you were the OP. Re-reading the top-level post, I now realize that you did in fact intend this to be aimed not just at the perpetrators but at the community as a whole.
I now feel slightly confused about something, but it’s hard to point to what exactly. So instead of trying to figure it out, let me just re-iterate that I approve of the point that if anyone feels uncomfortable it is the group’s responsibility to fix that. I also approve of global over local (i.e. this person is here to hang out with all the other people here, not for my sole benefit). I suspect that a large portion of the people on this thread would also approve of both of these. The issue seems to be more the part where the links are also framed as social advice, where I now (I think?) see that they were not intended as such, but instead as a set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons.
I am probably at fault for this, but I did not understand any of that until I reread the OP. I interpreted it in the context of intended social advice. If other people did as well, I think that explains some of the reactions (but not all of them—I think some of it results from having previously had bad experiences with feminist memespace, in the same way that some of the anti-FAI / anti-SingInst discussion results from having had bad experiences with the FAI/SingInst memespace). If it is not too late, your cause may be helped by unambiguously reframing it in the way you intended (if I am correct about what you intended).
I wasn’t sure of the etiquette about editing top level posts.
I’ve now added a clarification to the end of the post. Thank you for the suggestion.