I kind of agree...
You're right, it's not women skewing the legal system in a divorce case. Or, rather, it's not the woman involved in the divroce case, but we now live in a society that is so unwilling to put what is right, decent, fair or morally justified above what is dictated by the PC Thought Police (or Guardian readers, whatever you wish to call them is fine by me), that we have a situation where it is seen as acceptable to villify or victimise KMWIP as he's a man (and therefore must be wrong), whilst there are many posts of girls doing things just as bad/far worse to ex-boyfriends/ex-husbands and we are all expected to laugh along with the "woman scorned".

Legally, you aren't allowed to take retribution on anyone. Legally, it doesn't matter if you are a "woman scorned", if you harm another human being, you are breaking the law. But the PC brigade ignore this because criticising her actions might (in their warped minds) be seen as sexist. The same with the potential minefields of race, sexuality and religion.

In my eyes, either we allow all such posts to be laughed at, or none. There should be zero distinction (after all, there was a food revenge story last week in which a girl put a used tampon in a boyfriends cup of tea and no-one pilloried her, did they?), but in bringing up this point the self-appointed bastions of decency labelled me as bigoted for merely asking if it was right that KMWIP was treated in the way he has been when there weren't page after page of rants about posts where female posters had taken revenge on their boyfriend/husband.

Surely, that makes them bigoted for only allowing an act of revenge to be justified if performed by a woman? I merely argued that either all such actions should be seen as justified, or none should be.

Without wishing to spoil the debate, we on b3ta have a generally-recognised sick sense of humour, so I think that anyone moralising on here about a chilli up the flange needs to think if that is fair considering the amount of jokes about paedophiles, rape, missing children and suchlike that are met with gales of laughter on a regular basis.

Either we treat all posts like KMWIPs as a bit of fun (and don't skew the reaction based on the poster's gender, race, sexuality or religion), or we take everything seriously and kill off the whole point of this site - that it is a PC-free zone where people can say just exactly what they think. If we start letting the Emos and hairy-armpit brigade dictate what people can say and think on here, then we might as well all give up and go home - because this site will have lost its whole raison d'etre.
(Chad, Wed 1 Oct 2008, 12:28, 1 reply)

Broadly
I understand what you mean, but I think you're overestimating the bias around here, and the degree to which reactions like this are down to Guardian-reading, hairy-armpitted, emo, self-appointed bastions of decency, rather than just normal people reacting to something that they think is unpleasant.

Most revenge stories around here are acts against somone's property or reputation. These are generally seen as funny and deserved and having no real long-term consequences. The food contamination stories generally get at least some responses along the lines of "you sad inadequate little twat" (at least the ones written by people in crappy jobs taking petty, smug revenge on people that they don't like). Stories of intentional physical pain or harm are pretty rare and quite a few people have said that they find them abhorrent, whatever the genders of the people involved, and have said so here; presumably because they happened to real people (rather than just being sick jokes). They know they can't stop other people laughing at them (nor do they probably want to) but that doesn't stop them offering a perfectly valid opinion.

I think that people have a weird ability to laugh at something and recognise it as nasty at the same time, and KMWIP's story was quite funny. People's responses according to this fine balance vary, and they're not obliged to treat every instance the same just because *you* feel that they are the same. Nor are they obliged to scan the boards for every possible act that steps over the line and come down on it like this. The board will survive, sick jokes and all, and just as people don't need to read the board, you certainly don't need to read the comments and KMWIP certainly doesn't need to post the most extreme PM that he received. If he was looking for this kind of response (which is possible) he was going the right way about it.
(flimflam_machine, Wed 1 Oct 2008, 15:20, closed)