ntt@dciem.UUCP (Mark Brader) (03/21/84)
Well, I was going to stay out of the great static cling foofaraw, but having seen how completely my little posting has been misunderstood (particularly by Beth Mazur), I guess I'll have to explain at length. First, it seems that "static cling" means different things to different people. One is clothes clinging to the body (or nylons etc.) when worn; the other is when they cling to each other after being dried (making them hard to put away properly, so you find the missing hosiery hiding inside your pants). When I saw the phrase in Shelley Heretyk's original posting, I thought of advertisements that show people taking clothes out of the dryer and the clothes clinging together -- the second version. Frankly, I have never noticed real-life examples of the first version, but I am not clothes conscious and I do not comment on whether it really exists as a problem or is only an advertisers' myth. Female net posters have already suggested both of these. Now, with fashions as they are, it is clear that the first version of static cling is principally of interest to women. But whatever you mean by static cling, isn't it clear that Shelley's message recommending a laundry product to solve should be read by *whoever does the laundry?* The "sex prejudice" which my first posting referred to was the assumption that *laundry products* to cure static cling are best discussed in net.women.only. As a man who was the laundry-doer for most of the 6.5 years I've been married, I found this assumption funny and annoying at the same time, and I thought that net.women readers would understand that point without further explanation. I did not mean to ridicule the existence of net.women.only, though I was opposed to its creation -- just to suggest that now that it exists, it should only be used for topics where men really can't contribute anything. Laundry is not one of these. The discussion should, of course, have been started in net.consumers. It is not spying to read net.women.only -- the original discussion made it clear that it was only posting to it that men weren't welcome to do. I think that those men who posted to net.women.only to ridicule the problem were discourteous and should have used net.women and/or net.flame. I do not support sex discrimination in any form, as far as I am aware; some days I even call myself a feminist, but I don't like the connotations. This includes the existence of net.women.only, but as a courtesy I respect it. Mark Brader (I am not a net.women vulture, only a wrong-group-posting vulture!)