(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.
i think you are mostly making false equivalences here, but:
let me say this: a lot of this is self reinforcing. i think a lot of whats rightfully (and wrongly) criticized about men comes from this vicious cycle of disfranchised men falling behind > lashing out > getting hate > finding easy answers cause there isn’t much men to men convo about it > falling further behind and so on. yes its awful to live in a society where you are still pushed to be a some unattainable ideal while being in a terrible situation yourself, and then best case scenario is being made fun of for it.
however, as much as some men call out the fact many women generalize, many men tend to also ignore that PLENTY of us act absolutely horribly then play the victims, in a possibly indistinguishable way men might want to defend themselves. conversations about this would be healthier if this understanding were more common.
So it’s black men’s fault that the police kill them at disproportionate rates and that society views them as inherently dangerous?
You realize that collective punishment is a war crime, right?
no, i’m saying men (in general) in a shitty situation get caught in a vicious cycle, of society punishing them and them being less sociable due to society punishing them without them having healthy ways to cope.
i quoted working class, black and brown under the assumption most white men are also working class. black men are probably more likely to get caught in shitty situations though, since racism is a thing.