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.
I am absolutely with you in agreeing that the bear meme is inflammatory. But this post is about women who are telling their stories about being SA’d and men dogpiling telling them to shut up. A very different matter that I haven’t seen in any other community.
This post might not be about you, but it is about a real thing that happened/is happening. Take a beat to internalize that :)
SA is definitely real but saying that a bear is less dangerous than the average male will certainly not help convince people on the other side of the isle as it heavily demonizes men in order to create sympathy for women.
See this comment, if you would.
That’s what I mean.
The real reaction from this person is “hey wait, a bear is literally going to kill you and I am not. Demonizing all men into being worse than bears is not invoking sympathy”.
You are taking an expression of fear and hurt and taking it personally. A tip: It’s not personal. Don’t take it personally. Listen, and then move on.
It doesn’t personally hurt me I’m just explaining why a message like this will not resonate with men that did not already resonate with it.
When a generalization is made a person will self-insert if they fit the group. In this case a man that does not believe they are more harmful than a bear will find it unjust they are painted as worse than a bear.