Here's my take: the bear thing is causing such a visceral reaction that it is very hard to take a step back, not take it personally and have a rational discussion about it. Even if you know the statistics. Even if you're absolutely certain you'd do the right thing (or maybe especially then).

I was exposed to a somewhat similar experience in college: while walking through the campus one evening I realised the girl in front of me was a good friend of mine, so I rushed to catch up. When she heard me she quickened her pace close to running, and only stopped when I said her name and something like "wait up!". I was just happy to meet a friend. She, on the other hand, was absolutely terrified, and told me all about it as we walked towards the exit.

That evening I realised that women experience the world much different than men. That there's an underlying level of potential violence that they evaluate and weigh against potential benefits from encounters and interactions with men in almost all social contexts. And knowing that has recalibrated my behaviour to a certain extent, as I realised women can't afford to give me the benefit of the doubt, especially in contexts where they feel vulnerable.

I wish more men would get this point, especially in their formative years. It's not a judgement on their character when women that barely know them are careful around them. Trust needs to be earned. And for a woman, the cost of misplaced trust is too damn high.

The irony is that the poor behavior explains why many women would pick the bear

The bear scenario is the perfect division inducing shitstorm.

It’s understandable what the memes portrays the danger that women face, daily. The fact that they frequently don’t feel comfortable or even just basic safety is definitely valid and worth discussion.

However, the bear vs man thing was just the worst vehicle to induce that discussion. On one side men who may not be the most well informed about women issues; will get immediately defensive at being compared to a large animal known for tearing people apart and eating them alive.

The members of the other side who see all the angry men getting defensive at them for expressing this view and think it’s purely because they aren’t empathetic to these issue, they “hate” women or they’re marginalising what is a real and daily danger.

Of course there are actual trolls, toxic arseholes and people who have 0 interest actual discourse or understanding but fuck them, I agree ban em.

It was never going to end in a productive, calm or rational discussion and frankly I think tarring the entire of lemmy for it is equally as unproductive. I’ve seen plenty of people initially aggressive to the meme, come around. I’ve seen more and more people make light jokes about the same meme without the accusatory tone. If you want discourse theres space to do so; it just has to be done better(imo). Preferably without snark or accusatory tones.

To be a woman online means to feel unwelcome. Leaving a new community is pretty much inevitable unless you are willing to swim in toxicity.

I've lost count of how many 'welcoming' communities for game/hobby/interest that I have left because of the inevitable creep of (male) toxicity and harassment.

And it sucks to watch so many people not speak up, and to be targeted for further harassment simply because I said rape jokes weren't funny. (Or tying and drugging up a woman so T could have a girlfriend, if the group I play online games with are stalking my account read this. You guys are part of the problem.)

I just want liked minded people to share my interests and play games with.

I, and other women shouldn't have to navigate or ignore toxicity to simply exist in public spaces.

[Downvotes prove my statement. I'm not welcome or wanted, I get it. See you after my funeral.]

Every time I see something about that bear vs man thing it just turns into a shitload of people straw-manning the hell out of the opposing gender. The whole thing is fucking stupid.

I am a cis male mod of multiple communities here on Lemmy and all I can say is that I try to moderate as fairly and equitably as I can, but I also don't have time to read every single comment on every single post in the communities I moderate, so you have to flag posts you find violate community rules. Every community I moderate has a civility rule, and shouting down or harassing women who are telling personal stories would be against those rules.

But I may not know that it's happening unless it's getting flagged.

This is the equivalent of saying that MS Outlook is a community. It's not and neither is Lemmy. Each server has its own rules, and each community on those servers can add rules beyond that.

Address a specific community or server, there's no central control over the fediverse.

the challenge with lemmy is its immaturity with moderation, and many instances allowing pretty vile members and communities to flourish, which then spill over into other less extreme communities

The bear thing; good god, yes... the number of people just not getting it was/is incredible. It's a good example of how arguing for the logical position completely misses out on any nuance over why someone might say they're choosing, for example, the bear.

I know some of it is folks having difficulty reading between the lines, spectrum stuff, male socialising, etc etc... but man. That was a tough one

Narrowminded cisgender ragebait did what? Please tell me it ain't so!

The bear thing isn't controversial, it's just ragebait. You ragebait, you get rage. It is not a serious argument, which is why it constantly has to spark as ragebait over in the meme communities. The people taking it as a serious argument are making their serious arguments look bad.

Seems to me that the rage bait did it's job, but the only who won was the author and website that got all the clicks and ads serving, while lemmy got a shitstorm for nothing.

People get really upset over a hypothetical. I don't like posts that put all men down, but this wasn't one of them.

Also bears generally mind their own business as long as you keep your distance, with statistically less than one person per year dying from a bear attack in America. The last time it happened in my state was several years ago and due to some dumbass intentionally getting close to it to take photos.

