General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Posting T&A threads helps to create a hostile environment for women here. [View all]tblue37
(65,403 posts)Now, I assume many men, including progressive men, would be fairly comfortable with showing pics from the newest issue of Playboy Magazine around to other men they are friends with.
But I also assume that truly progressive men would know better than to stick a Playboy centerfold under a female co-worker's nose and say, "Hey, look! The new issue of Playboy just came out--and isn't Miss February incredibly beautiful?!"
But that is exactly what the initial SI thread, the one with over 500 replies, was like. Even the title of the thread was essentially saying, "Hey, look! The new SI cover is out!" And many of the posts on that thread were about how "hot" those girls were.
Maybe you engage in "Hubba hubba! That azz!" chitchat with your male friends. If so, it isn't my business.
But if you start doing so in front of me, then I feel I have a duty to remind you that such talk makes me and other women uncomfortable. I have a daughter, and I don't want her to have to deal all the time with men behaving that way in her presence, which is why I feel it is my duty to say something. We older women owe it to younger women to keep encouraging men to behave in a civilized way when they are in public places where women also congregate. When I was a young woman, we did have to live with such talk and behavior in the workplace and in other public places, before sexual harassment laws toned it down some.
Would you bring a cheesecake calendar to a coed political planning meeting or a coed Democratic GOTV meeting and show it around to all the men and women there? That would be something very close to what that SI thread was doing.
I will go even further and say that a lot of men in such a group would be annoyed by such behavior, even if no women were present at all, since yanking a political discussion off topic in order to perform the "Hubba hubba! That azz!" routine is simply immature and inappropriate. A 15-year-old boy might be forgiven for not knowing better, but a grown man should have better manners.