(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.
downvotes on this are nothing but a tally of guys who are legitimately worse than a bear. So at least speak up and reveal yourselves, you coward ass bitches.
I’ve never raped anyone but I’ve been forced/coerced to have sex with two different women, and yes I’m a little offended at the fact that simply due to my gender I’m lumped in with the perpetrators rather than the victims, and that the perpetrators are lumped in with the victims in my stead. It goes beyond the bear post and is partially the result of the fact that nobody gives two shits about male victims, and the fact that in many localities rape requiring penetration excludes men from seeking justice by default, the being treated as a predator whilst being preyed upon is just the icing on the cake, really.
If that makes me worse than the bear, because I’d rather we not use inflammatory and gendered language to vilify a whole gender and exclude its victims for the lulz, then so be it.