(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.
Yes I heard your agreement the first time!! 💖 But this is extremely well articulated and I hope the moderation team reads it. These civility rules uphold some nasty power dynamics.
I have, as a trans person, experienced being on the blunt end of these civility rules for being “impolite” about my disagreement. Passion is not a crime, and at the end of the day, being called an asshole isn’t really going to hurt anyone.
We should definitely moderate for slurs, but we don’t even do that consistently. I remember seeing a thread filled with heavily upvoted sexist slurs against Hillary Clinton. She does suck, but when you’re gleefully using words like “cunt” and “bitch” to articulate that, you’re creating an environment that’s kinda scary for women.