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
I respect your opinions a lot in general and agree with most of what you’ve typed up but I have a couple disagreements:
1) I think an outright perma at first is going too far. I think you’re being a little too uncharitable. demoncracy doubling down like this in the thread seems more like someone freaking out and going on the defensive when called out like so many people do instead of doing self crit. maybe they are a bad faith actor, but further misbehavior will have the added context of their previous temp ban in the modlog which will help the admins in determining whether or not they are a bad faith actor. this also kinda curtails with my 2nd point about temp vs permabans
2) on an anonymous site like this, it’s not actually possible to keep someone from using it. case in point, there was drama surrounding the user @Nameless_Partisan@lemmygrad.ml who ended up getting banned nine months ago for renaming her account as “mean arab terrorist”. she made another account the next month, @DeDollarization@lemmygrad.ml and didn’t get banned for 5 months on the new account. in looking at this i think i found another pair of banned accounts that took the 2nd account 3 months to get banned, and even then they werent banned for ban evasion (https://lemmygrad.ml/u/linkhidalgogato and https://lemmygrad.ml/u/Flamingoaks note the bio in linkhidalgogato “flaminremoved” and the new account is “flamingoaks” and they type almost the exact same way). Regardless, i think temp bans are more worthwhile to try and get people to change their behavior at first, otherwise they will just keep making alt accounts anyways, and then you’ve got to do dumb shit like stare at people’s writing styles and what not to see if they’re the same person you’ve banned 10 times already, and quite frankly i hope the admins wont ever start banning people over something that’s impossible to get right all the time like figuring out if a new alt account is a ban evading user based on their writing style unless it’s extremely obvious like someone like wisconcom
Just to recontextualize nameless partisan, they weren’t banned for changing their name, we understood it as a provocation (which they had been doing for a while), but they were banned for a different reason which was the conclusion for the culmination of 5 months of trying to provoke the mod team without ever wanting to engage in dialogue. I previously wrote about it here: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2650277
I have changed my stance on the communist party of ‘israel’ since then, though I still think there’s some amount of depth to its existence, but they really dropped the ball on October 7 lol. Regardless it’s not a big point in the events around this user.
edit: otherwise I agree completely with point number 2, I would have made it myself lol. With the tools we have at our disposal we do the best we can, I think in general the community is good at self-moderating as seen from this thread. It leads to a culture of self-responsibility. And yeah, we (I) have no interest in doing extensive research on every new account to make sure they’re not an alt. The general rule of thumb is that if we can’t tell they’re an alt then what’s the harm? If they got banned the first time they’ll get banned a second time under a different account, they’ll slip up eventually. Unless they actually changed and improved, in which case we won’t ban them. And in the meantime we run the risk of banning a completely innocent person based on conjecture.
the link isn’t working. and yeah i was way over simplifying the drama to keep my comment as short as possible, sorry.
That’s strange, maybe because OP deleted their account and so it deleted the post as well except for mods. I’ll paste my comment:
ty! it’s a shame she’s like that, shes makes a lot of valuable comments and what not