(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.

  • @Cosmicomical
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    177 months ago

    I’ve been away for a few weeks and I’ve missed this whole thing I think, does anybody have a link?

      • @Cosmicomical
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        07 months ago

        Oh wow. Thank you for the link, my faith in humanity would be going further down if it was not already at abdolute zero.

    • @TubularTittyFrog
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      7 months ago

      no link. just people flooding lemmy with man vs bear nonsense from tiktok.

      then whining about how it’s toxic and now lemmy is toxic, and making hateful comments about how if you don’t agree with them you’re clearly a rapist or incel.

      it’s classic leopards ate my face nonsense. most of the people complaining about the problem, are the problem themselves and fanning the flames of this gender war bullshit.

      • @[email protected]
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        17 months ago

        Lmfao sure thing dude, women are making shit up, and the women talking about men who have assaulted them are the real problem!

        Fucking idiot

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      There is basically no faster way to advertise

      1. That you get no pussy
      2. You’ve never been outside around a wild bear before
      3. You don’t know how statistics work

      Unsurprisingly this is a bigly amount of people on any online platform, it turns out.

      Just… exponentially more on Lemmy since a large portion of it is Linux related.

      • @Cosmicomical
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        37 months ago

        I hope you replied to the wrong comment… I literally just asked for a link because I genuinely don’t know what this is all about

      • @lemannM
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        27 months ago

        The last sentence makes the rest of the comment feel like an unfair generalization of Lemmy and Linux users, which in this context likely may make people even more heated, given the subject of the discussion.

        While there technically isn’t anything breaking the rules in your comment, please try and keep responses civil, since this was reported to us