I feel like every time there’s new drama about ashten/woem.men I go through the same cycle

new accusation drops “surely thats not true, it’s probably just ashten getting targeted”
evidence starts circulating “ok, maybe this is worth looking into, but I’ll keep my distance”
a day or so passes “ok maybe I should stay away from ashten, she doesn’t seem to be as good as I originally thought”
after a few weeks to months “hmm, nothings happened with ashten lately, maybe I’ll give her another chance”

I usually don’t like to jump to conclusions, and when all of a sudden one of your acquaintances gets accused of something major like this it can be hard to believe, especially if you don’t know them super closely. But this time I think I’ve had enough. Usually I’d just go, “oh it doesn’t really involve me, whatever, just maybe stay away from ashten” but now I’ve seen that some of my mutuals have been affected by ashten’s poor choices, in some exceedingly negative ways, that I should have seen earlier (and I’m sorry for that).

In any case, I feel like a lot of the problems with woem.men are simply problems with ashten that unfortunately end up affecting the entire site. I have almost never heard an actual complaint about the users of woem.men, except for the groomers that ashten evidently enabled.

I really do wonder if it would be better for the woem.men community as a whole if ashten stepped down from running woem.men and was no longer the “face” of woem.men.

I know she has said she doesn’t want to because “it’s what’s best for the community” but what’s best for the community is for them to have a safe place that isn’t constantly being thrown around because of her actions. Having an enabler as the head of the instance will not make the problems go away. There needs to be a major change in leadership or we’re just going to keep having these problems.