Oh boy. I don't have time to break down some of the comments from men here line by line and explain things, this is gonna be long anyhow. Gird your scrollbars.

I'm a sort of gender-complicated lesbian. I'm afab (assigned female at birth, as in, born with a vagina). I know lots of women, as well as lots of nonbinary people and trans men (FTM) who are into guro, as well as related interests like monsterfucking and piss and scat. There are bigger numbers who are into tamer kinks, but that's all true of men too. /d/ over at 4chan moves a lot faster than the boards here. You have lots of basic people into vanilla stuff (plenty of guys just like Playboy and normal porn), plenty of people into BDSM and kink, and the more you get into extreme and niche the smaller the group, but there are still plenty to be found. The same on both sides of the aisle. I have found that trans men seem to stick closer to female spaces, though afab people of all stripes do lurk and cross over, probably more than cis men do. (We're all aware of your guro, whereas some of you don't even seem to know ours exists?) Many of them will say that they feel the cis spaces are boring or hostile to them. I don't see many trans women (MTF) in the female-dominated spaces, so I can't ask them what they don't like about them. If any want to chime in, I'd be curious to hear their perspectives. But I think what has been asked about was the experiences of women in female-dominated extreme fantasy kink spaces are, so here we go.

Why do women seem rare in these spaces–i.e., what's making the women either leave or not participate here? (Obviously, some women are here and participate here, I just mean in equal numbers.) Well, it's a bunch of things. Many of the comments in this very thread being really sexist is a good example. "Women just like attention," "women are simpler creatures," etc. How about admit that you don't know anything about women, my guy? Because you're showing it.

There are other things that tend to be considered "over the line" in female-dominated spaces. Female-dominated extreme kink spaces believe that anything is morally fine in fantasy, but have a very firm line between fantasy and real life, and a strong emphasis on consent in real life. Like the comments here that women like to be raped–that would get you banned with a quickness in any female-dominated space. Because it makes us very, very angry. Because it shows such a profound disrespect for and misunderstanding of our experiences. That kind of thing is allowed in a context where it's understood to be part of the kink to say that, where it's understood that you're playing a role, but not as a statement about how things really are. Not in this particular thread, but I've seen a lot of comments on gurochan where people say things like, "I want to do this in real life." "I would do it if it wasn't illegal." "I'm afraid I might do it anyway." Or even, "I want someone to do this to me in real life." When the thing in question is something like murder or cannibalism, or you have people saying they want to rape and mutilate kids for real or whatever. That's all a huge no-no in female-dominated spaces. We're here to fap, not do crimes. I find it very distasteful when I see it. Even if it was true, you should know better than to say it. And it disrupts the community. How are we supposed to fap in peace when there's some nutjob saying they're like an inch from going out murdering people?

And by drawing the line firmly at fantasy vs. reality, we don't feel like we're bad people. We don't think we're real deranged sickos or whatever, because we can enjoy cartoon gore and respect other humans in the real world. We can roleplay some of our more achievable kinks consensually between adults. A few newbies come from backgrounds that gave them shame and guilt, but the community overall is a pretty shame-free space. We don't like shame, and we keep it out by keeping real life out of it. We don't care about ethics in fictional character torture. (There are female-dominated spaces that do, in fact, care about that, but they're very kink-unfriendly.)

Another big cultural taboo is that we feel strongly about credit and attribution. Sites like Pinterest and WeHeartIt that are almost all reposting are popular, but also seen as trash. Ideally, we prefer to give creators a platform to present their own work, and failing that, prefer attribution and permission. This is seen as maintaining respect within the community. The imageboard type of just posting everything without credit to the creators is often hated by female creators, and fans of female-generated content orbit around female creators. AO3's culture shows that well, with posting another person's work being explicitly forbidden even with credit. The taboo is strong enough that even when a creator deletes their work (so linking to the source is no longer possible) it's usually only redistributed in private. You have to ask if anyone has it and they email it to you. Attribution is always kept even then.

