(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.
I really appreciate that you made this post. Every top-level comment here is complaining about it being “rage bait” and that the question would “never foster productive discussion.” Why? Why aren’t men capable of seeing the scenario, recognizing why it’s necessary to say something like that, and getting over themselves just a little bit to get the point? The original question wasn’t even a “not all men” thing, there’s no actual reason to get mad about it enough to dismiss the dicussion. We have to be able to have a conversation where the other side is allowed to say something a tiny bit outside of our standards for what we want them to say, or we’ll never have a conversation at all.
The irony is, I am seeing a lot of productive discussion? Like high key? Alongside the standard rage, trolling and harassment of course (which should be banned).
I genuinely think that, if women actually stick around, this event could be a net positive for the Lemmyverse. What’s needed is just like several dozen deep breaths, some listening, and of course more effective moderation of the bad actors.
For sure. I hope lemmy’s mod tools have improved, I heard they were basically nonexistent before.
here’s something i’ve formed up recently after this man/bear thing happened, it’s a working theory, and i’m curious to see what people think. If no likey, please yell at me in reply.
because it’s basically impossible? It’s like asking someone born without vision to see. It’s a significant cultural divide (i say cultural as a stop gap here) between two massive parties who have different understandings and views of the world. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when one party expresses a doctored viewpoint of theirs to the other side, for the other side to be really fucking confused.
I take it you probably don’t know much about nuclear power? If so, it’d be like me coming out of the blue when you mention that fukushima was bad, instead of me talking about why fukushima happened, why it was bad, what could’ve been prevented, and how it shouldn’t have happened. I started talking about reactor design, and going through the different generations of designs, talked about the EPR, the EBWR, the ABWR, the PWR, the MSR, the ESR, the PBR, the SSR, etc… You quite literally, do not need that level of background to be able to comprehend fukushima specifically.
I think it’s a similar thing, where people are trying to make people comprehend something they can’t experience, don’t really care about on a personal level. They might know someone who has, which makes them sympathetic/empathetic to it, but that’s it. We all understand, on some level, that this is an issue, i don’t know how much the specific experience here matters, when the broad problem is very much identifiable, and objectively bad. And that everybody probably already agrees with it. It seems rather redundant to me.
It’s like trying to explain “war bad” by showing pictures of war casualties to people, all you’re doing is traumatizing them in that case.