The owner has locked it to only allow them to post. That’s fine, but all posts they’ve made so far they’ve also locked at zero comments to disallow the community to interact with those posts.
This goes against the purpose of lemmy(grad) in my opinion which is interaction and discussion. If the person behind this wants to post static things without feedback they’d be better served by hosting a website and hoping people stumble on it.
It’s one thing for admins to lock posts at their discretion because of an nonconstructive turn to discussion or because it’s an announcement and they don’t want fighting over their rules that they’ve decided on. Likewise for mods to not allow comments on a rules post or shut down discussion when it becomes unproductive.
The content is also somewhat sketchy feeling. I admit it’s true that there can be issues with female on male relationship violence not being taken seriously but such statistics are often pushed to silence and tamp down on the overwhelming societal issue which is in fact male on female violence within and outside of relationships. To shout down feminists with “men can be raped too” is like shouting down black lives matter with “all lies matter” or “white people experience police violence too”.
Honestly it rings alarm bells. There’s nothing wrong about talking about gendered violence towards men and boys, but this site seems to frame it in terms of persecution, in terms of there being some sort of feminist agenda to silence and shut down discussion on these matters.
Take for example this link from the blog this community models itself on: https://thetinmen.blog/we-are-not-violent/
In it they feature researchers who claim they received bomb threats, had their dogs shot, were shouted down by feminists. All of this rings alarm bells in my head that these people are likely reactionaries using progressive language as a cover. It uses the classic reactionary tact of claiming repression. They claim to have studies showing female on male violence in families being equal to male on female violence. Which is on its face a dishonest framing. Sure women may shout (verbal abuse) and with dishonest twisting of terminology you can over-count aggressive but not actually violent or dangerous behavior and use it to try and equal out men who give women black eyes. But you can’t hide the homicide rates and those show us that women and girls are far more frequently murdered by men and boys than the inverse.
Once more, it’s not that gendered violence towards men and boys doesn’t exist, it’s that gendered violence towards women and girls is much more severe, prevalent, has within our lifetime been the subject of tv-tropes and jokes (slapping a “hysterical woman” to calm her down as just one example) and has more severe consequences such as girls and women being attacked, seriously injured, and even killed.
Rape against men and boys is unacceptable, coercion for sex is unacceptable. But the fact is men and boys are the overwhelming committers in volume of sexual violence on women and girls that is actually physically violent, forceful, etc. Men for the most part merely feel a social pressure on their status to agree to sex with women, that they’ll be less of a man if they don’t agree. Every request from men and boys towards women and girls carries an implicit fall-back of violence, even lethal levels of it for rejecting a male, for denying them sex, intimacy, a relationship, etc and women and girls live with that every day, every encounter in the back of their minds. While such violence towards men and boys does not define their lived experiences, they do not naturally due to a felt prevalence assume that denying a girl intimacy, a relationship, or sex will likely result in her escalating to violence and the potential of bodily harm and danger.
Not taking that reality, that material and historical reality into account when discussing gendered violence makes one dishonest.
The site is evasive in what it talks about, it frames itself as for progressive rights of men and boys and what woman can oppose that? Not I. I’m all for men having conversations about healthy masculinity, reform, male solidarity that isn’t to the exclusion of women but looks like support for men by men. But it feels off and the fact the owner has locked any ability to discuss it also adds to the ringing alarm bells. Truthfully if they hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have spent 10 minutes looking over a few things there and realizing it felt sketchy.
It seems like a lot of this sketchy stuff is papered over and hidden between bland, no analysis, uninteresting, unenlightening, surface level feminist-friendly stuff like roe-v-wade being overturned being bad but then just throwing some statistics out and not really getting into any analysis or insight.
Here’s an example of more problematic stuff: https://thetinmen.blog/just-be-you/
“I want to define myself by who I am. Not as a feminist, an MRA or egalitarian, as left, or right, liberal or conservative.”
It’s alarming that MRA is mentioned as a possibility as if egalitarian which is used by the manosphere to disguise their hatred of women.
And one last one: https://thetinmen.blog/soft-power-and-the-henpecked-husband/
Which seems to downplay the power and reality of patriarchy.
I don’t want to get too into the weeds of the content and it’s merits. Because even if the content were incredibly uncontroversial and in no world could be considered sketchy or one-sided, even if it were something we all agreed upon as Marxist-Leninists just by our nature, the lack of ability for discussion is in my opinion against the intended nature and function of lemmy.
If you’re going to post something here you have to deal with people replying, even disagreeing with you. You don’t have to respond, you don’t have to even look at their responses if you don’t want to, you can chuck something out there into the feed and then ignore all discussion. But others should be able to.
I ask admins to consider whether this content should be here and whether this community should exist given two separate issues:
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The locking of the whole community against interaction and just using it as a posting board for someone’s stuff which seems counter to lemmy’s intentions and function.
