Cracking on other people's dolls where do you stand?

I'm glad you never had to experience being bullied.
I have only seen your point of view in healthy adults, you come at the issue with an adults understanding and reasoning not with the understanding and reasoning of a child. Do you really think that if you take a 6-year-old and torture it day out and day in for a decade that the fact that that impacts the child is because for the first five years of the child's life his self-esteem wasn't high enough? A child's mind works different than an adults though many of us forget that once we've grown up.

As far as mental abuse goes: I would pick the physical bullying over the mental bullying any day of the week. The physical part stops as soon as the person who bullies you stop. The mental abuse follows you home.


Back on topic. I gotta say that I really dislike the "freedom of speech" crutch. It's about the silliest thing I've ever heard. I have the right to do this, the freedom to do that etc, etc, etc.
Never heard uncle Ben say "With great power comes great responsibilities"? Yes we have near infinite rights and freedoms today, we have the power of the internet. These rights, freedoms and powers should be countered by a greater responsibility for what we say and do.

 

Sadly I have to agree with you >_<

 

If one careless comment affects someone's buying (such as one person saying they find Dollcompany X dolls fugly) then the potential buyer's conviction about wanting that doll probably isn't strong enough to justify dropping that kind of cash on it anyway.

 

This, entirely.
If someone saying 'I don't like that doll at all' online was enough for me to not buy a doll, then I'd have no dolls because there is always someone out there who won't like a certain sculpt. I personally don't like a lot of company's dolls and I'm not going to lie about it. If someone happens to really love that doll anyways they should get it.

 

I have to thank you Ciantha, because this is the only thing in this debate that has made me change my point of view on this and it's related topics. Well put.
There have been many posts that I have disagreed, and agreed with but this I think brings clarity to how I truly feel about it. I feel forced to tolerate not just snark (which does not really move me, I still don't get why anyone would give a flying flip at the moon about what someone said about your doll, please, don't be dissuaded from changing my mind about it, I just really feel that opinions are like butts, to put it semi-politely, everyone has one, and their is nothing more interesting, persuasive or swaying in butt as their is in yours) but outright abuse, just the way I have to tolerate Nazis, racists, N.A.M.B.L.A., P.E.T.A., and any other hateful or (hate filled or hate mongering) group or mob.
That said, being forced to tolerate it does not mean I don't find it disheartening that in my lifetime I feel I have not seen significant proof of Darwinian evolution to make me a believer. As a race, the human race, it seems to me that we should be working to better ourselves, not crawl around in mental refuse sifting through what should be passed out of our system much as digested food leaves behind the nutrients, and eliminates the refuse, and how wasteful is it to pass it out, and then spend half our waking hours going through the waste looking for stuff we'd like to re-chew. Tastes bad. Bad for you.
I think there has to be clarity when things are written, and there should be laws of etiquette that govern our actions even on the untouchable internet. Just as you wouldn't, hopefully, pee in the middle of Times Square. Because as both sides (or rather the many sides) of this Debate have pointed out, the interwebs are a public space. Public. As in don't pick your nose and wipe it on the wall public.

 

In response to what Chienism said: the main thing that bugs me about the attitude here on DoA and why I visit a snark-forum (as an antithesis) is this unwritten rule that if you can&#8217;t say anything nice, you shouldn&#8217;t say anything at all. I know that the moderators want this forum to be a safe place, where people act respectfully, but I don't think they meant not telling the truth. And that has become the attitude of this board in the past few years. Anything that reeks even remotely negative is shunned and the people who posted their critique are badmouthed.

When, in the Critique section someone posts of picture of a modded doll or a face-up and it is absolutely horrendous, nine times out of ten, the only responses the creator gets are &#8216;Wow! How uneeek!’ and 'yur so talented!!1!'. As Chienism pointed out, that isn&#8217;t kindness, it is throwing someone in front of sharks, because they will actually believe they did a good job. Aside from that, you also don&#8217;t give the creator room to improve, because if no-one says anything and nobody shows you what you did wrong, how can you? If you won't give honest feedback, you're killing creativity.

I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s better to say they need to practice more, even if it comes in a blunt package. It might hurt at first, because that is not what that person would like to hear, but in the end you help him/her improve. If you really want to help someone, you sometimes have to say things he didn&#8217;t count on.

 

I wanted to touch on this a bit- I'm not going to try and couch what goes on on the Other Forum as simply giving blunt critique or whatever because I've never though of that forum as being for public consumption. Most of what is written there really isn't meant to come back here. To me its a place to discuss the elephant in the room, the inherent dysfunction in our hobby/fandom. Everyone on DoA sees it but tries to ignore it, it's considered rude to mention it exists and people get jumped on for going "hey, did you guys just see that huge damn elephant?" Whereas the Other Place is pretty much devoted to doing nothing but discussing the elephant in it's myriad forms and wondering why he keeps popping up in the middle of the room. Snark happens because wank happens because all fandoms are, to some degree, insane.

 

The point is that if people keep telling you to kill yourself because no-one is ever going to love you and if you'd be dead, at least they have some piece of mind, it will get to you. There's no coping mechanism that can help you not to listen to it. If people repeat it often enough, you'll believe it's true. Low self-esteem might be the cause of bullying, many times it is a result and children were fine before all this started.

Mental abuse is often considered the least damaging of all abuse forms, but it's just as traumatizing as physical abuse. Even more perhaps, because it's not visible and because it is taken less seriously. With physical abuse there are bruises, scars, broken bones etc. as evidence something's seriously wrong, but how is someone going to prove to a stranger he/she is emotionally abused?

It's not the bruises that hurt, but the feeling of worthlessness, being cut off from anybody else and knowing that someone you love is deliberately treating you like trash... and you can't escape it.