There is literally nothing better about the clientele of this platform than reddit except people are nicer and probably less miserable on average in the comments. If anything its users are less socialized and more insular - e.g. I use linux server extensively for work where it controls most of the internet, but most of the hot takes here about linux here are beyond stupid. If anything, between Lemmy and reddit, the users here are even more convinced they're knowledgeable and infallible connoisseurs, if that's even possible. So when fallout does happen, it's generally more ugly.

Also, the bear thing is not controversial - except with infantile man-children. Those people don't get to represent a demographic.

Regarding Man v Bear I think the topic is rather silly. Most bears aren't looking to have a meet and greet if you do come across a bear one of three things are true. It's here to eat you, it didn't leave because its a she-bear and it has cubs its protecting, or you just startled it. If any of the above is true you are at best in serious danger. If it is actually trying to prey upon you then you are probably fucked. Whereas 100% of the bears you surprise in the woods are extremely dangerous 99.99% of people you meet man or woman are just people like yourself not looking for trouble.

It's not shocking that the 99.9% of men who aren't predators waiting in the bush feel justified in feeling unfairly vilified.

I want to put out there, that as a man I shared my story... And I was down voted and disrespected.

So you can probably remove 'for women' in the title. Lemmy is very much an echo chamber. You don't have to look around very hard to see that there's a large amount of intolerance on Lemmy.

This bear thing has got out of hand lmao

The whole "bear vs. man" thing proved that there are still a lot of people out there totally unable to get over themselves. On one side you see people piling on women not knowing the everyday struggle the average woman goes through everyday, on the other side there are people that get mad at memes not accepting that the statement was meant to be over the top in the first place, so it's ok to find irony in it

I think the distributed nature of the Fediverse is a big part of it. Lot of moderation policies at play, on a lot of different instances and some allow some real jerks to flourish and spill out elsewhere. I have zero tolerance for any of that garbage and am very quick with my block/ban buttons, but those are only effective on my own instance or the few communities I moderate outside that.

OP, best I can suggest is to report them. Most of the communities I interact with are pretty responsive to those kinds of reports and similarly don't tolerate it. Mods, unfortunately, can't read every comment and often rely on reports to know when to look deeper/take action.

And don't feel bad about blocking the jerks. There's a lot of them, lol.

Not even about Man v Bear, but just seeing all the casual misogyny on Lemmy is extremely exhausting to me. It’s so clearly obvious that Lemmy as a whole is dominated by men. There are no spaces here for women. It’s why I still frequent Reddit, because at least there are communities there that are more diverse. I really want Lemmy to take off more, but I just don’t get enjoyment out of this platform, after the initial hype died off.

Anyway, I’m really glad you posted this, OP. I think it’s incredibly important to foster a diverse community. Unfortunately the diversity just isn’t there, and I’m unsure as to how to help that. As it is now, I can’t recommend Lemmy to my other friends who identify as women.

You’re telling me that something that was intentionally supposed to induce division between normal ass people is inducing division between people?

Oh no!

Anyway, moral of the story, don’t get caught up in silly ass things like this. It was created to do exactly what it is doing.

If the fear for a typical woman is this bad, then we need to be better about teaching boys. I’m a pretty empathetic person, just ask my new very rapidly made female best friend. But despite the wife, and a few pretty damn close female friends, close mom, sister…. The fears expressed in my short reading on the current discussion have never been as clearly communicated, well the fear was definitely clear, but not the magnitude.

I agree with the sentiment that it’s just a bad premise. It puts everyone straight into a defensive posture, and no one learns anything when they’re trying to defend their sense of self.

On the other hand, if people are going to DMs to harass beyond the context of the heated conversation… well they ARE DEFINITELY the kind of people who are a threat, and need to be dealt with.

I commented about it and some guy replaced every instance of the word “men” in my post with “Jews” to prove to me that I am a bigot. His comment was removed by mods, but later un-removed because we’re big fans of bad faith arguments and invalid comparisons on this platform.

e: argue this point with women in person and see how well it goes.

I've not even heard of this issue you are talking about. Maybe it's not representative of the Lemmy experience as a whole? Besides, most social media postings seem fake as hell. Why put any emphasis on what people have to say. I think walking away is probably the healthiest thing you can do. No one is going to fix this place or any place for that matter.

I missed the kerfuffle, but my $0.02 is Lemmy is still in infancy. It's also a federated system made up of different instances, some of which - and you know who I mean - aren't as cool.

So utilize the tools provided, reporting, blocking, etc. and find the communities you like. /$0.02

Nice to see someone say this out loud. At the end of the day no platform is immune to hive mind thinking or ignorance, but hopefully there are solutions for open platforms to enrich people's lives some.