1y ago

"How can we make lemmy a safer place for women? Is it even possible to?" - literature.cafe

Conversation ongoing over there, inviting anyone who wants to participate to please consider sharing their thoughts if they are willing to. If you wanna post in the original thread from your instance copy and paste the link into your instances search panel

As I said in the thread, if you aren't comfortable posting feel free to DM me here or on matrix and I can post anonymously for you.

TwoXChromosomes @slrpnk.net

literature.cafe /post/1426139

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This is only tangentially related, but I was recently rereading The Hackers Manifesto, and although it doesn't mention gender, I feel like it should be amended to include it.
http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
It was clearly written against authority, but it was also a guiding light for netizens of the 80's and 90's. The internet should be free from social bias of all sorts, including sex and gender. The internet has changed a lot in the last 37 years, but the fact that we are all pseudonymous online personas has not. Ideas are what really matter here, and are the only comparator for truth and reality. Physical identity and all that comes with it is secondary. Not because it should be, but because that is the nature of online identity.
- The internet should be free from social bias of all sorts, including sex and gender
  It's not though.
  It wasn't when that document was written, and it's not now.
  Hiding our gender doesn't stop the bias and it doesn't stop us seeing the bias. All it does is make it less likely to target us specifically, because people are making incorrect assumptions about who we are.
  I nearly always use my name online and I don't keep my gender a secret. On the few occasions I have been anonymous though, all it has meant is that people assume I'm a man, which again, is not the same thing as "no bias"
  
  You're absolutely right. My post was only tangentially related and does not address the core problem that women and others face online.
  
  Adding to that... I was there in the 90s, I used the electron, the switch, and the baud... and the IRC.
  My nick was gender neutral, but from time to time, I heard women comment on how unfriendly the Internet was. One day, out of curiosity, I entered a somewhat popular IRC channel with a fake nick, "natalie" IIRC... and got instantly DDOSed by something like 100+ private chat windows with all sort of "openings" from the male population.
  Yeah, the 90s are not a good model to follow in this regard. On the other hand, if you haven't got 100+ DMs yet, maybe we're going in the right direction after all 🤞
- Thank you

As a woman, maybe more men should identify as women on Lemmy to make targeted misogyny both less accurate and more diluted?

I've seen it and call it out, or in, or whichever direction it would be since I'm a cishet guy (I can only guess the people I'm speaking to are also men). But that's a bandaid. I'm interested to see any ideas on how to fix it at its source.
- why do you assume that other posters are male?
  
  In this context it's because they say things like "females suck and won't date me". I can't be 100% sure, but it's an ok guess to make.

I think women should roll with the punches online and not shy away from shitting back on people who shit on you. Of course, take commonsense precautions like not DDOSing yourself, but give em back as good as it gets.
- Did you mean doxxing?
- On the surface, of course, this sounds completely fair, while at the same time, insisting that these women have to not be themselves and instead must do extra things just to get respect isn't fair at all.
  You shouldn't have to be willing to be baited into a fight to be respected.

I'll take a go at it. I am a woman. Don't automatically assume whoever you are responding to is male. Also, if we are specifically talking about women, then let's not forget that cis women, specifically, exist and don't have to do all the heavy lifting for every other non-cishet-male. Sometimes on R****t I felt that cis women were stifled in that regard. I will be very, very curious to see how this comment gets voted on and engaged with...
- what do you mean cis women exist and dont have to do heavy lifting for other non cishet male and how does that apply to making Lemmy a safer and more inclusive place for women?
  
  Regarding erasure, in an effort to make language more inclusive, women's identity is often erased. "Pregnant people" removes women (the vast majority of people who are pregnant are cis women). Other language like that. So use language that actually does acknowledge women and doesn't contribute to their erasure. "Pregnant women and people" perhaps, for example. When all you are usually dealing with is text on a screen, language matters.
  Re: the other point, it's less Lemmy-specific. Cis men need to step up and do the work for inclusion as well. It seems there is a default expectation that of course women should be leading the charge since they're already a "minority" group. It's tiring.

22 comments