Commenting Guidelines

Please refrain from the following in your comments:

1. Racism, sexism, ablism, transphobia, etc etc. This includes stereotypes about groups of people, and use of slurs.

2. Body shaming comments.  While I understand that people are reacting to depictions of women in comics, the issue is about how the industry/artist/etc choose to present, draw and depict women, and that they often portray women as only having certain body features. Don’t make comments like “no woman has breasts the size of her head”, “real women have curves”, or that women without big breasts “look like a 12 year old boy.”

3. Gender essentialism.  This is not saying there are NO general physical differences between cis men and cis women, but relates to statements about how muscular women look like men because only men can have big muscles, or that women all have thick lips, or etc…

4. Personal attacks about redrawers, artists, or other commenters.  Criticism, even harsh criticism of the artist/redrawer is not a problem, but not “you must be jealous and fat” or “that artist must be a loser who jerks off in his basement.”  There’s sometimes a grey area about what constitutes a “personal attack”, and then I’ll make a judgement call.  Consistent attacks on a person’s character, or attempting to undermine their argument by attacking them personally will definitely not be tolerated.

5. Rape jokes, trivializing rape, blaming rape victims, defending child pornography, or other such behaviour. I didn’t think I had to add this because I didn’t think it’d come up.  But since it has, I’m adding this so everybody understands this is bannable behaviour, and one I won’t tolerate at all.

6.  Attempting to use the comments section to derail discussion, or as your own pulpit.  This blog is not meant to be your blog.  Please do not hijack the comments section to talk about your own pet issues that have nothing to do with this blog, or to project those issues onto this blog.  Also, while disagreeing with posts is fine, if you persistently post arguments/rants about the very concept of this blog, (or sexism, or the validity of art critique, or feminism, or etc), you may be banned.  You can do this on your own blog.  I do not want Escher Girls’ comments section to be derailed into the same argument over and over again.

Ignoring these guidelines may lead to a warning or a ban depending on the situation.

I also reserve the right to ban anybody I believe to be trolling, this includes (but isn’t limited to) posting in bad faith, posting rapidly, tone-trolling, harassing others, being deliberately disruptive, or attempting to derail the conversation.

(Note: Please try to keep your comments in English as our moderators aren’t fluent in other languages and it would be difficult for them moderate non-English comments or know whether or not they are problematic.)

Update February 4th 2013: Sock puppeting (creating alternate names/accounts in order to pretend to be different people) is an automatic ban.

Update May 29 2013: Trolling is explicitly banned now, as is making rape jokes, trivializing rape, defending child pornography, and hijacking or derailing the comments section.

Update November 10 2013: Ceridwen has been unavailable to mod the comments section for a while, so I’ve edited this to refer to just me as the moderator until I can find somebody else to replace her.