Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
How many non-trivial independent sources are there for fleshlight? Mainstream publications? Has it been reviewed in Loaded? Or is it just advertising plus a load of "hur hur, look at that, that's so smutty, hur hur"?
The inflation of this to the level of some product of transcendent global importance is patently absurd.
Nobody is claiming it's of transcendent global importance, merely that it's important enough to merit a mention, either in an article by itself or in passing in a larger article about male-targetted sex toys (I favor the latter, unless more verifiable material turns up). It's been mentioned relatively recently (the past two years) in _Wired_, _The Village Voice_, and a few Seattle-area local papers, all of which claim that it's famous/infamous. I don't have good access to a good archive of media going back further than 2 years (my university's Lexis-Nexis subscription only covers that period), so I don't have data on whether, for example, it was discussed in media of the 1990s.
You also seem to be focusing on how interesting the object is, which neglects the fact that sociology is a legitimate and integral topic for encyclopedia articles. The object may well be boring, but if it's caused an interesting response in society, that's worth writing about. (See [[moral panic]] for some more straightforward examples of that sort of thing.)
Personally, I have no idea whether Fleshlight is notable or not without doing further research I probably don't care to perform. But that's what talk page debates, AfD, RfC and such are for. We have ways of reaching community consensus on such things.
Sure. Debate it. But let's wait until we have all the facts before starting, rather than second-guessing Danny and crying that the sky is falling because one wank-o-matic got deleted.
The disagreement is that Danny unilaterally deleted it, without first engaging in *any* discussion, and after it had actually come up before on AfD and kept. There are occasional articles that I think should be deleted but which most people disagree with me on, but I don't go around unilaterally deleting them, because that would be a misuse of my admin status.
-Mark