About the genders women are attracted to, and the genders they like to see portrayed in the art: statistically, most women like men (even if they also like women) but women who like women seem to be better-represented in kink spaces than in the general population. It may be that coming to terms with being gay or bi means exploring your sexuality more deeply and honestly, I don't know. I think lots of them show up straight(ish) and end up just liking each other a lot, haha. Female-dominated kink spaces are full of women hooking up with each other, basically. Both for real-life sex and just sexy text-based communication at each other in private. Not every woman is into that scene, plenty of straight women have their own circles where they just drool over men and don't homo at each other, but the segregation between gay and straight isn't as firm as it is in male-dominated spaces. For what it's worth, men who can play by the rules and not come off as creeps tend to have more women interested in them than they know what to do with. They're like unicorns there. But most men are pushed out immediately for being judgmental, sexist, or otherwise behaving inappropriately. This is intentional, because such men are seen as ruining the space by making it hostile to women, who then have to go make another space for themselves. This is why these communities tend to be more hidden. It's also why there's so much M/m, as I'll get to in a moment.

In this thread I've seen the assumption that women prefer male victims because they're attracted to men, and that women prefer female victims because they want to imagine themselves as them. While both such motives certainly exist–in different women and yes, even in the SAME woman–what makes you think that women would not imagine themselves as the male victim, or that they wouldn't imagine themselves as the male perpetrator in M/f? While there are some women who exclusively prefer to insert themselves into scenarios with a female stand-in character (look up "self-insert fanfic," "character/reader," and "Mary Sue" for more on that) overall, women are much more flexible in how they project onto fiction. And, how do I explain this…even though they may project onto a character (as in, they imagine they are feeling that character's sensations) they don't imagine that character is THEM. They don't imagine their real-life identity is in that scenario, experiencing those sensations. Their real self isn't part of the fantasy. It's a fantasy about being someone else entirely. So, women have no problem imagining themselves as a gay male sadist fucking some boy's intestines. Even someone who's a lesbian in real life can do that, because that kind of fantasy isn't about you or what you actually would like to do with your flesh-body, it's about losing yourself in a character who has entirely different preferences. While many women do have a preferred POV (victim or perpetrator) many also switch freely between them, depending on mood or even within the same fantasy, to experience it from both sides. While some women do have a gender preference in their fiction, the reasons for their preference aren't necessarily related to their preference in real-life partners. Hetero combinations have additional gender dynamics as part of the "flavor." A woman's preference for F/m or M/f might have less to do with which she "identifies" with, and more to do with whether she kinks on the power dynamic of extreme patriarchy or on the reversal of that. She might also like F/m out of attraction to burly amazons as partners, despite the fact that she's nothing like their male victims IRL. M/m is a very common preference, and tends to attract women who aren't picky about genders either way because there's already such a community for it, so it snowballs a bit just by being popular. A strong reason for its popularity is quite simply that straight men tend to leave it alone, and the content itself quickly and easily repels men who can't behave themselves. The faster we can get rid of the straight men, the sooner we can get to fapping, basically. M/m isn't popular because we love men, but because it makes most men leave us alone. Lesbians and bi women also tend to enjoy that the content is gay, because we find that relatable even if the characters are male. Another reason it's popular is actually because it's less identifiable to women. Women may dislike feeling pressured or expected to identify with the female character in het, and if the identification is too close to home, it may ruin it. A fantasy where she's a man has more distance between it and reality, and she's therefore freer to imagine things reality would spoil. Other women feel completely the opposite, and don't enjoy M/m because they can't relate to it. There's no female hivemind, but M/m remains popular, and has enough lesbians in the community that there's something other than attraction to men going on.

Other types of content definitely exist too. I have seen M/f, F/m, and F/f out there by and for women, as well as gender-ambiguous characters and monsters whose gender is incomprehensible or irrelevant. In some circles, M/f is the most popular gender combination, however, in more mainstream places like say, romance novels, while extreme kinks tend to still be liked, it's a lot more stigmatized, censored, and forbidden. Women get concern-trolled and attacked from all sides about this: that they're telling men it's okay to hurt us, that they're training women to be abused, that they have internalized self-hate, etc. Other combinations have their own specific issues. F/f has some people who basically think it's bad press for lesbians, who compare it to homophobic content that says lesbians are predatory and crazy. But probably the biggest limiting factor on these spaces is the feeling that men would take them over and push us out.

