dandelion (she/her)

Every summer, the neighborhood throws its own smaller-scale LGBTQ+ Pride event separate from the city’s main annual parade taking place this weekend.

It’s just one of more than 200 Pride events taking place in Germany this year.

17 anti-LGBT protests against over 200 Pride events, in case anyone is looking for a “silver lining” to this story. 😊

sorry, are men concerned for their safety dating women such that a gender inverted version of this app makes sense? Your ignorance is what I’m talking about here …

yeah, the app has obvious flaws, and the Rate My Professor style approach succeeds or fails depending on the quality of the users and moderators, and could easily be useless or become toxic - either way, I’m not defending this aspect of the app, it’s clearly problematic.

Regardless I understand why women would want a resource like this, and that doesn’t seem true for those in the comments who see the doxxing as deserved for using this app.

Nevermind the rest of the context, like 4chan being a bastion of right-wing, misogynist trolls who would target an app like this for political reasons.

Lemmy users approving 4chan doxxing women is a major red flag … it might have something to do with how many Lemmy users come here due to being banned for their behavior on Reddit. Reddit isn’t sending their best and brightest, and it shows. (This is just my speculation, though.)

of course, the app has obvious problems, but I don’t see that as justifying the gloating and sense of revenge enjoyment happening.

Instead I see a kind of discontent about women I find concerning, which seems ignorant of the widespread violence women experience or what it’s like for women who take risks when dating men.

Men are not all equally problematic or privileged, but they are generally in a position of power relative to women and are acting like the victims here.

They should direct their discontent to patriarchy which creates the situation where violence against women is dismissed or accepted, and which motivates women to use apps to check if the person they are dating has a history of violent behavior.

Patriarchy which perpetuates the narrative that men are natural predators and women natural prey is what victimizes men here, not the women who rightfully fear and feel victimized by the minority of men who are violent.

The app enables the photos to be run through a reverse image search, enabling them to run a basic background check, check against public sex offender databases, and check for photos that might get flagged as being used in “catfishing” — misrepresenting one’s identity online.

The app also features a “Tea Party Group Chat,” which allows users to directly share information about men, and has a rating function, which allows users to share their experiences with Yelp-style reviews, awarding men a “green flag” or a “red flag.”

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/us/tea-app-dating-privacy-cec

It’s a bit like Rate My Professor, but for dating.

Honestly I cyncially expect this kind of app might inevitably exist for rating people of all genders (or that dating apps might incorporate this Uber-style rating system), but the reason this app exists has directly to do with the violence women face from intimate partners.

The point is that men who are enjoying the doxxing of women who have used this app are ignoring the context, or even have a warped sense of the context, as if this is narrowly about (legitimate) privacy concerns and the harms caused by the app.

Even if the concerns about the app are justified, the revenge enjoyment betrays a view much harder to defend, that all the women who used the app are equally cupable, or that doxxing women using the app is equivalent to women doxxing abusive men through the app.

Men are not all equally privileged, but there is a broad inequality both to how violence is distributed and how that plays out in dating situations. Women are not wrong to fear men. One in three women have experienced sexual or physical violence, most of that violence being perpetuated by men.

Since this is the context for the use of this app, it’s not neutral to doxx its users or to claim it’s fair because men feel (legitimate) concerns about the app’s privacy violations.

There is some of that happening, like when women get together and discuss how they’re being treated it’s “gossip” and implied as immoral.

I think some men might read what you’ve said and think you are denying any toxic gossip exists, it’s important to have nuance and not alienate men who otherwise would be allies, but I think overall your point is well taken.

??

The replies in this thread are disturbing, giving me a sense that Lemmy has a misogyny problem; maybe I was naïve, but I expected outrage about 4chan doxxing women trying to protect one another, instead I see lots of revenge enjoyment as if being doxxed on 4chan is justice for … <checks notes> warning one another about dangerous men they encounter when dating?

The inability to empathize and take seriously the threats posed to women or to understand their motivation to protect one another is alarming.

