OK, I hope we’re not going to make Peter Pears into some kind of martyr to the IF Social Justice Warriors. I’m sorry that Peter’s gone, but he got bashed for 7 pages because he kept saying things that had unfortunate sexist implications and then doubling down on them when people disputed them. His comments are gone from that thread now, but he started off by basically saying that it was illegitimate to criticize a game for being sexist, and he eventually wound up using a dehumanizing term for large female opera singers and did not react well when someone, who had not yet criticized him on the thread, super politely asked him to withdraw it.
Now if people hadn’t criticized him for that we’d have a forum where it was OK to talk about women in ways that make them seem non-human and where feminist critiques of games could be ruled out of bounds just for being feminist critiques of games. I’m not a woman, but from women I’ve talked to and read, it seems like that sort of thing is what scares people, specifically (but not just) women, out of forums. And it certainly seems as though in general men feel more comfortable than women on the forum, judging from who posts here (and the fact that at least two women have said on this thread that they don’t like it here/won’t send people here for discussion).
I’m sorry for bringing Peter’s posts up again, because he deleted them as something that he regrets, but I don’t think it’d be healthy for this forum to let him go down as someone who got driven off by big meanies rather than someone who found himself in a hole and wouldn’t stop digging.