First, please be respectful in the comments. I have no idea what the topic was, but apparently it caused a lot of divide. I prefer just the claims and facts, backed by citations, and let me draw my own conclusions. I can think for myself. 😅
I’m curious because it seemed to have happened about a year ago, and then there were concerns of Lemmy being a worse place for women than Reddit.
I don’t really see that now. Granted, I’m new, and maybe it’s the specific communities I subscribed to, but I haven’t really seen much women-hating in posts or comments. If anything, I’ve seen a bias towards liberal viewpoints (many of which I personally agree with, but sometimes the justifications use poor reasoning and almost comes off as a bad defense or covert sabotage).
I’m hoping Lemmy changed for the better in the past year, and I’m not about to be side slammed with some misogyny. 🙏🏼
The bear vs man story was a social commentary thing where women were trying to show men how dangerous and confusing men often seemed to be with an anecdote about whether or not they would want to run into a bear in the woods or a man in the woods.
Women tried to make clear that they would most often want to run into a bear, because they know what a bear will do. They don’t have to constantly second-guess themselves about the nature of the bear. The bear can be scary, but if you’re prepared and know what to do, you can make it out alive.
The opposite is how they feel with men. They feel like they cannot know a mans actual intentions in the woods and it could be anything from wanting to help her if she’s lost all the way to leading her to a rape/kill dungeon in the woods.
Thus, they would rather run into the bear where they can always know the bears intentions, and thus always know how to properly respond to the sight of the bear, they don’t ever need to second guess themselves on the intentions of the bear. Whereas they have to treat all men as though they are their worst iterations just to be safe, and that can be frustrating and confusing and they also know that it’s hurtful to treat men who may not be terrible that way. Yet they feel the need to do so to feel safe and secure and not be taking a risk.
Now, as for a specific conversation on Lemmy that lead people to believe Lemmy was worse for women than reddit. I couldn’t point you to that, but that also would not surprise me in the least. Lemmy overall does seem to skew heavily on the side of cisgender men. The blahaj lemmy is pretty small compared to others, for example, and probably hosts the largest number of genders other than cisgender men.
So honestly, I would not be shocked if there was a discussion around the “man vs bear” thing and that a lot of men on Lemmy had negative views on the whole thing instead of being able to see the other perspective. It seemed that men in general had a very negative view on the whole thing, probably because it made them feel personally attacked. Which was never the goal by women, but rather to just try to get mean to hear them, really hear them on why they felt so sketched out about strange men approaching them in public.
I think a lot of it boils down to men having their own issues with women, especially men who try to be decent people. That can be seen in the response meme from men “Would you rather be emotionally vulnerable with a woman or with a tree?” The implication being that while men are often told to “open up” and “just talk about their feelings,” a large number of men have had very negative experiences when actually doing so. The number of women who think a man who cries is weak and will dump him is, well, too damn high. So emotional availability and vulnerability are things men feel that women want… but when faced with them, they’ll get an “ick” and dump a guy over it. So men would rather be emotionally vulnerably with a tree so they don’t get judged for being emotionally vulnerable.
The real issue is that “man vs bear” or “woman vs tree” are entirely different issues which don’t really cross paths not address the same issues or ideas. It leads to both sides sort of talking past each other instead of listening and hearing what the other side is actually saying. I think both of these positions have value to their respective genders, but both sides could do with a healthy amount of actually hearing the other side in this regard, instead of being dismissive.
While I think that’s a great way to view the question, and can definitely see the reasoning and sort of agree with it, there’s one test that can be made for some arguments to know whether they’re inherently prejudiced or not, that is the black switch. This works because our society has internalized racism, at least the talking of it, to a point where we can easily recognize racist statements, while the same is not true for sexist statements yet.
With that in mind how would it be if the question was “would you rather be in a forest with a bear or a black person?”. You immediately recognize the inherent racism there, and the person asking that question could very easily show statistics on the number of crimes committed per ethnicity to prove his point of why he would choose the bear, and even argue the same you did that a bear is predictable humans are not. Still you understand that the question is inherently racist.
This is not to say there’s no issues to be discussed here, or that women don’t suffer at the hands of monsters out there, and if you can’t understand why women would choose the bear you need to read more into what they go through… But still, regardless of all of that, the question is inherently sexist.
you can’t be sexist against the people who invented sexism, that’s just silly
Sure you can, it’s like saying you can’t be racist against white people, and having lived in a neighborhood that was 99% black I can assure you that’s a thing.
