(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.
People get really upset over a hypothetical. I don’t like posts that put all men down, but this wasn’t one of them.
Also bears generally mind their own business as long as you keep your distance, with statistically less than one person per year dying from a bear attack in America. The last time it happened in my state was several years ago and due to some dumbass intentionally getting close to it to take photos.
Literally saw a bear this weekend and it just kinda minded it’s own business and wandered away. Can’t say the same about a lot of men.
This is something that men are basically incapable of, especially if they have been successful in their career. They literally can’t conceive of things not being their business.
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?
because hypotheticals are clean, not messy.
it’s easy to be against incest hypothetically. it’s a lot harder to be against it if your sister asks you to have sex with you.
If my sister asked to have sex with me I’d be worried about her, not horny