(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.

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    5 months ago

    there’s an unpopular community here? Funny that i haven’t seen it until now.

    Anyway, on the bear man thingy. I thought that was rather interesting, as a “man” myself i saw a rather similar situation but from the opposite perspective (i hadn’t seen or heard of this before, so i was really fucking confused initially)

    incoming personal opinion btw, if you’re scared of those, you should look away :)

    I think it’s less “bad for women” more “The internet causing people to yell at each other over stupid shit for no particular reason” than anything. Naturally it was an incredibly polarized topic. The wording was specifically designed to generate outrage and attention around it (i feel like i don’t really have to explain why) and a lot of people were taking very tribal stances on either side, with the information they had, without properly considering all factors (because thought experiments turn out to be more than surface level, weirdly enough.)

    idk, i just didn’t really experience anything that wasn’t “fuck u/spez, he probably rapes little girls” levels of shenanigans. Then again, i’m internet hardened so you wouldn’t be able to shake me with anything really.