(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.
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.