The number of examples I have seen of people being told to shut up about their lived experiences with sexual abuse in the past 24 hours on this platform is deeply disturbing.
I am calling on y’all to take a deep breath and listen to women for once. There is a time and place for tone policing and it’s never the very minute a woman speaks up.
Absolutely not.
The people “speaking out against the generalizations” need to find their own space and time to do so, not to do it in direct replies to women who are speaking up about a very personal and invasive topic.
It’s an exact parallel to those who screamed “All Lives Matter” in response to BLM.
There are inumerable comment sections for men to explore and express the negative qualities of the patriarchy in their lives, !mensliberation@lemmy.ca being one I have seen that seems positive. But that space is not to be held the moment and place women begin to talk about their own experiences.
None of the situations I was talking about involved direct replies to women talking about their own experiences. Everything I’ve seen has essentially been “I’d choose the bear and you should feel ashamed.” If there are people making those kinds of comments in reply to women speaking about their experience and how they feel, I would agree with you that it is not acceptable. But 90% of what I see is blanket accusations or false dilemmas placing some viewpoint on me that I do not hold.
And in a way it does resemble “all lives matter.” But when there are people here directly saying that all men should be ashamed, that they are not safe to be around, and I have seen people saying in these threads that all men are rapists, it seems a little hard to see how that would make anyone understand or sympathize with the people making these comments. It starts to sound like “my feelings should take precedence over your existence” instead of “this is what I feel and why” or “this is how we can improve things.”
Its also ridiculous to me when it’s “but a man could rape me” but no “a bear could maul me.” If someone says that they have been SA’d or have otherwise had negative experiences, fine. I still think its a bit of a stretch to generalize it but I’m not out there saying “BuT nOt AlL mEn” to that.
Okay well that’s literally the topic of this post. So you are butting in with irrelevant commentary a bit.
Commentary isn’t irrelevant just because it’s not the exact same thing that you said. Exploring related questions/scenarios is half the point of a good discussion.
Valid! I encourage you to pop over to this post I made instead perhaps. It already has some rich discussion going on about exactly the concerns you are voicing here.
Thanks! Will check it out. I salute your efforts to spread awareness about lemmy stifling SA talk.
❤️ 👍
Uhhhhh they deleted the post which is very disheartening because there was genuinely really positive discussion going on. 🙁 Here is a reposted version.
Thanks again :D