(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.
Every time I see something about that bear vs man thing it just turns into a shitload of people straw-manning the hell out of the opposing gender. The whole thing is fucking stupid.
It’s almost like it was planted to make men and women mad at each other for no reason. Fuel it with bots and bad faith arguments and it’s a tempest in a teapot
I swear the left gets more conspiratorial every day. There doesn’t have to be some grand plan to sow dissent. Dissent is something that just happens naturally because this conflict is deeply ingrained in our culture. Nobody has to scheme to make it happen.
You know, implying that the author wrote it in bad faith is pretty much just doing a strawman.
i don’t think thats the implication
I wouldn’t call it “planned”, average people do stupid things all the time, and I wouldn’t blame the average person for not realizing the bear thing wouldn’t help get the points of each side across. I just wish more people acknowledged that arguing about the hypothetical is pointless, and we should actually discuss gender issues, personal experiences and how to make things better.
If I was running a conservative PR firm, or was running a foreign intelligence agency, this is exactly the type of discourse I would want to create within the Unites State/The West
By making the working class/the population at large attack one another, I am increasing internal conflict and decreasing awareness of class concerns. Which is useful if I am opposed to working class/national solidarity
people have been asking “would you rather” questions since before Plato.
Divide and conquer