(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
    1•6 months ago

    So you’re saying pissing men off is the point??

    yes

    And you’re somehow indignant that it, true to its purpose, pissed men off??

    no, i’m very obviously aware of the point. The problem here is that nobody here was interested in doing anything other than yelling at people for being stupid or something.

    We should be talking about the problem at hand right now, but instead we’re debating whether or not this was to make people hate each other more.

      • KillingTimeItself
        0•6 months ago

        i’m in the crowd of “capture for sport, and release for ecosystem” myself, I’m not trying to catch fish for anything other than sport here. I might consume the odd one or two though. But generally, i think it’s most productive as capture and release.

        part of the problem with the original thread, and a little bit here as well. Is that we caught fish for sport, and then just never released them, and they started rotting, and then nobody thought to dispose of them. When in reality we should have released them, and providing a productive dialogue through the process.