(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.
If the fear for a typical woman is this bad, then we need to be better about teaching boys. I’m a pretty empathetic person, just ask my new very rapidly made female best friend. But despite the wife, and a few pretty damn close female friends, close mom, sister…. The fears expressed in my short reading on the current discussion have never been as clearly communicated, well the fear was definitely clear, but not the magnitude.
I agree with the sentiment that it’s just a bad premise. It puts everyone straight into a defensive posture, and no one learns anything when they’re trying to defend their sense of self.
On the other hand, if people are going to DMs to harass beyond the context of the heated conversation… well they ARE DEFINITELY the kind of people who are a threat, and need to be dealt with.