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:
-
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.
-
The questionable content present
The content itself is often mostly fine, is a little “not passing the vibe check” at times, but the website they are sourced from is often misogynistic and associated with toxic “manosphere” beliefs. And the fact that discussion isn’t allowed on the community means no one can discuss these issues or the content in general. At best it is pointless and these infographics could be posted elsewhere, at worst it is actively spreading toxic misogynistic ideas masquerading as “men’s liberation.”
That reminds me of that time I posted an anti-imperialist take from Sinfest, a far-right webcomic as a broken clock moment. (Granted, I asked admins to remove it if they were uncomfortable.)
Yeah, stuff like this often notices a genuine problem in society (men do have issues with suicide and SA against men is often massively under reported) but they take a real problem and use it to steer people towards reaction, in this case they take the problem of men’s issues and blame feminists or women in general.
Exactly. It’s not even the question of what data is being provided, but how it is being presented - what part gets the focus and what gets omitted, to make the readers come to a specific conclusion. The original source clearly presents the data in a very disingenuous way due to their specific agenda.
The inability to critically assess the pieces makes it all worse.
Yes, I was hoping it was an honest mistake, but it feels like the admin of the community is falling for a lot of manosphere manipulation, they don’t start with being openly sexist and misogynistic, they start with faux sincerity about men’s issues, then start undermining women’s issues and then acting like men’s issues are never talked about and “those awful leftist feminists” never actually discuss them at all and pretend all men are incapable of suffering (which is ridiculous, as if anyone speaks to a feminist, they would hear about how the patriarchy harms men by forcing them into specific roles in society the same way it harms women.) Then it pushes into full on hatred and blaming of women for societal problems and they’re practically incel by that point.
Imagine saying “the US is not racist” just because “well, ‘hwite’ people get imprisoned, too!”
Does that imply that impoverished “hwite” proles don’t get unjustly incarcerated? No. Does that imply we should dismiss that fact? Also, no. Does it all imply that systemic racism in the US is a made up thing? Absolutely fucking not. Though I’m sure the ShaPeabrains, the Penis Pragers and the Crowders would like you to believe so.
Yeah, this sounds like this person just didn’t really understand intersectionality very well, though their response is concerning. I’m guessing since that they are “on trial” they feel very defensive and are getting quite agitated (I would be too if I thought I was contributing to a community and have people talk about me the way they’ve been talked about, it would hurt.) I just hope they actively consider why they’ve been talked about this way and try to improve and learn from their mistakes, even if they decide Lemmygrad isn’t the place for them.