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obligatory bear post
(lemmy.cafe)
is the man or bear thing rhetorically or optically the perfect feminist meme that is beyond criticism? no.
but is it leaps and bounds better at getting men to understand the material consequences of patriarchy on the physical and emotional health of women than that stupid “kill all men” meme from last decade? definitely.
I guess. It invoked some emotion for sure, something that research and policies usually don't. For me, I still don't know what to do differently. I've heard the statistics and it's scary and sad. I want women to be safe and equal and all that. But what's the plan here, which path leads to a different world? Does it help if I just sit around and feel bad about myself? I don't think so. It just alienates me from half of the human population. But what actually helps? The message I receive is mostly just "feel bad about yourself."
It helps when people aren't chronically alienated from one another. Growing up in a big family or in a neighborhood where you've got friends all along the block helps people to get to know and empathize with one another at an early age. You get to move through your moody adolescent phase surrounded by peers and see the real social consequences of being an asshole up front, rather than having anonymous channels through which you can vent your worst impulses without consequence.
Real actual socializing with other human beings. Empathy is just another kind of muscle. You gotta use it if you want to do any kind of heavy lifting. Otherwise, the occasional emotional contact with another person feels impossibly hard.
Do you really think someone's going to have the answer to a question like that from a bear vs man meme lemmy thread?
One of the things I find so irritating about social media is that people pretend like we can use it to solve all of the world's issues when in obvious reality if you think about it for a moment it's just a time wasting spot for people to go chatter about things (and apparently get big angry a lot of the time).
Social media is a snake eating its own tail, or perhaps more accurately, a thing that disappears up its own butthole.
It's similar to how Hollywood perceives itself at awards shows as being the center of the universe. Changing the world into a better one isn't making a movie that blows peoples' minds, having a music festival, and it (to an even lesser extent) isn't writing up a catchy Lemmy / Mastodon / Facebook / Xitter / Blog post.
These things can be inspiring. Creativity is fun, and media can feel cathartic to the audience...but ultimately media in and of itself tends to change very little.