A few days ago I saw an Instagram reel of a young woman talking about how she had been raped six years ago, struggled with thoughts of suicide afterwards, but managed to rebuild her life again. Among the comments – the majority of which were from men – were things like “Well at least you had some”, “No way, she’s unrapeable”, “Hope you didn’t talk this much when it happened”, “Bro could have picked a better option.” Reading those comments, which had thousands of likes and many boys agreeing with them, made me feel sick.
I know when someone claims to experience harm from something that’s not automatic justification for us to care about that harm or to think their experience of that harm is reasonable, but I don’t think people realize how these comments constitute a legitimate and severe harm to people - not just for promoting a kind of “rape culture”, but I mean the harm victims experience when they encounter this stuff online.
Given how many of us have been sexually assaulted and harassed, the combination of the violence and comments like this in support for that violence amounts to a kind of “terrorism”. I could talk more about the PTSD that can develop and the way people underestimate how awful PTSD triggers are, etc. but it’s almost pointless for people who don’t already have a traumatic history and have some amount of first-hand experience to draw from.
Regardless, I think the immediate solution for victims is to abandon social media - do not use Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc., and to instead participate in and cultivate online communities that take seriously the need to protect users from these kinds of harms.
Lemmy is broadly not a safe space for women (it feels actively misogynistic), but I would like to see some lemmy sub-communities, e.g. instances like Blahaj, develop and apply moderation policies to protect women and victims of assault, etc.
There is a lot to work out there, but it seems like a potential starting point.
Hmm, I’ve not experienced misogny so far but that might be because I have a nice long list of keywords that I block. So any posts or communities with those are a-gone. In addition, I’d recommend to make an account on Blåhaj zone (either Lemmy or Piefed is good really), as it has a strong policy against misogny and queerphobia.
In case anyone’s curious, here’s a non-exhaustive list with reasons included. Will add a ‘Done’ below this line when I’m finished.
CW, some parts may contain triggering words.
Breitbart
Fox News
Sputnik
Russian Today
New York Times (made misogynistic headlines)
Blocked communities
most of these were blocked because of ties to radicalism, others were just too spammy
ca_firearms_rights @ sh.itjust.works
gegenstrom @ feddit.org
genealogy @ lemmy.world
news @ lemmy.world
politicalmemes @ lemmy.world
politics @ lemmy.world
politics @ piefed.social
conservative @ lemm.ee
hugeboobs @ lemmynsfw.com (don’t mind tits, just not the spam)
maga.place @ lemmy.world
I prefer to just call them liberals, mostly because the grand majority of right wingers are just libs (specifying right wing is uneeded because all liberals are right wing)
“conservatives” = conservative-liberals (economically liberal and socially conservative)
“libertarians” = liberals (I mean they’re literally just classical liberals)
“liberals” = neoliberals (an inherently right wing ideology)
“social democrats” = neoliberalism (but with a fancy coat of paint)
I say “right-wing libertarian” because the term “libertarian” was coined by a French anarchist in the 19th century, and AFAIK, outside the US the term “libertarian” still has that left-wing connotation and meaning. So it’s at least useful to clarify by libertarian I mean conservative liberals and not communists / anarchists.
In the US, the conservative or right-wing liberals adopted the term “libertarian” around the mid 20th century to distinguish themselves from social liberals, and since then the term has just come to mean conservative liberal as you mention - I don’t know many people in the US aware of other meanings of the term “libertarian”.
As an aside, I’m not as willing as you to paint social democrats or social liberals as “an inherently right-wing ideology” because we would get into trouble with the fact that social liberalism represents the majority of what we might call “leftist”, particularly on social policies.
This disagreement isn’t really about the fact that social liberalism has right-wing positions, we agree that on the issue of property rights for example social liberals are right-wing, but I’m not sure it’s as helpful as it at first seems to portray social liberalism in such a reductivist way, i.e. as being simply just another solidly right-wing movement (esp. historically this would be harder to argue, considering even the very origin of the term “left” refers to liberal revolutionary sympathizers in the French National Assembly who sat to the left of the assembly’s chair as compared to the royalists who sat to the right).
