Sombyr

I spend 1/3rd of that on all of my groceries combined per month. If I was spending that much per week I would be over 1000$ in debt after a single month. Is the average person really that rich? And what food are they buying that they need to spend that much?
This is baffling to me as a poor person.

Men being hurt by women is not an excuse for men to hurt women in return. It is possible for both groups to acknowledge they've been hurt by each other and work toward a solution. Pushing "they hurt me so they deserve to be hurt" helps nobody, especially when both groups are doing it.
That's what I'm complaining about. This mindset that being hurt by men/women completely absolves you of the responsibility to allow them to feel safe. Any space dominated by women will be filled with "Well men are responsible for the majority of violence and sexual assault so actually you deserve to feel like shit." every time a man speaks up. Any space dominated by men will be filled with "Well it makes me feel bad when you discuss the repercussions of your trauma so shut the fuck up." every time a woman speaks up.
We can have a place where both genders can talk freely about the way these things effect them and the changes we need to make to fix them. The issue is people are only pretending to want such a space. What they really want is the other gender to sit down, shut up, and agree with them uncritically. Because in their head they're definitely in the right and they'd rather not be confronted with alternate viewpoints from people who have lived experiences they'll never have.

Worse, as a trans woman, you'd think people would be more willing to accept our viewpoints because trans people are some of few people who can have both lived experiences. But no, our experiences are only valid if they 100% allign with the men or women we share them with. Otherwise we're brushed off like somehow our experience doesn't count because we had the wrong experience to reaffirm their biases.
On Lemmy, dominated by men, when I say I fear women due to my lived childhood experience as a boy, being taken advantage of while I was still too young to fight back, I'm met with outpourings of support. People talk about why "this is why trans people's life experience matters." When I mention later in the same conversation that I also fear men due to my lived experience as a woman and not being able to fight back due the the hormonal muscle loss, suddenly, my experiences don't count anymore. People think they get to pick and choose which of my experiences were valid and valuable and which aren't based on whatever reaffirms what they already believe. And of course you can bet the exact same thing happens the other way around when I tell the same story to women.

But what's going on here isn't something within the control of most people. When you're abused by somebody you don't choose to fear those people, you fear them because that's what your brain is wired to do to avoid repeated trauma. Like I said, therapy is the solution, but only part of the solution. The other part is fixing the issue causing the trauma in the first place. Men aren't being victimized by the women who fear them, they're being victimized by the other men who caused that fear.
And I want to be clear, because I've realized at this point that this isn't obvious anymore in today's world, fear is not an excuse for misandry. At the same time, fear of men is not misandry. Somebody saying they'd rather pick the bear should be met with "oh, we should fix the issue causing them to fear men more than bears," not "oh, they should fear bears more."
I also want to be clear that this isn't even a gendered issue despite the fact that it's been made into one. A man who's been abused by women and would rather pick the bear should also be met with compassion and "how can we reduce the number of female abusers?" I've actually been abused by women too. In fact, more often than I have men. I want to be clear that even though this discussion has been about men specifically, I feel the exact same way about women. That we still need to be compassionate to their victims and accept that the people who traumatized them are the problem, not their trauma.
Fearing somebody is not an action you perform, it's a state you're in.

I hope this doesn't sound aggressive, but unless you're a man, you never had to venture very far on Lemmy to experience misogyny. If you ever mentioned you were a woman in any of the major instances and communities in any context except "I'm a woman and here's what I don't like about other women," you were gonna get misogynistic replies and a shocking amount of downvotes. It's just what happens when any internet community is dominated by a single gender I guess.
Lemmy's always been great about almost every other social issue, except sometimes trans issues and neurodivergence if you stepped out of the communities for it, but women's issues have always been an absolute train wreck around here.

I realized this a long time ago when I made a simple complaint that I thought women's issues were downplayed a lot here, and in response I was downvoted, ridiculed, people demanded sources for my claims then claimed my sources were invalid for whatever reason they could pull out of their ass, and one person even, and trigger warning on this, told me I should die giving birth to a rapists baby.
I've even picked up a downvote stalker during the course of this whole bear thing. Same time every day somebody goes through and downvotes every single new thing on my profile.