People need to decouple the ideas of discrimination and institutionalized discrimination. Discrimination can happen in any direction and it’s on an individual level, institutionalized discrimination can only happen from the people “in control” towards the rest, e.g. cis, hetero, white, males. Obviously institutionalized discrimination is way worse and should be fixed, however antagonizing people and claiming you can’t discriminate against them will lead them to close down into “well, if I can’t be discriminated against then neither can you”. It’s important to teach people that anyone can be discriminated, and to show how our society as a whole discriminates certain groups, this way the message becomes less of “you’re an asshole for being in the same category as people who are assholes, and there’s nothing I do to you that will make me an asshole” and more “it sucks when some people are assholes to you, imagine if the majority of people treated you like this”
I feel like Lemmy has a high number of cis men and trans women (maybe also trans men), but very very few cis women.
I think you may have missed a small but important part of the concept. I believe women also felt the LIKELIHOOD of a man being dangerous was higher than the bear’s, for all the reasons you stated.
If women had overall very favorable interactions with men they might choose the man in the woods because a bear is very unlikely to help her. So the man would be the obvious choice with such a low probability event. But to them, it isn’t low probability and that speaks volumes.
You are such a great writer.
One thing I would not agree is the unusual prevalence of cis men on lemmy. I saw many more trans discussions on lemmy than any other platform. At least when I joined the amount of posts in my timeline from blahaj was so high that I had to mute it after a while. It looked to me that there’s no other topic of discussion on lemmy than Linux and trans rights. And while I support trans people with all my heart, it got just boring and repetitive after a week, it’s not a topic that I want to fill my free time with.
It’s more complicated than that. They have to treat men with unearned respect while planning for the worse. Treating man as a threat can make him a threat if he feels his masculinity is threaten he may act erratically.
To put it the other way, they don’t have to worry about managing the bear’s feelings.
Excellent point. Men becoming angry and lashing out verbally at women online because they felt attacked by the “man vs bear” issue neatly illustrates that point as well.
You hit it pretty perfectly.
Too many people definitely took it personally, but I don’t think I ever saw it explained as well as you just did. All too often we just react, rather than constructively understand what was trying to be communicated
Thank you so much for explaining all of this. 🙏🏼
Yeah, Snot did a really good job. I’m actually saving this to forward on to other people. Thank you for making this post and thank you Snot for your reply.
Also, somewhat off-topic, but since you mentioned sharing important explanations to others, I have some that have worked for me. Feel free to disregard if they’re not helpful for you.
What I personally found persuasive when speaking with men is citing the research that 87% of rapes against women by men are explained by repeat offenders, which is 3% of men. That means 5 out of 6 rapes are done by a very, very small portion of men.
And it might explain some of the disconnect. 95% of men didn’t rape anyone, so they might be genuinely confused at the strong reaction.
I also explain that rape causes the equivalent of $122,461 in damages to the victims. This is just what is quantifiable and measurable via econometrics - the subjective damage is obviously much higher (and I am personally seeking reparations for much higher than this based on my own calculations).
5% odds with a random man might not initially seem that bad to some until I explain that it’s equivalent to rolling a nat 1 in D&D. That and you are literally rolling a 1d20 for each man you encounter, so unless you only meet at most 19 men in your lifetime, you’re expected on average to roll at least 1 nat 1.
I also explain that addressing rape culture benefits men, too. About 1 in 3 men are raped in their lifetimes, and about 40% of women blame victims and survivors (of all genders). Also, in the majority of states and countries across the world, it is not legally possible, either in theory or in practice, for cis men to be raped. That, and a lot of (anecdotal and not measured, but I’ll be measuring this one day) individuals, both men and women, believe that as long as no penetration happens, it’s not rape. This belief is not just used to the benefit of cis male rapists against cis female victims (“It’s not rape as long as I don’t penetrate her.”), but also been used against both cis male victims and lesbian cis female victims (by other cis women).
I don’t have the names of research papers memorized off the top of my head, but both of these are Google-able.
Yo thanks for posting this. It’s frustrating as hell to not only be one of the 95% who have never raped, but one of those 33.3% of men raped by women (twice, actually, two different women, three if you count GFs crying and threatening suicide every time you’re not in the mood until you give in, not sure if counts), and still get treated like I’m some crazed rapist instead of a victim due solely to my gender.
Haha, no need to thank me!
It was more out of survival instincts and gauging my environment.