That said, I completely understand the reason this has become such a strongly harped-upon piece of dogma for leftists, because liberalism is so total and dominating particularly in the US, it’s hard for people in the US to understand that social liberalism has any right-wing aspect, and we’ve come to the point now where progressives and social liberals in the US will even call themselves socialists, sort of owning the lies that the Right in America tells about them.
Also, I think on a psychological level, a lot of leftists at least in the US start as social liberals, and that process of radicalizing to the left is accompanied by feeling betrayed by liberalism, since it might be said that leftist politics is more “pure” and in accord with the values that social liberals hold and espouse. So for these people, there is a stronger desire to identify as a leftist and not a liberal precisely because of the discontent and betrayal they come to associate with liberalism.
From my point of view leftism inherently means revolutionary and revolutionary is the opposite of reactionary. Supporting capitalism and private property in any capacity is inherently reactionary as is bigotry and class collaborationism. It is therefore impossible for a leftist to also be reactionary or hold significant reactionary positions (if they did they wouldnt be a leftist. Back to my main point it doesnt matter if someone is a “libertarian”, “social liberal” or “conservative”, the positions many hold on Tea is inherently reactionary and in my opinion thats all I really need to know.
Hmmmm. I mean, Marx himself wrote in favor of reforms and did not advocate this kind of revolution vs reform delineation you are articulating.
I also don’t know how you would think of someone as being left or right in a post-revolutionary world … would this distinction still be relevant? What about in the USSR 20 - 40 years after the revolution, who was “left” and who was “right” e.g. in the context of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956?
And are all revolutions “left”? The French liberal revolution was liberal, but also a revolution, so was it left or right? If all liberal revolutions are reactionary or not leftist, what about the Haitian liberal revolution, which was driven by liberalism but also anti-colonial & anti-slavery movements?
Also, the reactionary opinions on Tea don’t really seem motivated by class or revolutionary concerns (at least not directly), they are more about the personal frustrations men experience in dating and finding a partner, and the way this opens the door to a kind of “revenge” satisfaction when women they deem as doing something immoral get victimized. Particularly I think these men see women as doing something immoral by talking about them behind their backs with other women, men variously describing this as gossip or even as a privacy breach (since the men’s photos and information are collected without their consent and then put together in profiles for other women to rate and comment on). So when women have their information and photos released against their wishes, it feels more like justice to those men than an injustice.
Either way, I wouldn’t say this is a reactionary response in the sense that it resists revolution or supports the ruling classes, except in the most generic ways (i.e. how patriarchy has traditionally been a component and tool of class oppression, racism, etc.; and to whatever extent these men are falling prey to the structural logics of patriarchy, they are participants in it - though I will point out women are no different in this regard).
From my view left/right has little to do with revolution itself; instead, the left embodies values like egalitarianism and liberty while the right embodies status quo hierarchy and tradition.
To that end, the Democrats might be “left” on issues like gay rights while being very much “right” on issues like immigration.
I know it’s written by a social liberal, but you might checkout Left and Right by Norberto Bobbio, as I think it has been influential in the literature on how terms like left and right have been used and developed.
I’m not sure I full agree with Bobbio, as I’m inclined to think liberalism mostly deserves to still be viewed as a right-wing ideology (even if liberalism has evolved and social liberalism has incorporated leftist social movements). It’s hard not to see this as the overall situation given the way capital accumulation happened under colonialism and imperialism, and the unwillingness to address those injustices and inequalities by liberals due to “property rights”; as well as the general way that the concept of capital and the way “private property” has been expanded to include far more than personal property, it all strike me as facilitating inherently authoritarian and hierarchical ends.
might also x-post to !feminism@beehaw.org
EDIT:
I know when someone claims to experience harm from something that’s not automatic justification for us to care about that harm or to think their experience of that harm is reasonable, but I don’t think people realize how these comments constitute a legitimate and severe harm to people - not just for promoting a kind of “rape culture”, but I mean the harm victims experience when they encounter this stuff online.
