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

  • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    37·
    2 months ago

    Maybe this is too complicated, but I like the idea of a formal process for people to educate themselves and self crit. Maybe first time an offender catches a temp ban and needs to reflect and post upon returning identifying what unexamined biases led them into error in the first place? Just a thought

    • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      2 months ago

      is there a reeducation comm? could have disclaimers to keep it safe for anyone who might get triggered or adversely affected.

      like a quarantine zone of sorts… idk just thinking aloud about your idea

    • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      23·
      2 months ago

      i actually think this is genuinely a better response than permabans. after all, someone can simply make a new account and choose to be silent about their awful opinions (they could still do this regardless, admittedly) if banned, but being forced to reckon with one’s mistakes is the good shit that personal growth is made of.

      • Dessa [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        The flip-side of this is that somebody may not have the tools to make a meaningful self-crit, and may either end up just saying what the mod wants them to say, or internalizing the wrong lesson. A possible solution would be to have them enter a dialogue or be assigned a task by a mod, that that’s increasing the workload and emotional labor of modstaff

    • christian [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      I definitely have blind spots and would benefit from guidance on how to be better.

      I’m ashamed of this, but I’ll share: I caught a temp ban from ml for misogyny a few months ago. I had already been in a place of bad self-loathing for a while and when I got the ban I basically checked out from online posting everywhere for a month or two. I PMed the user an apology afterwards. Thread was here.

      I didn’t even realize it was problematic until I logged in the next day and saw the ban. In my mind I use “girl” in colloquial speech with friends, so if I’m joking around with someone I think of it as a similar situation. I normally say “dude” but I know “dude” can be considered male-coded so I’ve been trying to work on that when a stranger has female pronouns displayed. In this case it really wasn’t better. When I re-read it, if she didn’t believe I was joking around it would come across as misogynistic, the joke was one-sided. Keep trying to edit this to make it sound less bad and rationalize my way out, but I fucked up.

      • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        It is the work of a lifetime to unlearn all the shit that the patriarchy puts into our heads. That’s kind of why I like the idea of a self crit process. You can’t work on mysogynistic attitudes if you’re not even aware that you have them.

        • christian [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          2 months ago

          I’m thinking more seriously about this and I don’t think there’s a way to do this that doesn’t just end up with performative forced apologies. Obviously bad views and behaviors can be changed and worked on, but very often coming to terms with things is a hard and long process, and asking someone to speed it up can actually counteract positive progress by creating resentment.

          I think a better option than requiring self-crit is just having a comm for “help me work on this shit” so that it can be more voluntary, but still easy for everyone else to block. Maybe temp bans could be for everywhere except there, but with no obligation to use it, and bad-faith use would extend the ban length (or other options). Obviously though it would require a lot of moderation work though to not devolve into a bunch of jackasses reinforcing their own shitty beliefs. Very easy for me to volunteer this great idea that would be a lot of work to implement and maintain and also I’m not qualified to do that work.

          At some point I came to terms with the realization that when I ask friends or family for help, or even talk with a counselor, I stubbornly fight with every suggestion I’m given, and then in the coming days the words start to sink in and I consider the ideas more seriously and usually realize my thinking was bad. I have a lot of love for the people in my life who accept this and still try to help me. The process is who I am and it works for me, but it makes it harder to inquire about anything potentially inflammatory, because I don’t want people to see the stubbornness if I’m defending a repugnant idea, even if I really need to hear the arguments against my thinking. And if I still believe it, it’s really hard to know if my rationale is actually repugnant or not without another voice.

          Like I have a couple recurring thoughts that I’d like to ask about and have challenged, find out if they’re well-founded or if they’re bigoted, reflect and fix if they are, but if they are problematic and do need to be corrected, I know that I’ll have at least a day where I’m still trying to defend them anyway. The time spent afterwards ruminating on a discussion like that would allow me to fix the issue. But, fragile ego and everything, if this is a public discussion and I get called out on being an asshole/bigot, the result is I ruminate more on my own identity and character. When I start thinking deeply on “am I a bad person?”, I get completely sidetracked from the thoughts I need to be having to correct the original belief I still need to get sorted out. I’m not pretending that’s a healthy way of thinking or that I shouldn’t fix it, just saying that I’ve been trying to fix it for a long while now and still am not there.

          Basically, having a space where I can ask “is this belief repugnant?” and a day or two where I’m allowed try to justify my reasoning would do wonders for identifying and correcting problematic thoughts I still have, but it requires the listeners to assume good faith (an absurdly gargantuan ask when talking about randos on the internet spouting offensive nonsense), and requires a lot of effort from moderation on top of that.