The number of examples I have seen of people being told to shut up about their lived experiences with sexual abuse in the past 24 hours on this platform is deeply disturbing.
I am calling on y’all to take a deep breath and listen to women for once. There is a time and place for tone policing and it’s never the very minute a woman speaks up.
Basically an overgeneralized meme representing the very true and valid fear women have towards strange men, where if they were stuck in a forest and had to choose to be stuck there with a strange man or a strange bear, many women would choose to be stuck with a bear, started cropping up on lemmy. Unfortunately this meme ALSO hit on the lived experience that a lot of men have had where they’ve grown up their entire lives feeling like they’ve been villainized and made to be the source of all societies ills, and so they voiced, with varying levels (and lack of) nuance why this meme upset them as it felt like a further villainization. This caused more friction than nuanced discussion, and more memes that more directly antagonized those who didnt appreciate the meme started cropping up, and now we are here
TBH this really wasn’t the kind of discourse I was expecting in 196 of all places, especially since there are Tumblr posts on this sub preemptively calling out this kinda stuff for being terf talking points