Testing Boundaries Part 1: A post on Streaming

This is normally where a Witcher Wednesday post goes, but this week I am going to focus on streaming rather than the game I was streaming. Furthermore, this post is going to be short because I have final grades to enter. Also, I suspect I will gather more data on boundary testing as I slowly grow my community and therefore will have more to say on it later. In other words, this will probably become another series of posts. 

What do I mean by boundary testing? I mean knowing the limits of what people can say about me, my stream, or what kind of humor is acceptable in this space. That this occurred was of no surprise to me at all. I expected this to happen eventually, and as it happened, the first 2 times were in the same week. This was also, maybe a little bit my fault since I have not yet posted chat rules on my channel - and these are common enough in Twitch at this point as to be expected. Also unsurprising was that both of these cases involved men.

For the record, I am not bashing men. So if you clicked to continue reading thinking that I would give you anger fodder you will be disappointed. I said it was unsurprising that both of these cases involved men for the following reasons:

1. In 2017 (the last year such info was publically published) Twitch reported that 81.5% of its users were male. Since then other outlets have reported this number to be as low 65% in 2019, but that still puts the platform at over half male. 
2. I am a woman in this predominately masculine space. In my experiences in other male spaces, this alone invites behavioral questioning from the men present.
3. I take on certain "masculine" behaviors while also presenting as very "feminine." This is largely due to my rejection of "traditional" gender roles, but again, I know from past experiences that this can leave people slightly uncertain of how to react to me. 
4. Societal norms are ever-evolving and we live in a time when gender-based relations and rules about sexuality are being publically rewritten. 

OK, so what happened? Someone made a sex joke (within the context of the game, not aimed at a person) someone made a comment that sounded sexual in retrospect (one of those instances in which the comment was not meant to be sexual, but was taken that way by others) and both people checked in with me shortly after to see if I was offended - if they had crossed a boundary with me. Neither of them I had, but I appreciated that they checked.   

Given all this, I started thinking more about how I want to phrase my chat rules. I want to say something like what I have told people when they swear and then apologize - I don't mind if you fucking swear, so long as you don't swear at anyone. My boundary, basically, is ad hominem attacks. As long as something isn't against an individual or group of people I am probably ok with it. I am not sure if being that broad will give me the results I want, but this whole great experiment is just that - an experiment.