(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.
The bear thing; good god, yes... the number of people just not getting it was/is incredible. It's a good example of how arguing for the logical position completely misses out on any nuance over why someone might say they're choosing, for example, the bear.
I know some of it is folks having difficulty reading between the lines, spectrum stuff, male socialising, etc etc... but man. That was a tough one
There's a similar concept that has sprung up in discission around here about how basically all women have a sense of danger around men they don't know or the ones obviously being creepy.
Way too many people here think that without a form of physical assault involved, taking measures to distance yourself from someone you get a bad feeling about is sexism and as bad as racism because not all men are bad.
Like, if I'm walking down a sidewalk and the person walking towards me decides to cross the street because I'm a man, I get it. It's not hard to grasp that some people don't want to be close to someone who might objectify them.
But I've been in probably 5 separate arguments on lemmy about how women who do that are misandrist garbage because every man deserves a shot and you should always give men the benefit of the doubt.
There's definitely a higher concentration of man-centric conversation here.
I dunno man. That's a long paragraph and I give you the benefit of the doubt to say that I don't think it matters as much as my pointless opinion
We're all pointless opinions here on the world wide web, bucko.
That being said, I hate your pointless opinion with every fiber of my being and I'm fully prepared to sit at my computer and argue about it through the wee hours of the morning