Is anyone else more than a little disappointed that the rampant misogyny, objectification, and "whataboutmen-ism" seems to have followed the reddit migration here?

I was just reading a discussion on another community where the OP was complaining about a lack of NSFW content being readily available. It was really demoralizing to see him bemoaning the fact that the female/femme members of the fediverse don’t seem to be lining up to disrobe for his amusement. It’s just frustrating to see the same old boys’/men’s club atmosphere be nearly as prevalent here as it was on reddit. I had been hoping for improvement in that regard when I moved over here last month.

agissilver,

There was a post earlier this month where it was like Lemmy users are 30s, techy, male, etc. And I thought “they’re already assuming there’s no women here?” That was a bit disappointing for me, but the only instance I’ve observed. I’m not into the nsfw stuff, so mmmv.

medgremlin,

I used to work in tech, so you’d think I’d be more used to it, but it was still a bit unexpected to see some of the prevailing opinions in the meme or general discussion communities.

TiredSpider,
@TiredSpider@slrpnk.net avatar

I’m getting frustrated with people who are saying they don’t want only fans girls here advertising but still want free porn. So much of reddit nsfw was stolen content, some people are so entitled. If you want free porn the least you can do is let sex workers plug their socials.

Cannacheques,

Meh. Porn is just subsidized for by adverts.

gavi,

admin here for lemmynsfw, it’s been annoying as hell having to weed thru the spam reports. we had to make a pinned announcement posting saying if people keep reporting content creators who post their links in the majority of communities that are fine with it, we are going to have to start taking action. it’s just ridiculous.

Saraphim,

Dude, I don’t even want to think about the level of mental you’re wading through right now, between all the new users, and the carryover from Reddit. You have my sympathies.

gavi,

It’s been interesting that’s for sure but we’re doing our best :)

Bozicus,

I wasn’t before, but I am now. (This is the first time I have seen it, since I prune my subscriptions like my life depends on it). I suppose it’s inevitable that an online space is going to have assholes, especially once it reaches a certain size, but it’s always disappointing when they show up.

TheLurker,

Oh yes please tell us more about the cherry picked example you found in order to paint all men as scum in an attempt to perpetuate the gender war narrative.

This routine isn’t old at all. 🙄

medgremlin,

That’s the problem though. I wasn’t expecting to see things like that around here. I expected that people on Lemmy would be more open-minded, empathetic, and egalitarian.

ProdigalFrog,

Considering you likely came here from reddit (as I did), it only makes sense that some of the people you didn’t like on reddit would come here as well. It’s the best reddit alternative on the web, and the exodus was not exclusive to empathetic egalitarian people. The only difference is that here, you can find instances that will likely defederate with the toxic parts of the fediverse, like how Lemmy.world defederated from the ExplodingHeads community.

Saying that, I personally think the lemmy community to be far more thoughtful and engaging compared to reddit, at least in the servers I’ve browsed. I can’t imagine how you feel its just as rampantly misogynistic as reddit, as I’ve found that most instances are pretty left leaning, which tends to quell the things you mention.

medgremlin, (edited )

Reflecting on it, I may have been over-reactive to the more blatant examples I’ve seen in the past few days, in part because it popped up in a less-than-expected way. On Reddit I curated my subscriptions pretty carefully and knew going into it to expect such things in the larger forums, and I’m still adding and pruning communities here as I get a better feel for the different communities and instances.

TheLurker,

You may have overreact, but not enough for some self reflection right? You would rather continue to pushing a gender war narrative with perceived slights, fabricated outrage and straight up nonsense.

Omg a guy was asking about porn on the internet. The patriarchy is coming for us. Run!!! 🙄

Drusas,

I have not encountered misogyny remotely to the same degree that I had seen on reddit. It was rampant and even the norm on Reddit, whereas here, the closest to misogyny so far is people posting porn.

I'm sure there must be communities which are worse, but they have not been making it into my feed.

SomeoneElse,

If we read the same post, I don’t agree. He was just asking where to find the porn or whether he should stick to Reddit. This place isn’t remotely as bad as Reddit. Like not in the same realm.

Lorela,

Yeah I was feeling pretty positive until there was a shitpost about unrealistic male body standards in media, and the majority of women’s voices saying “this isn’t there for us” being piled upon and dismissed was kinda staggering given the infancy of that community.

So many men fighting with women in the comments telling us that most women are attracted to and oggle over Hemsworth as Thor. Never mind our experiences I guess (literally never met a straight woman who’d pick Thor over Huddleston’s Loki).

Saraphim,

This kills me. All those dudes deciding what women actually find attractive instead of like, the women who are directly telling them ? It’s so crazy I can’t even

catreadingabook,
catreadingabook avatar

Ugh, this takes me back to seeing r/AskMen constantly make the front page with posts along the lines of, "Men, what bad things are women doing to us that shows that they are evil and we are victims?" And then all the top answers are either women wanting to be left alone, or ancient stereotypes that apply to maybe 0.5% of women in real life and aren't socially accepted to begin with. Really hoping we don't see the same here.

Can_you_change_your_username,

(literally never met a straight woman who’d pick Thor over Huddleston’s Loki).

That's still an unrealistic male body, just a different one.