Related to this, there's some research that even in kids, boys tend to identify with male characters in media, while girls can identify with male or female characters with equal ease, which is why so much children's media has male protagonists, because there's more money in cross-appeal. That itself reinforces the trend, because there are fewer female characters (and variety in those characters, for all the diversity and complexity in girls out there) for girls to latch onto, so they pretty much have to learn to make do with male characters whether they want to or not. How much of this is socialization, who knows, probably a lot. Boys who start to identify with female characters seem to be punished for it and learn not to do that again. Which I think is quite unfortunate.

Just as women don't necessarily want to project onto characters of their gender or anatomy, they also don't necessarily want to project onto their top/bottom preferences. No one wants to get their eyes gouged out and get skullfucked in real life, or almost no one, but it could be a hot fantasy. Imagining oneself as the perpetrator also doesn't mean you'd find it at all appealing to do that to someone for real. And these things don't mean you like to top or bottom in bed, either, since topping or bottoming in bed is such a different experience in every way from a fantasy about fucking eye sockets. A lot of people believe women prefer to project onto the victim. I won't deny that's popular, though not ubiquitous. But I think a lot of content on gurochan actually favors projecting onto the victim rather than the perpetrator, for this reason: the perpetrator is often off-frame. Even if there's a POV dick, the victim has the focus. Women are more likely to project onto whatever has focus, rather than imagine themselves as the partner of the focused-on character. A picture of a limbless woman and nothing else leaves nothing else to identify with in the picture. Sure, she could imagine having the limbless woman as a victim and pet, but to do that she has to invent a whole new character (possibly resembling herself) to add to it. To be encouraged to project onto the perpetrator, most of us would want to see the perpetrator, especially to see their face, to get some idea of the mood and motives of the perpetrator. Are they unhinged, leering, possessive, or coldly clinical? I don't want to have to make up the character I'm "experiencing" myself, I could do that in my head without any help. I want the work to give me a character to be, not just a character to fuck. You will see this pattern in say, M/m works on AO3. Fic that focuses on the bottom is for people who want to imagine themselves as the bottom. Fic that focuses on the top is for people who want to imagine themselves as the top. It's not the other way around. We're not looking for dates.

Is female-generated content more "abstract," more "vague," more "focused on emotions"? Eh. Yes and no. If you mean that women don't like graphic depictions, nah. Women like graphic depictions just fine. But places where women can put these things out there tend to face a lot of censorship. Notice all the censored cocks in yaoi. The self-published erotica industry faces intense content scrutiny, and published erotica is even worse. Women may censor and be vague because it's the only way we're allowed to produce content at all. Women will also usually prefer censored female-generated content to uncensored male-generated content, in spite of the censorship rather than because of it.

Female-generated content does tend to have more of a narrative. This is why many women will call male-generated content "boring." The sight of a character with their guts out is a good start, but it isn't enough. We want to know how that happened, like what's the story here? Who did it, why, how did this character end up here? And we'd rather that story was interesting and evocative! People talk about women's preference for knowing how the characters involved feel in a disparaging way, like oh women, only caring about ~feelings~. To us, the fact that men wouldn't care at all looks stunted. What is the point of drawing a character being flayed alive, if their face conveys no sense of pain or fear? Isn't the point of that to either imagine being in pain, or causing pain? What is there for the masochist or sadist if there's only mechanical action, but no pain? To be honest, the same problem exists even in male-generated vanilla porn. We see lots of dicks going into holes, and no one seems to enjoy it, hate it, or have any kind of feeling at all about it. That's weird and unnatural. Why would we want to imagine having really boring sex? We could get a real man for that, lol.

Even blankness could be hot if it was intentional. Why is the character so blank? Mental break? Disassociation? Mind wipe? It's not enough that there's a red-hot poker in her pussy. I want to know why she doesn't care that there's a red-hot poker in her pussy. That's what would make it interesting. Most of the time it doesn't feel intentional. It doesn't feel like a statement, but like it just wasn't considered important. There's female-generated content like that too, but the more poorly-defined the character, the lower quality the content is considered to be. It's considered less skilled, maybe good enough when you're horny, but nothing you revisit.

