Commenting

We appreciate your contribution to our site, and respect that your comments are your own written work. To keep discussion constructive, we reserve the right to moderate comments before or after they are published on the site. Below are the guidelines your comments must follow.

1. If someone, especially an administrator, says you’re behaving in a privileged manner, listen and take it seriously. Ask for clarification if you really want to learn and grow. They may be wrong, but in the vast majority of cases, they’re right. (This rule applies to the administrators as well, and we take it seriously.)
2. Do not derail threads. If you want to talk about something off-topic, mention it and maybe we’ll post an article about it (it’s happened). If you are just a troll who likes steering conversations wherever you like, you will be banned.
3. Never try to assess another commenter’s motive. For example, “You only think that because you had a bad relationship with your mother.” What does it matter why he thinks X? Just object to X and argue against it.
4. Avoid gender-biased, ableist, racist, anti-queer and other bigoted terms. If someone tells you you’ve inadvertently used one, welcome to the club: handle it with grace and move on. There’s always another way to say it.
5. Don’t characterize groups by traits. (Example: “Men are superficial” or “Feminists are bitter.”)
6. No essentialist comments. If you make a comment patiently explaining to all us silly folk how “But all [group of people] really are [stereotype] because it’s a genetic thing” you cannot seriously think you’ve just rubber-stamped your crap with scientific approval. Your comment will be laughed at, then flushed down the digital spam toilet.
7. Don’t question the entire purpose of the site, or someone’s motive for writing an article. We don’t come to your site to tell you it’s a waste of time.
8. Don’t assume we’re suggesting censorship or changes to law, unless someone has clearly stated that. Generally speaking, we’re just talking about problems that need to be identified so they can be solved.
9. Don’t provide personal information. You never know who’s reading, or going to read in the future. If you post under your real name and it’s unique, a potential boss years from now could find your comments here. If you use your non-unique real name but also mention the smallish city where you live, it could be very easy for someone to track you down. Use your best judgment, and please don’t take offense if we edit a reference out of your comment. We just don’t want anything unfortunate to come out of your experience here.
10. Don’t provide someone else’s personal information. If you want to “out” your abuser, I’m all for it, but I cannot take on the legal burden of dealing with it so you need to do that elsewhere.

Thanks! Enjoy the site.