There is no good faith extended, but also no evidence presented that instead of safety the app was just for gossip, it’s just taken as assumed that women are wrong for using Tea and they all deserve to be doxxed.

from the article:

Several users received an error message that says “The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists,” when they tried to add the phrases to their bios on Thursday. I tested this myself on a new Grindr account, and received the same error message. I was able to add “Zionist” to my profile (without “no”), however, and could also add any phrase I could think of: “no Arabs,” “no Blacks,” “no Palestinians,” “no Muslims,” “no Christians,” “no Jews,” “no trans,” “no Republicans,” “no Democrats,” and so on. “No Zionist[s]” was the only phrase that was blocked in my testing.

that was so hard to believe I checked the article myself, and here’s the quote:

Several users received an error message that says “The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists,” when they tried to add the phrases to their bios on Thursday. I tested this myself on a new Grindr account, and received the same error message. I was able to add “Zionist” to my profile (without “no”), however, and could also add any phrase I could think of: “no Arabs,” “no Blacks,” “no Palestinians,” “no Muslims,” “no Christians,” “no Jews,” “no trans,” “no Republicans,” “no Democrats,” and so on. “No Zionist[s]” was the only phrase that was blocked in my testing.

also, who has the time and money to bail on work, pay upfront for hotel rooms and lawyers, and do this? I mean, someone - but probablynot enough people to make large corporations that worried about it, though I could be wrong about that.

Yes, but we continue to fail to communicate - I was never undermining your point about material commitments, I think that point is well-taken, it’s the conclusions you draw that I disagree with, i.e. in terms of lumping the capitalist class together with members of the working class … When I say Che Guevara was a valuable member of the revolution, it is to highlight an example of how valuable class consciousness can be from members of the working class who are more privileged but are not members of the capitalist class.

I wish to resist the tendency to view someone like a software engineer as equivalent to the capitalist class, just because material incentives exist. A software engineer is not a capitalist, they are working class, and the revolution is served by viewing professional and managerial workers as workers, worthy of being included and incorporated into the revolution. Not because they are that way already, I am agreeing with you by suggesting the opposite, that they aren’t aware of their status as working class because they have some material incentives, so they align with the wrong class interests.

The right response to this, in my opinion, is to work on raising their class consciousness, while it feels like you are suggesting the opposite (essentially lumping them together and furthering the entrenched idea that they are helplessly aligned with the capitalists and thus basically capitalists themselves).

sure, but it doesn’t feel particularly relevant, those people aren’t that different from less economically privileged working class folks who defend capitalism despite gaining no material benefit from doing so. The upper middle classes that align that way are still exploited in their jobs and victims of the system they align with, and that’s no different than everyone else. Division among the working classes doesn’t help our cause, and those middle upper classes would be some of the most valuable allies in cultivating change if their consciousness was raised, since they at least are not completely empty-handed. Think of people like Che Guevara who had such immense influence - he was precisely one of those middle upper class people whose consciousness was raised when he witnessed the American-backed coup in Guatemala.

we’re talking about the average person; the idea that the average person in the US is using their higher income as savings to compensate for lack of social programs is delusional imo, I think most people have significant debt and will just fall between the cracks if they lose their job or get sick and can’t work, etc.

focusing on income is distorting, socially and politically some of the wealthiest and most powerful people have the lowest incomes, it’s just not the best lens of evaluating power or wealth.

as if anyone in America is saving their money 🤣

I don’t really see what is wrong with authentically egalitarian politics, so I’m inclined to think the “center” is just a euphemism for right-wing.

If a left wing movement fails in its egalitarianism, like when the USSR had slave camps, then I think we should not think of that movement as left wing at all, it just fails the definition of being left wing.

The common response to this is that it is a form of no true scotsman fallacy, which I think could be a legitimate concern since you might define a left wing ideal as the definition and anything failing to live up to the perfection of that ideal is not “left”. But on the other hand, I don’t know how else to consider some politics authentically egalitarian and worth supporting and others inauthentic or corrupt and embodying hierarchical or right-wing tendencies. Maybe there is no bright line we can draw or reduce to a logical equation, but I would like to think there is still some value in evaluating which politics to support (i.e. which politics are furthering egalitarian means or ends).

let’s keep it that way, the right-wing should be unwelcome everywhere