There's a stereotype that women prefer text to visuals, while men prefer visuals to text. I don't think this is exactly true, but the truth is similar. Some women do prefer text, but many women prefer images. For extreme kinks, we don't want to get anywhere near "real" content, but Hollywood special effects are fine, and drawings are always fine. On all levels of kink, we get less content catered to us–we don't get budgets, we're niche at best. It's cheaper to produce a comic than to produce a movie. It's cheaper to produce text than to produce a comic. So we don't have the more mainstream stuff. Even hosting images, and paying lawyers to defend the legality of your images, costs money. AO3 was originally intended to host art as well as fiction, but they couldn't afford it. So female kink exists on a shoestring budget. We have to make do a lot. And men certainly like text as well. Sometimes there isn't actually that much of a difference between fiction by men and by women. Both have examples of high and low quality. But one trend I find to be more common with male-generated content in both fic and art is that there's either no anticipation or "foreplay" and it just throws you straight into the action without warming you up any, or it's ALL anticipation/"foreplay" and stops right when the fun was about to start!

God like so examples of this "all foreplay, no action" trend: male-generated content has a disturbing lack of actually fucking the victim. I see a lot of amputees, potgirls, disembodied heads, corpses, whatever. But at what point was someone actually going to fuck them? All these poor girls being made into living fleshlights and never getting used. While female-generated content does also have a fair bit of "the kink replaces sex rather than including sex," especially with the more "actiony" kinks like execution or cannibalism, there's a whole lot of making a character into a helpless fucktoy that never actually gets fucked in male-generated content. How many times have I seen or read about men being transformed into bimbos or absorbed into a pussy or turned into blow-up dolls, and then it just ends there and no one fucks them! Now THAT is what I call vague and not graphic. Give me something, a POV cock, I don't care, not enough fucking in this porn. And please, can the victim react (or meaningfully fail to react) to being raped?

Abrupt endings seem very common in male-generated kink. Maybe it's the whole, you're only having one orgasm while we're in for the long haul, I don't know. Abrupt endings are usually considered unfinished in female-generated content. We abandon works in the middle, sure, but it's not deliberate. Like, a whole short story might be about a character being transformed into something, but then nothing about what life is like for that character in their new form. I've even seen so many male-generated things with an ominous fade-to-black implying they're going to get fucked forever, but not even one sex scene. Obviously doesn't apply to kink that results in death of the victim, that is an ending, but only because there's no "after" to tell.

Another part of it having a longer narrative is that not all dynamics would necessarily be Perpetrator/victim. Other possible combinations include victim/victim (under the control of the perpetrator, or after the fact in some way) and the vastly underrated scenario where the victim is somehow rescued or ends up in friendly hands, but is still irreversibly damaged, grotesquely physically altered, and possibly sex-addicted. The friendly third person would likely be horrified, freaked out, shocked, grieving, or something like that, so in a way they're kind of a secondary victim of the perpetrator, but they're also unwillingly dragged into a perpetrator-like role in being forced to have power over the victim, since the victim can no longer hold power. Varying degrees of this dynamic are very popular, often called hurt/comfort. Darker variants might have a perpetrator who flips into a false "comforting" role and acts friendly once the damage is done and the victim has no choice but to play along in the hopes of better treatment, or may even be broken enough to make themselves believe it. And a narrative can include several of these, e.g.: Perpetrator/victim, Rescuer/victim, Perpetrator/rescuer (second victim), victim/victim (former rescuer).

We also tend to categorize kinks more by tropes, dynamics, or events than by physical objects, though there are some physical-object-based kinks. For example, mainstream male porn focuses mainly on the performers' physical characteristics: Asian, teen, MILF, BBW, though there are some trope or narrative-based ones, like cuckolding. Women care more if this is a loving first time or incestuous infidelity than if the incestuous unfaithful people are Asian teens. The percentage of how much we care about narrative vs. object seems to be reversed. So the male obsession with objects feels very basic and simple. Women often complain that the frame stories in mainstream porn aren't hot, even when the sex manages to be, which is very hit or miss. Even a quick and dirty sex scene could still have a narrative, like naive prison guard/conflicted prisoner, bam, that's more of a story than just genitals mashing on each other with the brief implication that one of them is Asian.

Women also just, honestly, tend to be thrown by certain anatomy and tropes in male-generated content. A lot of the female bodies throw us off by looking like the man has never seen a real woman or touched a real boob. We usually don't like ridiculous balloon tits, unless it's actually a breast expansion kink instead of just treated as normal. So many women I know are like, "what is with men and the giant tits." Lesbians don't find the giant tits any more appealing. That doesn't even hit the part of my brain that recognizes it as a woman's body, all I see is men being weird again. Other bad anatomy includes: not knowing how to draw a pussy at all, really lazy half-assed pussies (especially noticeable when the cocks in the same art are lovingly detailed), not understanding that the vagina is in the back of the vulva and not dead center (yes, really!) and pubic bones just basically not existing or obeying the laws of physics. Also the titty bouncing in animation always just looks wrong, the boobs almost never lie realistically on the chest, etc. It just makes the art look lower quality.

