The researchers also asked the participants to rate how often they noticed ten different problems in the online forums. Visitors to NoFap forums reported seeing content that was often trolling (88%), misogynistic (73.7%), bullying (49.1%), anti-LGBT (42.9%), or anti-Semitic (32.0%). Additionally, a significant number of participants reported being told to harm or kill themselves (23.5%), witnessing threats to hurt others (21.1%), and witnessing doxing of others (17.1%) on the forums.
I’ve always taken the volcel stuff here to be more about not letting the forum attract creepers. On reddit any time there’s a girl in a pic 80% of the comment section will just be :awooga: shit, which is alienating as fuck.
Ideally, it works as that, and by extension as a protection for our ace and sex-repulsed comrades. It’s important to foster a site culture where :awooga: is not accepted. But i don’t know if everybody is aware of that intention, i’ve had people LARPing as volcel police when i was simply discussing my sexuality in a decidedly non-horny manner (i was actually talking about how not horny i am, how i fit into the alloace spectrum and how i felt various kinds of non-sexual attraction to people), and i don’t think i should be subjected to something like that in a militantly LGBT-inclusive space.
Not to mention that for a lot of people, the volcel bit quickly verges into chastity play and like all forms of BDSM, that doesn’t work spontaneously with complete strangers. You can’t do kink without establishing consent and rules and boundaries in advance. I’m not saying that to kinkshame, i’ve had lots of fun with chastity play myself in the past, i’m just saying that it’s not something i want to engage in with randos on a leftist shitposting forum. It’s as transgressive as sexualizing it when i talk about my tits merely as a gender-affirming part of my transition process, something a lot of people struggle to understand as well.
So yes, the volcel bit is a safegurad against the sexualizing horny culture that’s all over the rest of the internet and it’s a good thing we’re making this effort, but there’s both cases were people take it too far, cases where it achieves the opposite and cases were people suddenly forget about it.
i found out about the volcel police just by encountering the memes here and it was immediately obvious that it’s there to prevent this place becoming yet another porn aggregator and all around misogynistic shithole.
i love it.
i havent seen any … ahem… perversion of the meme so far.
like i said, i’m speaking from personal experience on all of these points. That’s rare, we’re generally on a good track, but some people don’t fully get what the volcel bit is about.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? :)
It originally started as a multi-thread rift on mysogynistic hornyposting, tired memes about communist secret police, and the late/post gwot trend of adopting some Arabic phrases as a way to ironically demonstrate rejection of the islamaphobic majority. The big haram greentext was an important part of it back on reddit, and the actual volcel police jokes were reasonably explicit with things like “please keep your bodily fluids to yourself”.
It’s meaning and purpose has changed here to largely being a mechanism for shutting down casual hornyposting to protect the site’s culture of being welcoming to people who either aren’t interested in or do not want to be around discussions of sex, but at least in my experience it remains playful and silly, with lots of variation and innovation and a long standing gag of trying to thwart or escape the volcel cops.
Related, it’s wild that the original volcel oath gag is like, what, seven years old now?
Do we need to go over the problems that arise from putting memes in front of discourse?
How insulated a community has to be in order for someone to end up thinking “I don’t really know if X is good or bad and I’m too afraid to ask.”
Of course we have many, maybe most people here with a strong consciousness and good rhetorical foundation, but I shouldn’t have to mention the dozen of struggle sessions over the years over so much stuff.
In hindsight one can always say “but I always thought X was [the correct take here]” but doing it in real time is not as straight forward as it seems.
In the end we realy do need a “Beginners guide to Hexbear” somewhere just to be safe.
Having a guide to site culture and the history of the more popular jokes and memes is rarely a bad idea. Reddit had a couple of subs dedicated to maintaining the history of reddit. Idk if they still exist.
This site is no different, it’s just all blush emojis and submissive “jokes” instead.
ymmv i suppose but i find that infinitely preferable
the tone is so different; it doesn’t feel like it comes from a place of misogyny
I find it worse because it’s done under the pretense it’s somehow woke if you have a slight kink. At least :awooga: guys aren’t pretending it’s anything else.
i can understand that i suppose. like i said it’s very subjective, it just so happens that i find it less repulsive (maybe the focus on “what i’d like to do to her” vs “what i’d like her to do to me”? idk)