Hi comrades, want to give you all an informal update on the discussions around the site’s misogyny problems that’ve been happening over the last several days. I wanna make sure you know that the admin/mod team has seen all of that discourse and we’ve been actively discussing solutions in the matrix mod chat. We’re taking this shit very seriously and acknowledge that we haven’t used a heavy enough hand on misogynistic rhetoric. As some of you saw we nuked that cheating thread from a couple weeks ago and handed out temp bans to the most egregious offenders. Idk how that was allowed to run it’s course but we apologize for that oversight. We’re going to do better.

We’ve come up with some ideas for how to improve this part of the site culture and we want to get suggestions from y’all as well, since the alarm was sounded on this by our beautiful c/traa posters to begin with. Our ideas so far include:

  1. A zero-tolerance policy towards any even remotely misogynistic/patriarchal posts or comments, as too much has slipped through the cracks on that, establishing a clear protocol for bans for violating rules against misogyny, and ideally tracking repeat offenders in a way that makes deciding a course of action easy when they reoffend.

  2. Uphold TC69 thought by starting up a book club (and hopefully more to follow) on feminist theory and encouraging mass participation, particularly from the he/him’s on the site. “The Will to Change” by bell hooks has been suggested by multiple people as a great starting point but please feel free to suggest any other works.

  3. Relaunching /c/menby with a trusted educated mod team and a specific focus on countering mainstream narratives about masculinity, relationships and sex that breed reactionary, patriarchal attitudes

  4. Encouraging [namely femme] participation in /c/womenby and taking steps to revitalize that sub as an excellent source of discussion on feminism and intersectionality

  5. Holding another mod drive to get more folks into mod positions in our communities who can help weed out reactionary attitudes

  6. Encouraging users to use the report button often on any post that seems even remotely sus, with the promise that no one’s going to be punished for “report abuse” for reporting posts in obvious good faith

Please let me know your thoughts on the above or any other ideas you have for making the site better, safer and more inclusive for our femme comrades. Once we’ve fully hammered out plans and updated policy we plan to make an announcement post highlighting these changes for the whole userbase. Thank you all for being here and being who you are feminism trans-heart

  • belligerentkitten [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    22·
    1 month ago

    yeah this has kinda been a problem for me my whole life tbh. i’ve spent like 15+ years in trans communities and reinventing the gender binary is something i’ve seen happen repeatedly, with enbies just kind of expected to go along with whatever is the opposite of their assigned gender. tho these comms aren’t trans exclusive they do kind of have the same effect of just recreating the gender binary, and splitting up the enby community along birth assignment lines.

    i also think it misunderstands the reason to make a group for women and enbies - to be clear i think this comm in particular is fine. it’s just somewhat undermined by the existence of c/menby. given that we live in a patriarchy, women and nonbinary people have legitimate reason to organise with each other against patriarchy n misogyny. such a group for men and enbies just doesn’t make sense. we should not exactly be organising against women. and yeah, i know c/menby is not (supposed to be) anti-woman, it’s (supposed to be) for them to educate themselves. but in that context, enbies are politically aligned with women and should be actively included in the space rather than just passively jammed in.

    we should keep c/womenby, change c/menby to just like c/men(i’ve reconsidered my name recommendation, see edit) or something to that effect, if it can be maintained as a space for deconstructing patriarchy rather than generating toxic masculinity, and maybe a nonbinary space of our own.

    EDIT: I think the community should be called c/deconstructing_masculinity to make it harder for it to turn into a breeding ground for misogyny.