There are some great women in our local leagues. I won't name them but they know who they are. They're great for pinball because they collect games, work our local show (SFGE), and are really good people.

Most of the usernames here are gender-neutral (like "vid" and "swampfire" and "s1500"). The gender of a Pinside user shouldn't matter - I think that might be the point that Curtis_Playfield cleverly made with her username. I admit that I sometimes get curious about how old someone is, their race and their gender - but it's none of my business.

I'm in avatar hell with you, buddy. I dropped my avatar to be more family-friendly (no more kids smoking), and now I can't add a new one back. I'll fix it when I'm back home from Shenandoah.

Here's a shout out for Helena Walter, who appears to be the top-ranked woman in pinball right now (unless I missed one). Ranked at #104, she could mop up the floor with most of the guys posting in this thread (including me).

http://www.ifpapinball.com/player.php?p=103

Oh, and how did I miss Margaret Hudson? She's one of the best pinball artists ever!

http://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?ppl=Margaret+Hudson&sortby=name&searchtype=advanced

I love the work she did on CSI.

Blondetall, thanks for sharing your stories. I'm glad we have a female moderator to help keep us centered. I hate that I missed meeting you at SFGE, but there's always next year.

For every story like Blondetall's, there's one where the woman doesn't even know what's happening. I had a boss in the 80's who openly told his team "I won't hire women". This was for a software engineering job. Worse, he would occasionally bring them in for interviews - to keep up appearances. Wasted a whole day of their time just to keep his sorry ass from being fired.

I will say that I haven't seen anything like that since then, so maybe there's hope for this world.

This thread was on-topic (good/great women in pinball) until jonnyo and Xenon and zizzlemeplease took it down this stupid "PC" rathole (go back to page 2 if you don't believe me).

Let's here it for more great women in pinball: Gary Stern must have had a mom, right?

[edited, no point in saying anything further]

I don't get offended by much of anything, but I know when speech or content is inappropriate given the context (i.e., a pinball forum, in a thread celebrating women in pinball). That's not "being PC", it's being polite.

Thanks to cait001 for voicing some things I was already thinking.

Do you guys have Men's Support Groups where you can share your concerns?

Because they're people, Odin, and this is not the He-Man Woman Hater's Club. I wish you'd go back to being clever and funny; I liked you better then.

Read the on-topic posts in this thread to see why women are great for pinball. They open locations. They teach us how to fix games. They create art for the games. They run the shows. It hasn't got anything to do with dating or whether they're "hot". Anybody who doesn't get this should probably find another forum to post in.

Women don't need our help to get into pinball, that's not the point either. It's about not driving people away from Pinside.

Nobody wants to date a guy without an avatar.

If that's really the case, shouldn't we be trying to drive men out of pinball, instead of women? There are way more guys coming into the hobby than women.

Anyway, I think pinball is big enough for all of us. I see games go up for sale constantly that I have to pass on because I'm full. Maybe the market is tougher for buyers in CA than in GA?

I think I have a metaphor that might help us talk about this. Let's say someone started posting spoilers for movies and TV shows, in the middle of a pinball thread. A few people call him out on that behavior, and the thread isn't about pinball any more. "What's the problem?", he asks - "Thus is just the way I talk, by sharing movie plots. You have no right to be offended by it." Then let's say (in this hypothetical scenario) that 20 people jump in to defend the guy posting spoilers, because "if you haven't seen those movies by now, you're probably a loser anyway." Then they join in and post spoilers too, sometimes even for current movies, just to stick it to the people who complained.

Who are the jerks are in this scenario? Is it the people violating the basic social contract that you don't share spoilers on a forum with 5,000 active users? Or, is it the people complaining that they can't use the site anymore, because they never know when someone is going to ruin a movie for them?

We're maybe 40/30/30 conservative/progressive/independent here, but the site doesn't fall apart. Why? Because 99% of us realize that politics are poison, and we avoid bringing that shit up. Moderators handle the other 1%. So why is THIS so hard? Are the guys here being deliberately provocative, or are we (guys) really that clueless about what annoys women? Note that I said "annoys", not "offends".

I think if the worst 10% of the posts went away, things would improve a lot. This is just my opinion, but I think the tit pics are not the biggest part of the problem; they just happen to be the easiest to monitor and ban. The ugly conversations are much worse.

But we can only tilt images, right? Maybe we do need a way to tilt a post (with or without pics). At least then the poster knows when he's being annoying.

My point is, when someone says "Democrats are dumb", they get a thread eject. But if someone says "I hate saggy tits", everyone is expected to roll with it. Am I right? Or do we have a basic contract as Pinsiders that we don't talk about genitals or breasts unless it's related to some pinball art?

^^^ great example. The text in the picture is obnoxious; the pic by itself probably would have been fine.

Sounds like the reason that forum works is because rude/crude/tasteless speech results in a 1-week posting ban.

One last comment and I'm out. It bugs me to see people saying "this website" or "Pinside" as a shorthand for "people who post on Pinside". Whatever we think of some posters (maybe including me), the forum itself is damned near perfect. I would extend that to the choice of moderators as well - you all do a great job.

Cait has an awesome pinball blog, hiding in plain site on her pinside page. Please check it out before calling her a "troll" again:

http://pinballnovice.blogspot.ca

This thread has gotten far too abstract and political and personal. I think a lot of people are missing the background. Go back and read this post from the perspective of a woman, especially toward the end:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/couple-has-sex-in-my-game-room

That thread really reminds me of the movie "The Accused", with Jodie Foster. Crazybanana was right to call it "a black mark on Pinside". BTW I'm not a saint - if I hadn't been on vacation in a mountain cabin last week, I might have posted there too. But I'm going to try to be aware of how my posts come off to women (and girls and boys) and I think that's all Cait and Molly are really asking for.

If anybody posted my FB info here to call me out, I wouldn't let it go as easily as Cait did.

Thumbs up for making me smile. No...based on my last stupid confrontation (a few years ago), I'd have strong words with the person, drink 4-5 beers and then win a pinball tournament from all the adrenaline. Oh yeah, that was good.

Wow, thanks for the internet advice, guys - I didn't know that's how the internet worked.
And thanks for taking the discussion to a whole new level of absurdity.

Are you wearing a wifebeater (t-shirt) in all of them?

You guys do realize that it's NOT hypocritical to like sex, but not want to hear about it on a pinball forum...right?

I'm only embarrassed of my FB page because I haven't rainbowed my profile pic or taken a position on the rebel flag yet.

EDIT: good place to end the discussion. Beers all around...except for me, I'm on the wagon.

Don't forget the little people - the party doesn't really start until they arrive.

Speaking up for WolfMarsh since he's out of the thread - I think he understands now that what he did wasn't right, and I know him not to be a creepy guy.

.

I just checked in on RGP - looks like we have chased 4 or 5 angry guys away from Pinside, lol.
I'm glad we have guys like Vid and Centerflank and O-din who can dish it out AND take it.
i don't know what's funnier, Frankfurter having respectability again, or the guys talking about how much they enjoy the non-censorship of their text-only Usenet. I guess they could share ASCII boob art.

Jurassic World ends pretty much like the first Jurassic Park, with the "good" dinosaurs saving the hapless kids from the "bad" one. The main twist is that the velociraptors are good in this one.

This discussion has gone totally meta - we are arguing about how to argue now. Usually a sign that the horse has been beaten to a pulp and there's nothing left to say.