(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.
Thanks for the PSA :)
I’d argue that it’s still prejudice, as the word only means to assume behavior from the appearance alone. But in a positive way, as prejudices originally existed for self-protection.
Huh?
I worded that badly. What I meant was that the reason humans have prejudice-y thinking hardwired in the brain is for self-protection. If individuals of some ape species have a 30 % chance of being super aggressive and trying to kill you on the spot, your first reaction to seeing one will be negative and retiring – even if this specific one is super nice and wouldn’t hurt a soul.
Ohhhh yeah