Glossy photos of girls on bikes!

Sigh, here we go again.

there is alot of talk about the degradation of this forum due to this particular thread

I don't believe this is true, this thread is not exactly something that the forum as a collective of people could be proud of, but it does appear to be reflective of a portion of the larger collective otherwise it wouldn't exist.

The wider view of how women are perceived on the forum really relates to cycling (male bias) and wider society. This thread does not, through it's existence, define the difference between elements of the forum being sexist and it not being sexist... deleting the thread is simply censorship, and would hide the issue and not deal with it. If this thread did not exist, would you really believe that there were no people on this forum with sexist views?

...referring to any woman in that regard is nothing short of chauvinism,

Another important set of points relate to whether things are that black and white, I don't personally believe so. I don't see anything as being one thing or the other and not any of the possible things in between. There exists an infinitesimal range of greys inbetween and to determine whether a post on an internet forum is indeed sexist or reflects a chauvinist view you will need to understand the person who posted, the intent of the post, the tone and context of the post.

Which relates to the next thing, we're on the internet. The majority of how people communicate is stripped away when we converse over a typed-word medium. We lose body language, tone of voice, tempo, the context of the poster as regards mood and circumstance, the company... we lose such a vast majority of how people communicate that we're left with barely a sliver upon which others are choosing to cast judgement. With barely 10% of how we communicate left... can you be so sure that your judgement of another is correct? I am never sure of anything on the internet, I tend to side towards believing I've read something wrong and that I should give benefit of doubt.

the fact you find that funny is quite disturbing, ....you treat woman in 1 regard here, clearly poorly, but in real life, it changes? .. weird...

You've judged, and the sentence is harsh. But really we don't know jack about the intent or purpose of posts. Not all posts are serious, most on this forum are purposefully joking, antagonistic, wind-up. It's no excuse if the post was made flippantly, but a post that takes the piss and makes jokes out of some religious entity isn't suddenly representative of fundamentalist views of the opposite extreme... this is what I mean by polarising... things are not black and white.

And ultimately I think all of this preaching is bollocks. I once learned a great thing from a youth leader who said that the moment in an argument when your voice is raised or you tell someone to fuck off... you've lost, they're no longer listening. And the second thing I learned from him, was that hoping to change someone's mind by arguing from your point of view will never work, you need to argue it from their point of view.

I don't think the problem can be dealt with by burying it, censoring it, shouting it down, going off on a rant, patronising people, or generally stooping to their level by displaying similarly closed views on things.

Do I have an answer? No. But I honestly don't think a single person's view is going to be changed by these little shit storms we have. There's probably a much better middle-ground way of going about it, but I'm probably way too fucking liberal.