(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 hate that i’m still commenting about this, because i know whats going to happen, but maybe im just too fucking autistic for this shit.
“bears generally mind their own business” and humans generally don’t rape other humans. It bothers me that people talk about the bears statistically, as if that somehow overrides the statistics present with humans. But then again, that’s not the point. The point is something entirely different, and the problem is people don’t really understand how to express it properly.
it just feels wrong to pull out stats for bears, and then ignore the existing stats for humans. I mean surely human to human interactions, and bear to human interactions, like interaction interactions, are probably not statistically all that different?
Someone might have been to the woods several times without encountering a bear but also have been assaulted multiple times. The same person could’ve seen a bear irl and had it move along without incident. Statistics probably aren’t what they think of first in the scenario.
You don’t like that the person you’re replying to didn’t give you the comparison information you desire but instead of doing your own research and bringing the results here you’re suggesting “surely” you’ve already got the answer you want?