Hilariously though, women are absolutely just as guilty of this, but with male bodies. Yaoi/BL is rife with bad male anatomy. It just doesn't bother us as much, though we do still joke about it and consider good anatomy to be higher quality.

While I think I met one woman who did like ahegao, most women I know hate ahegao. We just think it looks stupid. No one really makes that face when sexually overstimulated or whatever. Like, what is that even supposed to be? Why are the only two facial expressions "blank doll" and "ahegao"? It's bad art, it doesn't evoke what it's trying to evoke at all. Ways to give women a ruined orgasm: put ahegao in it just when they're about to come.

And while tastes vary wildly on mindbreak and brainwashing, a very common complaint I hear is that men do that in a boring way. It's stupid that all it usually takes is getting pounded with a big dick. We just kind of go, "they sure think a lot of themselves." You never see a man mindbreak into a slutty simpleton because a woman with a meaty pussy rode him for five minutes. (Though, actually…that would be kind of hot….) Usually, we like the mindbreak to be harder to accomplish, happen more gradually, and often for the character to try to fight it more. Many women say it's boring when the character isn't even a little bit still in there fighting it. Total brainwashing is liked by some, but the mood is still different, closer to a horror movie where the victim thinks they're in a romcom. Big dick goes in for five minutes, ahegao and slut4eva is so near and yet so far. Many women's reaction to male-generated content is, "I keep coming back because it's almost my kink, but why are they so bad at this?"

Where do such women congregate? Usually in more niche parts of spaces that already have a lot of women in them, but are general-interest spaces. Women tend to prefer general platforms that allow the most innocent content but also the most depraved, which is why AO3 (which was created by female-dominated fandom) is like that. However, we often don't make the rules of the platforms, because $$$$. Pinterest and Instagram would be hotbeds of graphic female-generated guro, if the TOS allowed it. Livejournal had a fair bit of that in its heyday, though with so much deleted or friendslocked/members-locked and it being a bit of a ghost town, you won't find much of it there today. Other former venues include Y!Gallery, which shut down, and tumblr, which was a very popular space for female kink until adult content was banned last December. To be honest, a lot of us are still reeling from the loss of tumblr. It's starting to feel impossible to enjoy ourselves out in the open, so a lot of it's going underground. Invite-only Discord servers, closed Facebook groups, personal conversations in real life and in instant messaging. Some of it may have went to Twitter, some to Pixiv. I don't speak Japanese, so I can't say much on the Japanese culture on Pixiv. Non-Japanese-speaking users on Pixiv are already something of a minority fringe. We've had spaces as long as there was an internet. There was female-dominated kink going on on Geocities, in mailing lists, on Usenet. There are quite a few women into furry stuff, though I get the feeling furry stuff is still seen as male-dominated. Even within furry spaces, I think some gender segregation is going on, but not really being furry I don't know where the furry women hang out, just that I've met some kinky women who were also furries.

