(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.
You’re telling me that something that was intentionally supposed to induce division between normal ass people is inducing division between people?
Oh no!
Anyway, moral of the story, don’t get caught up in silly ass things like this. It was created to do exactly what it is doing.
pretty much exactly this. There is no way that statement wasn’t designed intentionally this way.
I mean why else would it work so fucking aggressively?
Hmm could lots of men here be too self-centered and have fragile masculinity? No, must be a psyop!
Lol
it’s not a psyop?
It’s the same as literally any viral statement ever.
There have been plenty of (subtly) misogynistic comments on Lemmy long before the bear thing
The bear thing is misandry because it groups all man as bad.
The point that I’m making though, is that there will ALWAYS be bad actors. There will ALWAYS be a group of people who are just hateful, and will do or say anything to upset others, because they have nothing in their life that gives them actual happiness.
So, to me, this whole man vs bear thing is just incredibly stupid, and I am shocked so many people would get so upset about it, from either side!
It truly worked, and that’s more sad than anything else here.