(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.

  • @michaelmrose
    2•8 months ago

    I’m not engaging further with what I think is a bad analogy.

    I guess all these “not me though” or “but a bear will kill you” types don’t get that they are outing themselves as being of questionable trustworthiness.

    Maybe outing themselves as pedants who don’t like shitty analogies. How do you get from disagreeing with labeling all men predators to … must be a predator. That just seems like you glued two concepts together and expected it to make a coherent thought. If A in some universe and B in some universe then if A thus B.

    I don’t believe such a high amount of men who aren’t predators are bothered by it

    I’m not a predator. I’m bothered by it

    They might not be sexual predators

    So because I disagree I might be a rapist. Super real there.

    but I have no doubt they would gladly vote away women’s rights because its their party or its the christian way or some other shit like that.

    I’m an Atheist who votes Democrat and supports women’s rights

    Truly innocent men would just leave women scared of them alone

    This is a discussion forum. The poster started a thread to discuss the topic. I’m discussing the topic. Nobody is attacking anyone with their words.

    There is no reason to convince them

    This is a many to many discussion forum people aren’t just engaging with the poster they are engaging with other readers interested in the same topic. Notice how our discussion is a sub-thread to each other and merely about the topic broached by the original poster.

    doing so only makes them more afraid.

    You are infantalizing the poster by imagining that she creates a topic but is rendered afraid by the mere fact that some people don’t agree with her. I don’t think that is even slightly reasonable.

    This post could be a subject of an entire paper on how to write dishonestly and for emotional impact instead of honest argument. Please stop doing this.