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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

> "Women and their monogamy obsession. Why are they so insecure and try to fight biology?"

> "Reject"

> "We would have approved. Whether we agree with a comment, we want to provide a space for interesting interactions to occur. Put simply, the replies to this comment may prove to be enlightening for many readers. The comment does not criticize a specific woman, so it is not a personal attack. While it might be considered an insult against a class, alleging an "obsession" is not a particularly inflammatory insult. We don’t seek to police opinions, only to help as many people as possible express themselves on nytimes.com."

It was about calling women "insecure" besides "obsessive" in a two sentence comment in a pejorative tone. It is not about agreeing with the comment or not.

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> What the New York Times community desk demands most of all is that some effort is made to justify your views. The desk must also be convinced that your intention is to inform and convince rather than to insult and enrage.

So. How is this person justifying their comment? There's at least three [citation needed]s in there. And saying you'll keep it because the replies will be enlightening even though it brings no inherent value is basically admitting that you're deliberately allowing a flamewar, which seems contrary to the idea that it's not trying to enrage.

Yeah, their rationale on that is bizarre. Not only does the comment contain a sexist insult, the comment is nothing but a sexist insult.

FWIW, the comment got 9 upvotes and 2 unconstructive answers: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/world/asia/china-marriage-...

Apparently the times' idea of an 'interesting conversation' is to have feminism 101 conversations over and over and over and over and over and over again.

The handling of derogatory comments about groups is rather odd to me.

Because groups can't do anything badly (e.g. statistically significant percentages of their members or in their core ideology is they are something like a political part, a religious sect etc), and shouldn't be criticised and/or made fun for that?

The quiz explicitly bans comments that target a nation "Saudi Arabia", but allow comments that target an entire sex "women".

TBF, the difference is that the comment about women didn't call for sterilizing all of them, which NYT pointed out as the reason for rejecting the Saudi Arabia comment.

I wonder if their rationale is that a negative comment is more insulting and less constructive if it has a more specific target. E.g., there are fewer Saudis than women. That seems a bit backward to me, though.

Eh, that comment suggested to _sterilize_ Saudis - where has reasonability gone?

I think there is no problem with this being accepted.

Firstly, the question posed is quite unlikely to be meant literally (many women do not want to live a monogamous life).

Secondly, if they are trying to fight "biology", may their focus on monogamy be biologically based?

Thirdly, should all statements along the lines of "oh, men", or "men don't take responsibility for [...]" be banned?

Lastly, man or woman - it is hard to truly take offense at such a statement.

Had this been about abilities or some "obsession" in the non-private sphere, I suspect they would have come to a different conclusion...

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