We don't expect to be welcomed or catered to in male-dominated spaces, though, any more than we expect to welcome or cater to poorly-behaved men in our spaces. (Men who behave themselves are always welcome, but most men have no interest in that, and get shown the door.) I think even men get the concept of "lurk moar," i.e., learn the social rules before you participate, or don't participate if the social rules aren't for you. While I know I was a bit harsh on male-gaze kink, part of it's like, turnabout is fair play, guys say terrible things about women's tastes all the time (plenty in this thread, even, do you even realize how offensive some of you sound? why do women not talk to you?? It's a mystery!) so that set the tone for me being a bit offensive back. But really, we assume that men make their stuff that way because that's what they enjoy, just like we make our stuff in the way we enjoy more. Even if we read Nifty, we don't tell the gay men there to make it more like AO3, as we expect the gay men to not tell us to make AO3 more like Nifty–and we swiftly tear apart those who try, because men are entitled like that. Some women have no interest in places like gurochan at all, even if they enjoy guro. A great many I've talked to in other spaces have said they lurk, but would never comment. My girlfriend told me not to write this comment, saying it was a waste of time, "Men will never get it." We tend to think men don't want things explained to them, as they only get angry or offended when we explain ourselves, and seem to prefer behaving badly with the excuse of being ignorant. It's really like, stopwatch till someone says you're just a dumb domestic gossipping stereotype with no real sexual preferences other than being treated as an object, and not only like rape, but don't even know the difference between consent and rape because you're such a shallow little cunt. So charming. It seems impossible that a man could form opinions that bad through just ignorance, so he must already know that's wrong and be doing it just to be hateful. Why even try to debate that, right? The problem with men is not just that the unwanted sexual attention we often get from them, though that's certainly a problem. It's the way even if they're gay and not interested in us, they didn't consider that we don't exist for their benefit and acted to please ourselves, rather than to be more convenient to a man, and therefore, women creating M/m content are not doing it to please gay men, and don't care at all if gay men find it pleasing or not. A man being gay also doesn't make it less offensive if he thinks you have no sexual preferences and find being raped acceptable, just because he wasn't planning on doing the raping himself. But let a woman complain about men being intrusive and entitled and acting maliciously towards us, and she'll be accused of being a crazy man-hating feminist. But we say, fine–they're not allowed to tell us how to be, and we won't go tell them how to be, let them be like that and think there are no women on the internet, or they're all "catfishers."

As for my own interaction: I've lurked here for many years. I often link threads or content I like to other women, who also enjoy it. I very rarely comment, and try not to be disruptive to the community, more just taking it as what it is and scrolling quietly past content that doesn't appeal to me. I did post a little of my own content several years ago, but only very rarely post content by other people, mostly because I'm lazy, and because there seems very little in it for me–it's more exciting to see if anyone liked my own work than just something I reposted. I might post more art, especially with tumblr shitting the bed lately. I don't plan to post opinions with that, and probably won't be telegraphing my gender any more than one could just guess from my style and content preferences. Overall I like a bit of everything in genders of victims and perpetrators. Style and quality matter more, though points for concept and creativity. I usually prefer to imagine the sensations of the victim, though I'm a sadist and top IRL. I find the victim's POV more interesting, because it gets you closer to the suffering than imagining oneself as the perpetrator would, but the response to it is still rooted in sadism. In fiction and fantasy, I am in a way always the perpetrator, as I choose to imagine and linger on the fantasy, and the imaginary character–and how much I imagine they suffer–is under my complete control. I mostly like /g/ and /f/ stuff. I find more things to my tastes on /f/, so I tend to go there first, but it's less that I dislike gore, and more that gore art is just often drawn in a way that's less appealing to me. When it's drawn to my tastes I love it. Actually, several women have told me they don't like gore, but when I show them gore I like they say they do like that, they just didn't like other gore they'd seen before.

A reason I hesitate to post my own art and fiction is that I think people may want or expect content more catered to male tastes. Not even the genders of the characters or whatever, I love drawing female victims, that's fine, just those little stylistic cultural cues. Just like a lot of the content here misses the mark for me, my content would miss the mark for a lot of people here. Lately I just don't know where else to put it, the art, anyway.

What I like about gurochan is that it's easy to find. It's right out in the open, no membership required, no secret handshakes, no having to know the right people, no having to talk to anyone. It has a wide variety of content, so there's usually something for everyone. It's accepting of a broad variety of kinks, people usually aren't assholes about something not being to their liking, especially on the threads themselves. That's appreciated. Discussion on the imageboards is kept to a minimum, which is good. Just content where you want content. I like that the content restrictions are sensible: no RL gore, no handwringing about imaginary character welfare. I like discovering new kinks here. Basically, gurochan is reliable and delivers what it promises: imageboards full of guro aggregated from around the net. It hasn't really changed much in years, despite changing hands a few times. I admire the dedication that goes into keeping this place around, and I'd be sad if it was gone for good. Because most female-dominated spaces start general-interest and develop niche communities, those niche communities can at times have a tenuous relationship with the larger community. Gurochan basically just being for guro is more welcoming in that way. There's no question as to whether guro belongs here or not. No rich investors worry about it being unpalatable to the mainstream and push it off. But I basically get all the benefits by lurking, and very little added benefit by participating, which is why I lurk.