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 evidence with the locking of all these posts shows in my mind that the OP knew what they were posting was wrong, reactionary, anti-Marxist content and was afraid of being called out on it. That in my mind cinches it over from just someone being ignorant and posting bad stuff that they’re not knowledgeable on or maybe are holding over some reactionary views from before becoming a communist to the fact they KNEW it was bad, and wanted to hide that, didn’t want to be called out, wanted to sneak it in without discussion and that in my mind should take this kind of offense from a slap on the wrist and an assignment to be educated to a permanent ban for intentionally trying to spread this stuff knowing it was against instance rules, knowing it was bigotry, knowing it was reactionary and trying their best to keep it going for as long as possible by lowering ability for people to critically engage.
I agree that they likely knew this was reactionary content and didn’t want a response calling them out on that, but do you mean banning the user’s account entirely, or just removing the community? I’m fine with the latter, not fine with the former before the person posting this content explains their rationale behind this. (Though if they refuse to do so, it is probably because they know it is because they just don’t want to be called out.)
If this is the people’s court, I do think that people doing things like this should explain themselves and their actions, rather than the rest of us assuming the worst. (Though obviously if their defence is a backhanded non-answer or they don’t reply at all, we probably will be forced to assume the worst.)
I think given their responses here and the general bad faith. I can’t come to any conclusion but this person was spreading sexist propaganda of a particularly insidious type cloaked in progressive language.
How would we react if a crypto-Nazi was spreading crypto-racism under the same circumstances with a sus website, comment locking, etc?
How would we react if it was trans-phobia, homophobia, etc?
Women’s issues get a little stickier than those because of many factors including how old patriarchy is, predating modern racism and concepts of whiteness. Because of the buy-in of many of the victims (women), because of how it binds both men and women, benefits men, benefits some particular women. Harms some men, etc. It’s a very tangled mess compared to white supremacy. But I think it’s helpful to do that kind of comparative thinking and ask ourselves: Are women worth protecting from those spreading hate based on their immutable characteristics any less than any other group? If we are angrily, viciously swift on giving the boot (rightfully) to homophobic bigots, to racist bigots, etc why not these?