(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.
The bear thing; good god, yes… the number of people just not getting it was/is incredible. It’s a good example of how arguing for the logical position completely misses out on any nuance over why someone might say they’re choosing, for example, the bear.
I know some of it is folks having difficulty reading between the lines, spectrum stuff, male socialising, etc etc… but man. That was a tough one
It’s because of the way it was presented, which is very much a “you are enlightened, or you are the monster”. This is not the reality of the situation of choosing the bear and is as disingenuous as the incel arguments.
amen. the whole thing is bad faith.
There’s a similar concept that has sprung up in discission around here about how basically all women have a sense of danger around men they don’t know or the ones obviously being creepy.
Way too many people here think that without a form of physical assault involved, taking measures to distance yourself from someone you get a bad feeling about is sexism and as bad as racism because not all men are bad.
Like, if I’m walking down a sidewalk and the person walking towards me decides to cross the street because I’m a man, I get it. It’s not hard to grasp that some people don’t want to be close to someone who might objectify them.
But I’ve been in probably 5 separate arguments on lemmy about how women who do that are misandrist garbage because every man deserves a shot and you should always give men the benefit of the doubt.
There’s definitely a higher concentration of man-centric conversation here.
I feel insulted because I’ve never hurt anyone in my life enough to even remotely justify this, and also because some men I would be cautious about usually don’t get the same treatment. At least it takes them more time and effort to get it, LOL.
So is this sarcasm or do you really not understand that it isn’t your right to decide what other people discern as safe vs unsafe?
Because if it’s not sarcasm, I’m really not in the mood to have a 6th argument with another person whose entire position boils down to “well it hurts my feelings because not all men are bad”
It’s fully my right to decide what I’m upset about though, and go fight someone else.
Now with ascribing positions to others you should be used to be called a clown.
EDIT: Also this your comment didn’t seem intelligent or subtle. You may have gotten such a wrong impression of yourself, thus I’m helping you.
This concept isn’t hard to understand and every time someone has a problem with it it’s always some variation of being personally offended because they think someone else’s safety is actually about them.
You’re not different. I didn’t ascribe your position, you literally said you’re insulted because you’ve never done anything to justify that behavior.
That’s a variation of making it about you because you don’t feel like you should be lumped in with other men, even though in the situations this happens in it’s because the other person doesn’t know you.
You’re the exact type of person I was talking about with the exact point the last 5 have all made. I thought it might be sarcasm because you can’t seriously be trying to assert the same thing they all did on a comment calling them all out for refusing to get it, but here we are.
Calling me a clown is a cheap cop out to deflect from the fact that your feelings are hurt. Go bait someone else.
I wasn’t this specific, so this statement is false. That someone lives in Japan doesn’t mean they live in Tokyo.
To not completely waste this, I was talking about people who know me and interpret autistic behavior as a sign of danger.
It’s not even about men. I never had that problem with women with the same traits.
A person saying “you’re the exact type of person” is a clown.
Specifically for clowns - having your feelings hurt doesn’t make you wrong.
You came into a conversation about unknown men being an implicit danger to women, a subject that’s a title post and 3 comments deep, to talk about how people treat you like that because of something completely different, not clarify that you’re talking about something completely different, and then you’re wondering why I’m thinking you’re talking about the subject of the post?
I’m willing to chalk this up to a misunderstanding, but your insistence that I’m a clown for defending a point that you made no indication wasn’t what you were even talking about until now has left me completely unwilling to talk to you further.
This is pointless. Goodnight.
I dunno man. That’s a long paragraph and I give you the benefit of the doubt to say that I don’t think it matters as much as my pointless opinion
We’re all pointless opinions here on the world wide web, bucko.
That being said, I hate your pointless opinion with every fiber of my being and I’m fully prepared to sit at my computer and argue about it through the wee hours of the morning
my working theory is that is that it was doomed from the start, I saw quite a number of people not immediately understanding it, probably due to lack of experience. And in response, people immediately re-iterating the statement made in the post above, i guess somehow hoping that it would make sense the second time it was said. Though people did explain why they were saying what they were saying. It didn’t explain why anybody was talking about bears in the woods, which is inevitably kind of irrelevant. The second post that resulted later down the line was better, and the recent meme has been quite a bit better, except for my criticism of vague statements. (please for the love of god, stop using vague statements, they help nobody. Just talk about what you’re talking about, some of us don’t fucking understand ok?)
I’m not really sure what people were thinking to be honest, oh and of course it devolved into “well, you’re part of the problem” I’m sure that didn’t help.
Maybe i’m autistic, but like, i don’t know why people kept screaming metaphor at people expecting it to suddenly make sense to them. That’s not how english class works, im pretty sure.