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:
-
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
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
…People dismiss men being raped… Does this apply to this community, as well as specific members of this community? Can you point to specific people dismissing such things? …little boys making the most of children being available for adoption… Even if that were true, (which, judging by the quality of the sources provided I find dubious at best) - how would it imply misandry in any way? How would it discredit this community, specifically? How do you explain locking the comment section barring any discussion and any counter-proof? “You said I joined a week ago” That’s what I saw when I looked into your account, it’s what the website told me. I did not know you had a different account, and I wasn’t supposed to know - there’s nothing in your bio that could imply you having other accounts, other members told me. Most importantly - what does that have to do with your claims? “…I participated vastly more in the community as a whole than you…” This is not a participation-measuring contest. What are you saying here?
Yes, I consider the responses this thread got dismissing those, since those were the things I posted.
Excuse me? How would dismissing issues affecting men specifically imply misandry???
Counter proof to men getting raped? Holy fuck - this is exactly why I didn’t want comments because vile stuff like this is mind boggling to me.
If you were active, you’d see me, including who I am as a person, but you instead chose to call me dishonest with no proof, debasing me as a person because I share information regarding issues affecting men, which, again, is vile, and exactly why I do not want to engage, because the dehumanization and active apathy towards men’s issues mortifies me.
Skipping a shit ton of issues I have with this… Let’s put it aside for a moment. Who exactly is dismissing these issues? You’ve been asked to provide proof, not to repeat your statement.
The source you provided clearly has manosphere bias. People provide “proof” climate change is a myth, that often looks like a well-written article. Does that mean we should accept such “proof” when someone posts it? I’m not even saying it is necessarily a lie, I’m saying you deliberately post something and then hide in a hole plugging your ears, rejecting any potential criticism of the source - that’s what locking the comment section looks like.
Why? Also, you can check out my user page as well. What level of activity should a person have to know every single user in this community?
I see you.
Thats why I said the vibe is off, but it’s hard to pinpoint which issue I have.
I think the main issue is the lack of opportunity for discussion on the material you posted. These matters are hard to make sense of, and are too easy to be shifted back into oppression. It happens with the radfem, or black supremacist ideas. It’s even more dangerous for men, since we’re already in the oppressors position, most of the time.
The question you pose is a good one. How do we welcome and embrace men that suffered abuse? There’s lots of us. The synthesis of the content you offer, if followed through, has dangerous social side effects that have to be considered, and are not generally aligned to recent communist consensus. It can be challenged, sure. But just posting without discussing isn’t a proper challenge.
The problem is patriarchy. The problem is the work relationships. The problem is exploration of people by people, suppression of their needs.
Implied on what you post is “stop looking at woman’s problems, look at men’s problems!”. That’s not the best approach, and I think it would be freeing to you to try to figure out why.