Comment by stinkbeetle
12 hours ago
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.
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.
No you're wrong, poster I replied to explicitly asserted that "men really don't understand" it. And I that doesn't miss the point, you claim it does but you aren't actually addressing any of what I wrote.
Most men don't understand what women have to go through in everyday interactions and most women don't understand the same for men. And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional problem proves my point I feel.
You're missing the point, and that's because you changed the goalposts from "men really don't understand" to "can't possibly understand"; a difference that in this context is significant.
The OP was saying that men generally don't have the awareness of how women have it in the online world. The lack of understanding is because of not knowing about it, not because of a lack of capacity or empathy.
In fact the post suggest that doing an experiment to get such awareness would help in getting the understanding.
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