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xbmcuser 5 hours ago

Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.

laszlojamf 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?" After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<

stinkbeetle 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That old trope is pretty tired ("you can't possibly understand or talk about anything that you have not personally exactly experienced for yourself").

Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it is like to be any other person. You can still have an understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many cases.

The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you might say it is for a child. It can be much less dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted physical contact. I have never in my life "made an account" with identifiable names that are public on the internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank account details, or mother's maiden name on internet forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous forums. I might even be a woman.

An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited disgusting and horrible comments and content of course, not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more than men do. This is not some high mystery or something so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand it. Offline is a completely different story, but online? I can see messages people I know get.

Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and still talk and interact and collaborate and share with people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent threatening things, for having differences of opinion. It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline -- that was dangerous.

AlecSchueler 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

They didn't suggest men couldn't understand, they actually offered a way to help foster understanding by creating the false profile. The ones who won't understand are those who make no effort to understand, and that's quite reasonable to say.

A woman's online safety relative to other spaces also misses the point about their online spaces being less safe than those of men; the suggestion wasn't that online spaces are the absolute most dangerous spaces for them.

That said I would raise the point of how easy it is to dehumanise people online and how easy it is to quickly gather various data like work addresses etc.

fennecbutt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)

Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.

sph an hour ago | parent [-]

I like her take-away from this experiment:

Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a better time than B, or that one needs more support and focus than the other. We’re all in the same, but different, shit.

deaux 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Over the whole population, I bet the difference between sexes is very small when it comes to what % posts online comment. You're saying "most social platforms" - what's the biggest one in the world? Probably still Facebook. Yet I'm fairly sure it has a higher female than male DAU, at least in the West.

r/kpop has 3 million subscribers. Take a look at the most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them have female-dominated comment sections?

> I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.

You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the world the general population lives in, outside your highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're considering only the spaces you have been visiting for most of your life.

ethbr1 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Parent was saying that most men don't understand the amount of casual sexual harassment women are subjected to in unmoderated online spaces -- much more so than men receive.

Which makes me sad.

Apparently Y chromosome + enculturation = prerogative to send unsolicited photos of ones genitalia to random internet strangers.