Quote:
Originally Posted by Solace
No one harps on join date much. Location however does get people into trouble. A recent thread devolved into cultural mud slinging partly because of a misunderstanding of how the user entered his location information. On another note, unlike join date which you cannot modify, location and gender are easily changed. Quite a few people can and do put random unrelated text in those fields.
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I think the location field is a good example to compare it with. I'm clearly one who uses unrelated text for the location field at times. I make no effort to hide my location, but I changed the location text when some one flew off the handle and interpreted a joking comment as serious due to their anti-USian prejudices.
I enjoy having the location text there, when it says something useful (or when it makes me chuckle). It provides extra data to help make interpretations in discussion. We can extoll the virtues of being taken at our word all we want, but the truth is that no discussion is made in a cultural vacuum. Whether location, age, gender or anything else, more data can go a long way in providing context for understanding a poster. That's especially true with discussions in which at least one person is not a native speaker and therefore lacks the experience to pick up cues from the text.
The problem is the number of idiots who make poor assumptions with the data provided or express their prejudices. In the land of internet forums, sometimes you have to make concessions in order to disable the idiots.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Solace
Let me ask some questions for everyone.
1a. Have you ever had a moment on these forums where you wished you knew the gender of an individual, but could not find out without asking said person privately?
1b. If so, why?
2. Have any of you ever been in a discussion on these forums where knowing a persons gender would have made a difference in the discussion? By this I mean in relation to the topic, and not because "boys can't get pregnant so their opinions don't matter" type of thinking?
3. How many times have you run into someone being bothered that you got their gender "wrong" on the forums?
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1a. Yes.
1b. Although I rarely mince words, I attempt to maintain a level of decorum in my conversation. For the sake of politeness, I might use different vocabulary in the discussion of personal issues. Likewise, my presentation style can differ. A message intended to challenge an ego to elicit a positive response can work well as a friendly gesture between males, but would be very likely to be interpreted as outright rude by a female recipient. Likewise, when discussing contentious issues, reducing the confrontational impression of a logical argument by surrounding it with empathetic justification might be more likely to be considered polite by a female party, but more likely to be considered to be diluting the argument to a male party. Of course, not all persons of a certain gender are the same to be able to say these sorts of considerations are universally applicable, but the tendencies exist due to the realities of the human experience. Even those who do not share those tendencies and personality quirks are generally quite used to working in a society that assumes them.
2. Yes. As an example, in the discussion of parental and romantic relationships, I've occasionally been overly careful in my replies or declined to reply at all because the lack of knowledge of a gender means I don't have the context to answer properly. A person talking about their "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" doesn't necessarily mean that they are of the opposite gender, and speaking out of turn can mean adding the clutter of a useless post or causing offense.
3. I've rarely seen someone offended. What I see far more often are threads temporarily derailed by an incorrect assumption, followed by several corrections, apologies and follow-up comments.