So yeah, Lemmy's never been a great place for women. I only continue to participate because I'm disabled and have so few connections to the outside world that I'll take anything now.

How about you miss the entire point and get aggressive for no reason?
Seriously, what kind of response to "I've been traumatized by men" is "you should traumatized by bears too?"

IRL, sure, but on Lemmy that's not what's happening. If you talk about trauma at the hands of women on Lemmy, you get outpourings of support and people sharing their experiences as well. Which is good. That should be happening everywhere.
The problem is you can't do the same thing on Lemmy if you were traumatized by men. Instead, you get down voted to hell, get statistics quoted at you as if that'll magically fix it, and when surprise, still traumatized after the stats, now you must be a misandrist so your trauma is invalid anyway.

I was just hoping one place would exist on the internet where men's and women's issues could get equal screen time and be respected just as much, but no, the genders have to be treated like sports teams and if you support one apparently you have to hate the other. I just don't get why people are like this.

You're free to disagree, but for me and many others, I've been through both, and I'm definitely waaaay more scared of being sexually assaulted again than being beaten half to death again. They have very different effects on your psyche. Physical violence I react far more with anger than fear, even if I was terrified in the moment. When it looks like it's happening again, my brain says "Fight back." When I'm afraid of sexual trauma being relived, my brain says "Escape, now. Can't escape? Submit. Maybe that way they won't kill you too at least."

I agree. I never said it was a good mindset. Therapy is definitely something we need to learn to deal with this and think logically. The issue is so absurdly many women have been traumatized by men that the mental health support systems would be so overloaded that it's just a fact that only a miniscule fraction of women would ever be able to receive help, even if we had absolutely perfect support systems.

So the only solution is to prevent them from getting traumatized in the first place. But the entirety of Lemmy seems really resistant to that conversation. Would rather quote statistics about "oh the average man isn't likely to assault you" than to accept that the ones who do are dealing enough damage that the problem needs to be dealt with regardless of what the average man is doing.

There's a serious difference in the level of trauma between these examples, and the level of exposure to the dangers of the counter. Sexual trauma is a hell of a lot more scarring on your psyche than simply being beaten. In addition, at least in the US we're exposed to gun violence every day as opposed to basically never for bear attacks. Even in other countries with better gun control, you're dramatically more likely to hear about somebody being shot than you are to hear about somebody being mauled by a bear. Not only that, but it's really easy to process "get shot, you're dead." It's not as easy to make yourself believe you're definitely gonna be killed by an animal that has whole guides written on how to survive them.
Those two things combined make your example far from comparable. In addition, I'm not saying in any way that the fear is justified nor that no attempt should be made to fix it, what I'm trying to point out us that people don't realize how intense a fear it really is when they get offended at people making this choice.

Obviously, therapy is important to learning how to handle that fear and think more logically, but if every woman who needs it sought therapy for this, there just aren't enough therapists in the entire world to handle the load. Not even close. So a bigger part of the solution is, y'know, making sure women aren't getting traumatized in the first place. But everybody here wants to skip that part for some reason.

I'm aware, and thanks for the advice. I've experienced a little of this already since I've been applying the advice I've gotten here. Luckily, so far, most have been willing to put some effort in now that I've shown I'm willing to as well. It's easy enough to just not talk to the people who won't, because they're already not trying.

As far as I understand, people generally assume I'm being rude and dismissive, but they don't tell me that, they just kinda stop talking. Then they go and ask my friend why I'm like that, where she explains to them that I'm not being rude, I just have difficulty communicating, at which point they usually accept that, but still don't talk to me much because I'm just too difficult to get close to. Or at least they think I am, because they don't realize I'm enjoying their company because I don't express it, because I just assume they'd know because I'm paying attention to them.
That's what I'm working on. Showing people that I'm genuinely enjoying their company, that when they ask me questions I'm happy to answer, and so on. So it's not so much a problem of people not being willing to adapt to me, but the fact that they as much as me don't know how to adapt, so I need to meet them in the middle.