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.
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
Thus they must agree with the articles is my contention. They agree, they know others do not agree.
Further it is against site rules to post shitreactionariessay type content outside of that community. This is also not that, it is posted uncritically by one person trying to spread the message and viewpoint of the blog. It’s like if I share a bunch of Nazi memes about black people and crime without comment, in a community I created exclusively for that purpose, that is stated to be for that purpose and not only do I not critically comment on them but I lock the comments to prevent anyone else from dunking on them. What’s the difference between me at that point and an unironic Nazi trying to spread their propaganda? The answer is none, distinction without a different.
This is misogynist propaganda, it violates the cardinal rules of the site. It was obviously done this way to prevent feedback, dunking, etc. As such the originator should not get the benefit of the doubt. I have no doubt they will if confronted claim ignorance, claim they only saw some good bits, make up all kinds of excuses that sound plausible enough and I am calling on the admins of this instance if they believe the blog referenced to be misogynist, to be MRA, to be reactionary or to have such content in any amounts to do the right thing to protect users and not accept excuses however finely tailored but to act and remove this person permanently. Just as they would if it was crypto-homophobia, just as if it was crypto-racism.
The locking of comments (and posts to a lesser degree) IMO is a slam dunk indicator of intention to not allow criticism or discussion and when posting reactionary content that already violates the rule against posting outside of one community for that, shows that by virtue of not criticizing such content, not offering explanation, and not allowing others to critically engage with it, only to engage with it on the terms of the dubious authors that they agree with it.
You’re absolutely right, I agree with you, I’ve edited my original comment to reflect that. If this was a “shit reactionaries say” sort of thing, they would just have posted them there, you’re most likely right, they are in support of these ideas, but want to be non-committal because they know they would receive a lot of pushback for them.
They also have posted to the community since this post went up, and haven’t appeared here to explain themselves, which potentially further adds to this idea. (though it could very easily just be them not seeing this post).