Given how many of us have been sexually assaulted and harassed, the combination of the violence and comments like this in support for that violence amounts to a kind of “terrorism”. I could talk more about the PTSD that can develop and the way people underestimate how awful PTSD triggers are, etc. but it’s almost pointless for people who don’t already have a traumatic history and have some amount of first-hand experience to draw from.
Regardless, I think the immediate solution for victims is to abandon social media - do not use Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc., and to instead participate in and cultivate online communities that take seriously the need to protect users from these kinds of harms.
Lemmy is broadly not a safe space for women (it feels actively misogynistic), but I would like to see some lemmy sub-communities, e.g. instances like Blahaj, develop and apply moderation policies to protect women and victims of assault, etc.
There is a lot to work out there, but it seems like a potential starting point.
Hmm, I’ve not experienced misogny so far but that might be because I have a nice long list of keywords that I block. So any posts or communities with those are a-gone. In addition, I’d recommend to make an account on Blåhaj zone (either Lemmy or Piefed is good really), as it has a strong policy against misogny and queerphobia.
In case anyone’s curious, here’s a non-exhaustive list with reasons included. Will add a ‘Done’ below this line when I’m finished. CW, some parts may contain triggering words.
Done!
Keywords
Reason: Fascism, Authoritarianism
Trump
Elon
Musk
ICE
Putin
Republican
Israel
IDF
fascist
Kirk
Corporate
Bitcoin
Crypto
Luigi
AI
Misogny/phobic
rapist
tranny
alpha
Blocked sites
Breitbart
Fox News
Sputnik
Russian Today
New York Times (made misogynistic headlines)
Blocked communities
most of these were blocked because of ties to radicalism, others were just too spammy
ca_firearms_rights @ sh.itjust.works
gegenstrom @ feddit.org
genealogy @ lemmy.world
news @ lemmy.world
politicalmemes @ lemmy.world
politics @ lemmy.world
politics @ piefed.social
conservative @ lemm.ee
hugeboobs @ lemmynsfw.com (don’t mind tits, just not the spam)
maga.place @ lemmy.world
Blocked Users (spaced as to not ping them)
AlHouthi4President @ lemmy.ml
Jemmy_GPT2 @ sh.itjust.works
RandyChadson_GPT2 @ sh.itjustworks
it really came to my awareness when 4chan doxxed Tea app users, and the average Lemmy response was along the lines of “good!”
Of course it was mostly .world users
absolutely, or certain more right-wing libertarian programming / tech instances
I prefer to just call them liberals, mostly because the grand majority of right wingers are just libs (specifying right wing is uneeded because all liberals are right wing)
I say “right-wing libertarian” because the term “libertarian” was coined by a French anarchist in the 19th century, and AFAIK, outside the US the term “libertarian” still has that left-wing connotation and meaning. So it’s at least useful to clarify by libertarian I mean conservative liberals and not communists / anarchists.
In the US, the conservative or right-wing liberals adopted the term “libertarian” around the mid 20th century to distinguish themselves from social liberals, and since then the term has just come to mean conservative liberal as you mention - I don’t know many people in the US aware of other meanings of the term “libertarian”.
As an aside, I’m not as willing as you to paint social democrats or social liberals as “an inherently right-wing ideology” because we would get into trouble with the fact that social liberalism represents the majority of what we might call “leftist”, particularly on social policies.
This disagreement isn’t really about the fact that social liberalism has right-wing positions, we agree that on the issue of property rights for example social liberals are right-wing, but I’m not sure it’s as helpful as it at first seems to portray social liberalism in such a reductivist way, i.e. as being simply just another solidly right-wing movement (esp. historically this would be harder to argue, considering even the very origin of the term “left” refers to liberal revolutionary sympathizers in the French National Assembly who sat to the left of the assembly’s chair as compared to the royalists who sat to the right).
