You have to consider that not everyone has your moral standards, and absolutely nothing will get done (or perhaps even be possible) if we declare the most offendable person the standard. For example, let's pit you against me - I am, in a word, aspiritual (I mean that as a consistent application of atheistic thinking), and as such have a much weaker and much more flexible sense of morality than you do. I am offended by very, very little save stupidity and hypocrisy. My take on inappropriate usernames is this - most of the people who put words they expect to cause offense into their usernames and chuckle about it are not likely to be active users. Out of sight, out of mind - you can't seriously argue that a few entries on the user roster among thousands are going to either hurt the opinions of anyone evaluating this site or affect your experience with it. The few that are active are not likely to become useful members of the community, since the fact that they missed the lesson about the kinds of handles they should use suggests they missed a few others, too. Trolls will give you plenty of reason to ban them or at least make the place unfriendly for them in a short period of time without have to jump on their usernames. In the unlikely event that there is a contributing, valuable user who picked a name that is likely to make sensitive people not want to use this site, I am sure he could be reasoned with and asked to change it for the good of the community.
tl;dr version: There's no need for prior restraint here. Moral panics are rarely viewed as rational in retrospect.
Quote:
A rise in Violent assaults on women in Ireland can be linked to their public potrayal (as brainless whores)
|
I'd like to see a source for this. Even if you have one, though, I'd like to introduce you to the concept of 'correlation does not imply causation' - essentially, just because you observe rises in violent incidents against women and in what you view as negative portrayals of women in the media over a comparable time period does not allow you to conclude that the former is caused by the latter. Consider the reverse case (example: an increase in the number of violent acts against women caused unscrupulous advertisers to start appealing to base views of women) or the shared-cause case (example: there is some chemical in the water that promotes animalistic traits, resulting in more violence among those who would have otherwise been close but not over the line and more suggestive advertising from those who are simply thinking about it more).
I am not suggesting that either of those are what's going on here or even likely enough to be worth talking about on their own; the point I am making is that both of those worlds would present the same data - more violence against women, more negative images of them in the media. To come to the conclusion that you came to, you would need two random groups of people, one which was exposed to the worst our media has to offer in unusually large quantities and one which was left alone. You would then need some objective measure - maybe just actual incidents of violence, though no promises on that being easy to collect data on. If you found that the first group had significantly higher numbers than the second, and ONLY then, you could say that exposure to depictions of women as 'brainless whores'
causes an increase in violence against women.
It's easy to jump to conclusions about this kind of thing, but you have to understand that people are frequently not predisposed to logical thinking, yourself included. Unrigorous investigations of causality result in such absurdities as blaming metal/rap music and violent videogames for Columbine-like incidents. As a heavy consumer of both, I assure you that they possess no powers of mind-control.
</enormous rant>