I'm curious why one of my threads was locked. Thanks.

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One of my posts was locked because it was "nonsense."

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt258856.html#6054401

Since I've never had any reason to be unhappy with the moderation here, I'll explain the reason for my post, and what I did to try to make sure that it was in-bounds.

Antibiotic resistance isn't very controversial, so I'm assuming that it was locked because of the tie in to gender. I had several reasons for drawing the connection:

1: I though that drug resistant bacteria would disproportionately hurt women. I might be wrong, so I'm happy to explain how I came to that estimate: (a) I'd read about antibiotics being used preventively during childbirth, which I assume wouldn't be done if it weren't important to ensure the safety of the mother or child. (b) I knew that it's somewhat common for a newborn to become stuck in the birth canal, and that it can be deadly. (My father was taught how to perform "partial birth abortions," not as a birth control method, but to save the life of the mother in those cases. The alternative is a major operation that cuts the pelvis open. Doing that without antibiotics seems spooky.) (c) I considered that the risk of infection might actually be gender-equal. Since I'd already estimated that the risk during childbirth would be high, I looked for higher risks among men that might balance that out. I thought of two - sports and work - which used to account for higher mortality in young men. Since the social trends seem to be toward gender-equal sports participation, and away from dangerous manual labor, neither seemed likely to balance out the risks to women mentioned above. Therefore felt that I was on solid ground mentioning gender.

2: It's effective legislative politics. I used to work as a Democratic organizer. To get a policy changed, you need groups that (a) have a reason to support the change, and (b) have the energy to influence floor votes or elections. If my guesstimates about risk are correct, this issue should matter to women. Feminists have a lot of energy right now, whereas a lot of other groups are burned out. Therefore, the group that I directed my post to meets both criteria. It's neither abnormal nor sinister to use that type of argument: One of the most effective arguments in the gay marriage debate has been that it's 'good for business.' Businesspeople have no direct, disproportionate involvement in the issue, but still play a key role. Would a thread drawing that connection have been locked on WP?

3: If the moderator was upset that I drew a contrast between lack of action on this issue (which seems likely to kill a lot of women), and the vigorous action on other issues, remember that men's activists on WP have been accused of blaming women while not doing enough to help their own:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postxf256422 ... ml#6014434

I didn't accuse that poster of "nonsense." I replied respectfully, giving him counter-examples:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp6017868.html#6017824

Why treat my post any worse?

I did several web searches to make sure that the issue in my now-locked thread wasn't already covered elsewhere. I found one article that came close, but it dealt only with UTIs (which men also get). Other than that, I found articles on generic women's sites that covered antibiotic resistant bacteria, but all of them were taken from AP and other wire services. They were very general, and none asked which groups would be most impacted.

If you had asked me to guess which of my posts would be moderated, this would not have been in the top ten.

OK. I'll unlock your thread; you appear to believe it is valid and I won't argue with that. My first impression must have been wrong. We've had lots of threads in the past along the lines of "What do feminists think of XYX" where XYZ is everything from the sublime to the ridiculous and are essentially threads intended to attack feminism and mock women in general which is against the site rules.