Commenting Policy

Please take a moment and refamiliarize yourself with Shakesville's Commenting Policy. These are not suggestions. These are the guidelines for participation in this community.

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Required Reading Before Commenting: Everything in the Feminism 101 section, all links below, and "My Vote. Mine." Please also familiarize yourself with Shakesville's Email Policy.

Culture: This is an advanced feminist space. We don't do newbie education on demand here, and we don't do flamewars with people who treat discussion of progressive feminist ideals as an abstract academic exercise or want to play "devil's advocate." If you have a question, ask it in the daily Open Thread, with the hope but not expectation that someone will be around who has the time and inclination to answer it and engage in discussion with you.

Participation here requires that you respect and remember that this space is built and its content authored by individual people. In a space dedicated to social justice, we believe it is important to center the humanity of both its users and its architects.

Content Notes: Content Notes, indicating where potentially troubling or triggering material may be found in a post, will be provided where applicable. We make a good faith effort to identify content associated with common triggers, e.g. violent imagery or slurs, and sensitive subject matter, but please be advised that we cannot predict every reader's individual needs. Content Notes are provided to give readers the option to assess whether they've got the spoons (pdf) to process material that is potentially triggering to them. The provision of Content Notes is an exchange in which readers must participate: We communicate the information, and readers must assess their own immediate capacity to process content in the noted categories, then proceed accordingly.

Commenters are also asked to make a similar good faith effort to note potentially troubling or triggering content in comments, as has become community habit.

Short Rules: Be nice. Be thoughtful. Be open to correction in response to unintentional expressions of privilege. Respect the mods. Hold yourself to the same standards you hold the contributors and other commenters. Have fun. And expect to get whatever you give: If you respect the guidelines and the community culture, you'll get the same in return.

Long Rules: Comments are open to anyone as long as they don't troll and/or traffic in racist, sexist, homophobic, trans*phobic, ableist, ageist, sizeist, or otherwise overtly objectionable commentary based on people's intrinsic characteristics. Hate speech, slurs, rape apologia, rape jokes and metaphors, violent imagery and rhetoric, threats, trolling, concern trolling, derailing, playing the Oppression Olympics, pointless belligerence, sockpuppeting, silencing tactics, accusations of bad faith, disrespecting the mods, including ignoring them, telling contributors what they should be writing about or how they should be writing about it, and/or invoking the [TW] blogmistress' personal experience to use against her, or doing the same to any of the contributors, mods, or other commenters, could result in any of the following: Your comment edited to remove offending material, your comment replaced with an incredibly sophomoric paraphrase, your comment deleted, and/or your commenting privileges revoked.

Differences of opinion are welcome; no one has ever been nor will ever be banned on a difference of opinion alone.

However, bad faith masked as disagreement is not allowed.

It is eminently possible to bring a mistake to my attention, or the attention of another contributor or commenter, and/or to register a disagreement, without engaging in ad hominem attacks, using silencing tactics, jumping to unfounded conclusions about allegedly reprehensible motives, or in some other way accusing me (or anyone else) of acting in bad faith. Failing explicit evidence I have acted to the contrary, I expect to be afforded the benefit of the doubt that I move and act in this space with good faith. I believe I have earned that after eight years.

The other contributors have earned it, too.

If you are unwilling to extend good faith to the contributors to this space, you make it an unsafe space for us, and your commenting privileges will be revoked as a result.

Being banned from Shakesville is not an invitation to take your issues to the email inbox of Liss and/or any of the other contributors or mods.

Whether you can comment at Shakesville is ultimately at our discretion—and plaintive, angry, or accusatory wailing about free speech will be met with yawning indifference. This isn't a public square. This is a safe space.

This blog is meant to be a refuge from the entire rest of the world where people who deviate in some way from arbitrary norms are ridiculed, marginalized, turned into punchlines, silenced, targeted, treated as less than, made to feel not good enough, put at real risk of physical harm, and denied rights, opportunities, access, equal pay, friendships, votes, equality.

We're all going to make mistakes occasionally—and for that, we need to make allowances. Everyone trips up now and then, even with the best of intentions, which is why we are resolved to endeavor always to be aware of our privilege, and, in moments of failure, remain open to criticisms and suggestions, think twice before responding defensively, and apologize when we fuck up.

We also expect the same of those who want membership in the community—which includes addressing others' mistakes in a productive and considered way, because no one is expected to be perfect. Everyone is expected to be willing to self-examine and learn, and therefore everyone must be willing to provide the space, the room to breathe, in which that reflection and growth can happen. A failure to support the provision of room to fail is a failure to respect the rules of the safe space.

And everyone is expected to respect the rules.

If you take issue with a blogmistress who wants her teensy weensy part of the world to be a sanctuary from the oppressions of the kyriarchy, if you feel that impinges on your freedoms, then off you go. You've got an entire world waiting who won't hold you to the same standard.

We expect more.