The number of examples I have seen of people being told to shut up about their lived experiences with sexual abuse in the past 24 hours on this platform is deeply disturbing.
I am calling on y’all to take a deep breath and listen to women for once. There is a time and place for tone policing and it’s never the very minute a woman speaks up.
I found the recent incel-ish responses on various Lemmy communities to the bear meme to be off-putting. Granted, it's much worse on Reddit but I would have expected better on this platform.
i guess i wasn't online when this bear meme happened? what was it about?
I don't have a particular Lemmy link, but here's a general overview from knowyourmeme.
Hypothetical question posed to women: would you rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a man? Many women said "bear". Many men took that personally.
What a stupid thing to spend energy getting upset about. I'm a bigger than average dude and I'd pick the bear as well; humans are capable of all kinds of villainy, bears are just bears. I'd like to find the statistics on women attacked by bears in the woods compared to women attacked by men, it has to be overwhelming more common to be attacked by a man.
I agree with you completely; I'm surprised that people are upset as well, but there are plenty of people in this thread who feel that the question unreasonably attacks men and is deliberately inflammatory.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/man-or-bear-in-the-woods-question
According to the CDC, 1 in 3 women in the US have been victims of sexual harassment or assault. And honestly, given how underreported those sorts of stats are, it’s probably higher.
Another hypothetical question was posed to women a while ago: if all the men on the planet got whisked away (not killed, just sent to an awesome men-only vacation planet or something) for 48 hours, what would you do?
The answers were overwhelmingly things like ‘go for a walk at night’, ‘take a jog with my earbuds in’, ‘go to the gym’…
Hey, at least you’re listening and giving it serious thought. That’s better than some people.
here you go :)
Yeah, I've seen ignorant takes about that on tumblr too, from accounts I thought knew better. Genuinely disappointing to see.
precisely! to date lemmy had been the most progressive and respectable toward human dignity community i have followed, but that facade has dropped pretty quickly with this turn :(
I hope this doesn't sound aggressive, but unless you're a man, you never had to venture very far on Lemmy to experience misogyny. If you ever mentioned you were a woman in any of the major instances and communities in any context except "I'm a woman and here's what I don't like about other women," you were gonna get misogynistic replies and a shocking amount of downvotes. It's just what happens when any internet community is dominated by a single gender I guess.
Lemmy's always been great about almost every other social issue, except sometimes trans issues and neurodivergence if you stepped out of the communities for it, but women's issues have always been an absolute train wreck around here.
Even as a man I noticed pretty quickly that Lemmy can be weird about women, maybe as an extension of many nerd spaces still being like that. I really hope we get or federate some communities with a different gender balance, I guess beehaw and blahaj already try to be.
This definitely aligns with my experience and understanding as well. Thank you for sharing :)