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The questionable content present
edit 13 hours in: Since looking more into it since I wrote this post I have changed my mind. I was too conciliatory in my language. So let me be clear. I think this rises to a case of global rules violation, hatred, misogyny and the OP and sole moderator should be appropriately sanctioned. No benefit of the doubt is deserved given the language they used on the sidebar about the stuff they were posting being useful
The sidebar literally says “This is community solely for reposting their very useful infographics.”
Useful. Useful. That’s a positive connotation. Not that this despicable shit they’re posting, not that they’re dunking on them, not that it is trash (which already belongs in shitreactionariessay) but that it is USEFUL.
And what’s sad is if they hadn’t been so obvious we’d have a lot of people giving them the benefit of the doubt when they wouldn’t if this person was doing anti-BLM racist dog-whistling instead of sexist dog-whistling, if this person was doing anti-trans dog-whistling they wouldn’t get any benefit of the doubt and I’m asking they not get any here given the strong evidence of intent with the locking to prevent feedback.
I wish people wouldn’t give this person the benefit of the doubt. If you’re going to post content from a place to a dedicated community you created, using lemmygrad resources to rehost it and then denying others the opportunity to critically engage with it, you’d better be damn sure that it isn’t reactionary, isn’t hateful, isn’t against site rules. If it’s questionable, ask others, simply allow engagement like every other damn community on the website.
I really do not think evasion on technicalities and “oh I didn’t understand how this worked” should work here. You don’t get to claim to be a smol bean not good at running a lemmy community person when the content in question is hateful and the evidence against you is this bad. It doesn’t matter that devoid of all context it may be fine. Devoid of context, “all lives matter” sounds fine, in light of BLM however we know what it really is. It’d be like posting suicide statistics of purely CIS people, not elaborating, a few times mentioning trans people and insinuating they get too much attention and just continuing to post that and insist you just care about cis people and they need a voice too because the voice of the trans people is too loud. The voice of men in this conversation must start with acknowledging clearly that women are disadvantaged by patriarchy, that women suffer the most from gendered violence.
It’s cherry-picking to sew a narrative whose unspoken implication is “those feminists hate men, we need to talk less about women’s problems and more about how much it sucks to be a man”.
Since looking more into it since I wrote this post I have changed my mind. I was too conciliatory in my language. So let me be clear. I think the moderator should be permanently banned.
I’m being more lenient than most because the admin seems to be very young, and so I would say is better off being corrected and informed of their inappropriate behaviour rather than being kicked out entirely. But ultimately it is the admin’s decision as to what they would like to do. It isn’t our community’s job to tolerate toxic ideas and give forgiveness to people supporting them, especially if they’re aware of their support being something our community would disapprove of (as the inability to comment seems to indicate).
From what I understand of the admin of the community, they are trans, young and have quite a lot of hangups and issues that they are working through in not particularly healthy ways, I’m worried that kicking them out entirely will deny them a potentially vital lifeline, though I do agree that the community should be banned (and if they continue to showcase support for toxic ideas they should be kicked out too). But I think my red line is a bit looser than a lot of other people’s here. I think it is better to make it clear this behaviour is unacceptable rather than kicking them out outright, but if they are kicked out I would respect that decision, I understand why people would want that.
They still haven’t commented here about their rationale, but have posted multiple times in their community since then, so I’m becoming increasingly convinced that they know what they are doing is wrong and are hoping it flies under the radar. I suppose in my circumstance of not banning them, they could try a similar thing in the future, if they did, I would firmly support a ban.
EDIT: Fogor words
For what it’s worth, I agree with the sentiment here. This community should definitely be banned and deleted, but banning the user entirely might not be necessary just yet.
Since when does youngness excuse anything when it comes to an account on this website?
Would we tolerate a young anti-communist here just because they’re young? Would we tolerate a young racist and white supremacist spreading that stuff just because they’re young? Would we tolerate a young homo/trans-phone just because they’re young even while they spread lies and hate?
Why then do misogynists get this special pass from their fellow men? Yes it’s widespread, so is white supremacy, so is believing imperialist propaganda, so are many forms of bigotry and chauvinism we don’t accept from users who have accounts on this site.
We should tolerate people who are willing to listen, remain quiet, and change their shitty behaviour. This person was not willing to do that, so they should not be tolerated. I think you’re reading my comments out of order. I was their biggest defender in this thread, because I think it is fair that at least someone gives them the benefit of the doubt, but since their “explanation” of their actions I flipped completely the other way. They weren’t willing to listen, and they weren’t willing to learn. I was initially operating under the assumption that they were a new user making a mistake, but you had convinced me of the opposite.
I don’t understand why you’re behaving this way after you got what you asked for, this is supposed to be a place to debate an issue, not to just agree with the original poster and ban things without discussion. The discussion moved entirely in your favour and entirely against them, but you still seem quite upset by the whole thing, I don’t get it.