(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.
What is being said is that right wing organizations are utilizing astroturfed faux “feminism” as a dogwhistle to fearmonger about people of color and immigrants.
This is the sort of rhetoric that would be pushed by the Daughters of the Confederacy, and similar groups. It is a mask for hate speech and marginalization, not an authentic expression of feminist values.
Tiktok, along with all social media, is known to be a haven for astroturfed political movements and propaganda campaigns. Strange then how some “people” are unwilling to recognize this bear meme for what it actually is.
Why are you assuming and generalizing to that extent? Even if some malign interest are encouraging a trend, it’s still individuals expressing a view that aims to get some point across. If you think this is coordinated astroturfing, I think you might be just a tad delusional, and also simply not aware of why the bear analogy (not meme) was made.
The troubling part here, would be to disregard the gist of the message: a lot more women than most people are aware of, experience unpleasant interactions with men. That this is expressed, perhaps exaggerated (for making the point clearer), perhaps genuinely and literally (because that’s their opinion), as rather taking their chances with a bear… Is kinda fucking rich to disregard as astroturfing, IMHO. And, if you are a normal, decent, empathetic person, and want to be perceived as such, I’d keep that perspective to yourself.