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.
Okay very basically this whole thing started with a hypothetical posed to a bunch of women about which they would rather run into while alone in the woods; A random man, or a bear. A lot of women chose the bear. Reasons varied from “The worst the bear will do is kill me,” to “At least I know the bear wants to kill me,” with a general theme seeming to be that whatever tangible threat the bear posed was preferable to the uncertainty of wondering whether or not a random man would assault them.
The poster’s stated goal with the hypothetical was to get men to think about why the women were choosing the bear. Instead a lot of guys took it as a personal attack, like they were being punished for the actions of other men. Many started attacking the question, insisting that bears are way more dangerous than virtually any man. This led to a lot of dismissive responses of the criticism like “This is why women choose the bear,” or talking about women’s safety being more important than men’s feelings.
I’m simplifying a lot but that’s the basic gist of it.
Thank you for the detailed summary.
To add the final unfortunate details, there was a recent discussion on Lemmy where women were sharing their reasons for choosing bear, which involved sharing personal stories of SA. Unfortunately, many men responded in a toxic manner, causing some women to delete their posts or accounts. Very disturbing and this is what inspired me to make this post, as it is quite reminiscent of the Catholic church sweeping SA under the rug.