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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  • darkcallingOP
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    8 months ago

    My rationale here is intentional locking of not just the community to only the single moderator and poster but also all the posts themselves indicates on the balance they knew what they were posting was wrong, against instance rules and so on and intentionally used such locking as an attempt to prevent these posts from blowing up into critical discussions that would turn against them, get them called out, and get the whole thing shut down and thus a sign of knowledge it was wrong, and active attempts to evade the rules.

    And as such that this offense should be considered not an accident, not a little boo-boo, not a tiny little mistake from someone new to this, not a learning experience, but intentional, bad faith, malicious against our users and thus not deserving of any leniency that might be shown someone who had allowed engagement. Not deserving of any benefit of the doubt as it were to any explanations they might offer.

    I think it shouldn’t matter if the person who posted this comes in here, red paint on their hands sobbing how they didn’t know and apologize which is like the thief caught in their den sobbing to the police only then that they knew it was wrong, not of genuine desire for repentance but part of a cynical strategy to appear remorseful and lessen punishment.

    Additionally, the sidebar describes the content as “useful” that’s a positive connotation, not neutral, not critical. They can’t claim they were meaning to post this as dunking content because 1) it’s against site rules to create another shitreactionaries say community and 2 their sidebar and lack of their own commentary (I have archived the sub in case they change this) indicates they agree with it. The sus nature of the locking takes even the questionable and defensible parts I think into criminal territory. Much as trying to hide or destroy evidence often indicates a guilty mind at work.

    • DamarcusArt
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      8 months ago

      I don’t want to agree with this, but I think you may be right, I very much would be willing to accept a “I’m sorry I got caught tried to do this.” sort of excuse, but that’s probably far too soft. I seem to be going to bat for this much harder than most under the idea that it was possibly supposed to be against this particular source that they keep posting, but if that were the case, why ban comments?

    • ExotiqueMatter
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      8 months ago

      As one of the users who interacted the most with this person I have to recognize that you are completely right here. Creating a whole new community supposedly about violence against men when there is already a community for that, locking it so that only him can make posts and comments, then proceeding to post whatever that shit is without any possibility of push-back, not to mention his immediate antagonistic and accusatory tone and hiding behind "no u"s when confronted and the fact that he IMMEDIATELY deleted his account without bothering to try to make a case for himself after being caught… all of that is just too suspicious. We are a safe space for oppressed minorities in an oppressive world, we can’t afford to give benefits of the doubt when this much against him.