(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)
We all know how awful Reddit was when a user mentioned their gender. Immediate harassment, DMs, etc. It’s probably improved over the years? But still awful.
Until recently, Lemmy was the most progressive and supportive of basic human dignity of communities I had ever followed. I have always known this was a majority male platform, but I have been relatively pleased to see that positive expressions of masculinity have won out.
All of that changed with the recent “bear vs man” debacle. I saw women get shouted down just for expressing their stories of being sexually abused, repeatedly harassed, dogpiled, and brigaded with downvotes. Some of them held their ground, for which I am proud of them, but others I saw driven to delete their entire accounts, presumably not to return.
And I get it. The bear thing is controversial; we can all agree on this. But that should never have resulted in this level of toxicity!
I am hoping by making this post I can kind of bring awareness to this weakness, so that we can learn and grow as a community. We need to hold one another accountable for this, or the gender gap on this site is just going to get worse.
This is basically my entire point. Don’t make posts like “I’d rather the bear than the women because a bear will just maul me but the woman will force me to have sex with her,” which are designed to evoke a negative reaction. Instead, a real conversation where it’s victim v offender instead of man v woman is likely more productive. Now that it has become an inflammatory gendered thing all we’re doing is talking about that instead of the “original intent” (frankly I think it was intended as it came, but “benefit of the doubt” I guess.)
Yeah. Definitely fair on the probably not pure intentions part as well, but I’m frequently too quick to give the benefit of the doubt, even after all this time.
I’m sorry if this conversation is rough for you.
Thanks, but I’m over what happened now, it was years ago, but it just bugs me to deal with all the bullshit surrounding it, like this issue with the bear thing.
I just think we should all come together on this issue for the betterment of everyone instead of bicker about “men this, women that, and nonbinary don’t exist in this conversation.”
so much this. The entire point of this statement was LITERALLY to talk about this problem, and here we are with people saying “yeah actually, you’re why i choose the bear”
This is genuinely turning into LAMF material as we speak.