Bozicus,

Ugh, that doesn’t sound like a productive conversation for anyone. I’m sorry you had that experience.

To be (un?)fair, there are masculine insecurities that are delusional or unrelated to actual heterosexual relationships, but still difficult to deal with. Like, we might know that women don’t want certain things, but still feel that we ought to be/have those things. A lot of body image issues are irrational on multiple levels, and, in my experience, the irrational ideas are more difficult to deal with than the ones that connect to the real world. Or we might be looking for male partners, who often share and project these irrational expectations. There are queer men who do, in fact, prefer the Thor type to the Loki type. (And, of course, are not women, lol, so that in no way invalidates women’s perspectives, but it contributes to men holding onto that idea).

But saying women’s opinions on male body image problems are somehow incorrect because they don’t reinforce our insecurities, rational or otherwise? No. Just… no. Not when so many guys genuinely do worry about what women want, and welcome feedback from women. I am embarrassed on behalf of the men doing that, and disappointed that it happened.

Lorela,

Not un/fair at all, I did completely miss that out of my comment because I just didn’t have the energy to talk about the impact of the Patriarchy and masculine beauty standards on men.

The image in question (now removed) pitted women’s very valid concerns about sexualisation/objectification of women in the media vs. hyper-masculine portrayals of men (mostly superheros) in the media as if they were parallel issues.

Many comments were woman pointing out that hyper-masculine bodies are glorified in these movies, usually not for women to objectify, but to provide a power fantasy for other men. Plus lots of talk trying to explain male gaze vs. female gaze.

Not for a moment denying the negative effects this has on men’s self-image. It hurts men, and that hurt is more often than not being inflicted by other men. Absolutely LOVE that men are starting to have the conversation, but it shouldn’t be framed as the fault of women.

Bozicus,

Ah got it. There was no need for you to mention the masculine perspective in your post, lol, I hesitated to even add it to a conversation that was about men doing the wrong thing. Just because someone is in pain doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to behave badly. But I decided the topic of “men sucking due to emotional trauma” might be relevant to a discussion of men sucking in general, so I brought it up. And yeah, obviously it’s not women’s fault, that’s yet another example of guys doing exactly the wrong thing about their feelings. [/sigh] Toxic masculinity is all about sabotaging your own opportunities for emotional connection and growth.

About the image, agreed, I don’t think there’s much room for direct parallels there. It’s reductive in both directions to say that problematic images of men and women are fundamentally the same, or even that they’re problematic in the same way. The power fantasy angle is a good take. I suppose there is a lot of wish fulfillment in superhero movies, especially for guys who grew up identifying with those superheroes. I find I usually see my flaws in male Marvel characters rather than anything I would like to be, but I suppose that’s part of the same picture. Male gaze vs female gaze might just be too difficult a concept for guys who are just starting to be able to analyze subtext. They might never have seen an example of a movie or TV show featuring the female gaze, which I think is important for understanding what it means.

All of which makes me even more disappointed, since it sounds like this was a situation in which women were coming in with useful and interesting contributions, and getting yelled at for, essentially, being right.

Digital_Eclipse,
@Digital_Eclipse@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yeah as soon as I kept scrolling upon endless titties and ass, I had to block NSFW fully, which is annoying because sometimes non-porn things are NSFW. But I can’t keep playing whack-a-mole with every single hetero straight-male-gazey porn community.

Also little vent: when I do want to look at porn, can I just say how annoying it is that this same cookie cutter hetero porn always outnumbers everything else 1,000 to 1? I would have to filter out sooo much crap that turns me off to find little bits of what I actually want. Eventually, I gave up on visual porn and have resorted to erotica on ArchiveOfOurOwn, because that’s the only place on the internet with a mostly female gaze it seems.

SomeoneElse,

I’m quite interested in medical things so I didn’t want to block NSFW fully. I blocked the lemmyNSFW instance and then the most prevalent porn communities from elsewhere. Obviously my subscribed feed doesn’t have any porn on it and my “all” feed isn’t swamped. It’s perfectly browsable with NSFW set to “blurred”.

Fosheze,

For now your best bet to remove the porn and keep the rest of the nsfw stuff is probably to just join an instance that defederated the porn instances. I know even the admins on lemmynsfw don’t want their stuff showing up on all but right now there is no way to prevent that in Lemmy. I think there is a PR to fix that being worked on but right now there are far to many parts of Lemmy that are still on fire for that to be a priority.

As far as the porn goes yeah it sucks. I think thats why a lot of guys are so against OF models in general. Most of the most prolific OF models post the same generic straight-male-gazy cookie cutter content and they post it everywhere to reach the widest audience. I’m not judging them for it; they have to do that if they want to make any actual money. Generic straight men are the largest customer base and it’s a competitive market. With amateurs they don’t need to be concerned about attracting the largest audience so they are free to be more varied and not spam their content. Of course actual legitimate verified amateur content is much much more rare but without all the straight-male-gazey OF spam it would be easier to find. A lot of guys seem to take not being able to find their prefered smut personally.

I wish I could find stuff on AO3. I personally can’t enjoy any fanfic which eliminates most of the site. Most of the origional works on there seems to be incest, dead dove, or similar which is not my thing so that eliminates most of what’s left. Then the remaining normal origional works are mostly gay which is just personally not my thing.

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