(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.
i hate that i’m still commenting about this, because i know whats going to happen, but maybe im just too fucking autistic for this shit.
“bears generally mind their own business” and humans generally don’t rape other humans. It bothers me that people talk about the bears statistically, as if that somehow overrides the statistics present with humans. But then again, that’s not the point. The point is something entirely different, and the problem is people don’t really understand how to express it properly.
it just feels wrong to pull out stats for bears, and then ignore the existing stats for humans. I mean surely human to human interactions, and bear to human interactions, like interaction interactions, are probably not statistically all that different?
Someone might have been to the woods several times without encountering a bear but also have been assaulted multiple times. The same person could’ve seen a bear irl and had it move along without incident. Statistics probably aren’t what they think of first in the scenario.
You don’t like that the person you’re replying to didn’t give you the comparison information you desire but instead of doing your own research and bringing the results here you’re suggesting “surely” you’ve already got the answer you want?
yeah, and this is why i find it weird that people mention stats at all. Because it’s not about it. Or when they are mentioned, they’re only one sided, because apparently they other side isn’t real anymore. It’s pretty explicitly some form of inherent bias, which is the point ultimately, but that’s not what we’re talking about, we’re talking about the hypothetical instead. For some reason.
in fact, the funny thing the underlying thought experiment of this statement is intended to prove that people will often choose the thing that they are less familiar with, over the thing that they are more familiar with, because it seems like a better choice, due to lack of information present.
i don’t like to pull out stats because they’re a nightmare, and i’m rather lazy. As are most other people. You’ll notice i didn’t pull up any stats on bears in my post either. I don’t have an answer, if you’re taking that to be an answer you aren’t interpreting that properly. What i’m saying is that based on my current knowledge of the world, surely statistics would not provide a significant difference between either choice, which is why i find it weird that we mentioned stats about bears, but not about men. Because surely that thought would’ve gone further?
Also regardless of this, i have a massive post back in my history on one of the now deleted threads? I can’t remember, where i was posting about how i conceptualize the hypothetical and what i thought the “statistical likelihood of these things were” from an analytical perspective I.E. i was lining up the hypothetical to a framework in order to analyze it without any form of implicit bias, or at least, trying to minimize it. If you’re curious about my end result in that discussion, i determined that choosing the human was more likely a gamble of an outcome, I.E. It has the potential to go very badly, but it also has the significant potential of being extremely beneficial (being lost in a group is arguably better than alone)
I prefer the small chance of getting killed by a bear over the small chance of getting raped or worse by a stranger
question, because i’m curious. Have you considered the likelihood that the stranger help you in a pretty significant capacity? Being lost alone is much worse than being lost alone with someone else, or even multiple people.