That said, I completely understand the reason this has become such a strongly harped-upon piece of dogma for leftists, because liberalism is so total and dominating particularly in the US, it’s hard for people in the US to understand that social liberalism has any right-wing aspect, and we’ve come to the point now where progressives and social liberals in the US will even call themselves socialists, sort of owning the lies that the Right in America tells about them.
Also, I think on a psychological level, a lot of leftists at least in the US start as social liberals, and that process of radicalizing to the left is accompanied by feeling betrayed by liberalism, since it might be said that leftist politics is more “pure” and in accord with the values that social liberals hold and espouse. So for these people, there is a stronger desire to identify as a leftist and not a liberal precisely because of the discontent and betrayal they come to associate with liberalism.
From my point of view leftism inherently means revolutionary and revolutionary is the opposite of reactionary. Supporting capitalism and private property in any capacity is inherently reactionary as is bigotry and class collaborationism. It is therefore impossible for a leftist to also be reactionary or hold significant reactionary positions (if they did they wouldnt be a leftist. Back to my main point it doesnt matter if someone is a “libertarian”, “social liberal” or “conservative”, the positions many hold on Tea is inherently reactionary and in my opinion thats all I really need to know.
Hmmmm. I mean, Marx himself wrote in favor of reforms and did not advocate this kind of revolution vs reform delineation you are articulating.
I also don’t know how you would think of someone as being left or right in a post-revolutionary world … would this distinction still be relevant? What about in the USSR 20 - 40 years after the revolution, who was “left” and who was “right” e.g. in the context of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956?
And are all revolutions “left”? The French liberal revolution was liberal, but also a revolution, so was it left or right? If all liberal revolutions are reactionary or not leftist, what about the Haitian liberal revolution, which was driven by liberalism but also anti-colonial & anti-slavery movements?
Also, the reactionary opinions on Tea don’t really seem motivated by class or revolutionary concerns (at least not directly), they are more about the personal frustrations men experience in dating and finding a partner, and the way this opens the door to a kind of “revenge” satisfaction when women they deem as doing something immoral get victimized. Particularly I think these men see women as doing something immoral by talking about them behind their backs with other women, men variously describing this as gossip or even as a privacy breach (since the men’s photos and information are collected without their consent and then put together in profiles for other women to rate and comment on). So when women have their information and photos released against their wishes, it feels more like justice to those men than an injustice.
Either way, I wouldn’t say this is a reactionary response in the sense that it resists revolution or supports the ruling classes, except in the most generic ways (i.e. how patriarchy has traditionally been a component and tool of class oppression, racism, etc.; and to whatever extent these men are falling prey to the structural logics of patriarchy, they are participants in it - though I will point out women are no different in this regard).
From my view left/right has little to do with revolution itself; instead, the left embodies values like egalitarianism and liberty while the right embodies status quo hierarchy and tradition.
To that end, the Democrats might be “left” on issues like gay rights while being very much “right” on issues like immigration.
I know it’s written by a social liberal, but you might checkout Left and Right by Norberto Bobbio, as I think it has been influential in the literature on how terms like left and right have been used and developed.
I’m not sure I full agree with Bobbio, as I’m inclined to think liberalism mostly deserves to still be viewed as a right-wing ideology (even if liberalism has evolved and social liberalism has incorporated leftist social movements). It’s hard not to see this as the overall situation given the way capital accumulation happened under colonialism and imperialism, and the unwillingness to address those injustices and inequalities by liberals due to “property rights”; as well as the general way that the concept of capital and the way “private property” has been expanded to include far more than personal property, it all strike me as facilitating inherently authoritarian and hierarchical ends.
Hey now, I’m sure at least half of it was .sh.itjust.works! After all, they are just dotworld but more so.
I noticed them as well, also feddit.org