MJ calls what happened to her in Zion national park “small ‘T’ trauma”. She knows women have experienced worse from their partners. But she still feels the anger of being left behind on a hike by her now ex. “It brings up stuff in my body that maybe I have not cleared out yet,” she said.
Five years ago, MJ and a new partner – he was not exactly her boyfriend, and the pair were not exclusive – traveled from Los Angeles to Utah for an adventure getaway. MJ, who is 38 and works in PR, was looking forward to exploring Zion’s striking scenery; its vast sandstone canyon and pristine wading trails were on the list. But on the morning of their big hike, MJ was not feeling well. She could not shake the feeling that something was “off”; indeed, MJ would learn on this trip that her partner was seeing other women.
As they made their way up Angel’s Landing, MJ’s partner started walking faster than her. “I could tell it was getting on his nerves that I was slow,” she said. “I was like, ‘Fuck it, just go ahead of me.’” He did without hesitation.
When she caught up at the top of the mountain, they took a picture together. Then her partner hiked down the mountain with a woman he had met on the way up, leaving MJ to finish by herself. They broke up shortly after that trip. (MJ asked to be referred to by her initials for the sake of speaking openly about a past relationship.)
Last month, MJ opened TikTok and heard the phrase “alpine divorce”, a label she now attaches to her experience in Zion.
Why would my response have anything to do with the gender of the person I’m replying to? How do you expect me to even know that information? How do you know I’m not a woman? (I’m not, just pointing out that immediately making this a men vs women thing is bad.)
It’s clear from our comments that OP and myself are women.
You can pretend that lemmy isn’t overwhelmingly male dominated at this time, but I won’t.
I didn’t make this a men vs women thing, it had already become that days ago.
Lemmy is absolutely male dominated, I just don’t like perpetuating the gender war discourse. There are some reasonable takes in here and I would prefer not to have it be drowned out by the “women weak” and “men evil” takes I’ve seen being tossed around.
Then maybe you should be calling out your fellow men rather than pushing back against the few women in here.
I’ve done both. I just have longer comment chains arguing with the women because misogynistic comments have the depth of a puddle and there’s not much more to say to them than “you suck and I hate your entire worldview”.
I also again disagree with the framing that allegiance here should be gender-based.
In this particular thread it’s clear that the men here don’t want to hear why women feel like the alpine divorce issue is a big deal.
There are multiple comments wondering why this is even a topic of conversation.
Women should be allowed to share our stories and not be questioned to death about the ways we could have made those abusive men not abusive.
Yeah I agree that’s very prevalent in the thread
And those comments are heavily upvoted. The community here has made it clear how they feel about women in abusive situations.
The intent of those comments varies wildly from “women should man up” to “why are we assuming women aren’t the more capable hikers” to “why are men even abandoning someone they supposedly want to hike with” etc. I think some have gotten more upvotes than they deserve but not all of them are just saying we shouldn’t be concerned about women being abandoned in the wild by their partners, and those that do say that usually have appropriate replies. What you described is certainly an issue but I don’t think it shows an overwhelmingly mysogynistic sentiment from the lemmy userbase at large.