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
Inviting @Demoncracy@lemmygrad.ml to make their case before a decision is taken.
I am deeply troubled by misandry and systemic misandry being shielded in leftist spaces using leftist language to diminish the issues, playing key role in conservatives (who participate in systemic misandry themselves) being able to take advantage of struggling men, keeping the issues completely unaddressed, seldom ever spoken of, with people using leftist jargon to perpetrate the status quo.
I am going to be leaving Lemmy as a whole. My “vibe is off” apparently.
I removed things relating to my private life, but left everything else, in case it won’t get removed once I delete my account. - Stating this in case someone takes offense to that and makes up conspiracy theories about me hiding something.
If this was the case, why go about dealing with this in such a roundabout way? Why not make a community directly devoted to discussing misandry instead of one devoted to a manosphere blog that seems to dismiss women’s issues just as often as it brings up legitimate men’s issues? And more importantly, if you wanted to start a discussion on this topic, why prevent commenting? How do you expect a discussion to take place if people aren’t actually allowed to discuss things? It just seems like a very counter-productive thing to do.
Because I take issue with people branding and dismissing things like
as misogyny. I am very aware the left has issues with misandry indistinguishable from liberal one, I merely wanted to post sources mentioning real issues, because I neither never see them in leftist spaces or they get shut down as misogyny.
I’m afraid that I don’t understand your reasoning. You…assumed this place would call things misogyny instead of misandry so your solution was to post articles from an often misogynistic website and not allow discussion of the topic at all?
I think you may be misunderstanding intersectionality a little bit here. Women’s and men’s issues stem from the same place: the patriarchy. Talking about one does not diminish the other, and trying to solve one does not mean the other doesn’t exist. Discussing one doesn’t mean we can never discuss the other, if you had created a place to discuss men’s issues, that would’ve been far better received than what has happened here. The problem is that you’ve been sharing a very problematic website and have seemed to have been trying to eliminate any discussion of that (I’m not saying this was your intention, that is just how it has come across, as you haven’t given anyone an opportunity for discussion, including yourself). Again, I just don’t see how your goals align with your actions here, I don’t see how you expected the response you wanted from what you have been doing.
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Ah, I didn’t know one existed already, thanks for that.
So why did you lock the posts to prevent discussion?
Because they’re dishonest and afraid of discussion. Because their intent was not to have a conversation, not to create better men, to better themselves, not to be progressive, not to have a conversation with Marxists about positive manhood and the issues of patriarchy but to shove MRA propaganda down the throats of vulnerable young men on this and linked instances, to hook them, radicalize them. It is dishonest, splintering, non-comradely, and predatory behavior.
We have and have had a menslib sub for far longer than the sub they made existed (or their account). They deliberately chose not to use that, not to create a menslib sub but one centered around an MRA blog that was so problematic they decided to censor talking about it.
I know this person has been a prolific poster and seemed nice but can we please accept they’re probably a misogynist or spreading misogyny and unwilling to deal with push-back on their takes? The evidence is all there, yet people keep fleeing from it, trying to make excuses for them and I’m sorry but I feel like if this was any other group, any other situation. If the blog was a transphobic blog and they’d done the same thing for discussing cis people issues that people would not be as forgiving given the tone, and certain tells.
We don’t even know that their whole sob story about medical issues and housing and all that is true. And even if it was, no tailism, we have to hold ourselves higher than that, being oppressed in one way does not give one license to oppress others and hide behind the fact you’re part of some other group.
One cannot start a conversation about the issues of white people without first acknowledging the issues of white supremacy and the greater problems of POC without attracting and ending up being white supremacist in nature.
I’ll reiterate, if this person made a community about a weird blog no one heard about and locked it down like this and that blog was about police violence against white men for instance and it centered their suffering and downplayed the issues of POC interactions with police I do not think that person would get the same leeway this person is getting, certainly I hope not.
One cannot have an extended conversation about straight issues without first acknowledging the oppression of the LGBTQ+ community first or you invite gay-bashers.
It is the same here.
This blog was dishonest. Quite possibly it is run by the same person who ran the community (demoncracy) for all we know. It did not frame it that way and the poster (demoncracy) did not do the bare minimum when spreading content from a reactionary source of prefacing it with a disclaimer. It would take so little effort to do that and pass a cursory vibe check.
Even if they acknowledged it as reactionary you have to admit it violated rules against shitreactionariessay type posts and further that the only point of such posts is to dunk on, debate, discuss them and that locking contents means they were creating billboards for users to passively consume, not critically consume out of this kind of content.
There’s just so much wrong here if you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. Too many pieces that cannot fit except that the person in question is into misogynistic thinking and trying to spread that on a Marxist-Leninist website as carefully as they can. They edited their posts the other day last night to include links to scientific publications in support of their scientific-sexism, nothing else. That’s doubling down in defense.
You’re the head admin, you can do whatever you want. And I appreciate everything you’ve done to make lemmygrad a safe, welcoming, interesting place (as evidenced by the age of my account).
I agree that menslib needs attention, but not from people who act this way, not from MRA blogs that take this persecuted by feminists, silenced, thing that doesn’t include and center in the womens’ struggle the acknowledgement of the fact that while patriarchy harms men, it primarily harms women and men need to understand those harms, not just boo-hoo and cry over their own little troubles as a result of it. Only once that is made clear and understood can men begin to un-harm themselves, they can’t toss off the obligations of patriarchy towards themselves while keeping them on women, while not learning how to make sure they don’t put them on women and perpetuate it, that’s just giving them more freedom without liberating women. We are Marxists, we are more than self-interested, that means understanding and including the struggles of others. Intentional omission is a deliberate tactic by bigots and unacceptable.
I think inviting this person back after what they’ve done and they’ve offered no defense nor could they is the wrong decision.
It sends the wrong message about the value of this one person compared to all the women comrades here and their safety, compared to the safety of underage or young impressionable men on this instance who they were attempting to victimize and draw into this reactionary website and potentially way of thinking. I wish you would reconsider. I know I myself came off kind of weakly in my initial post. I sometimes struggle still with trying to be nice, the way my parents raised me, to be deferential. This kind of thing has shaken me though and I don’t think this person belongs on this website. Because they did infiltrate it, they did engage in hard to spot reactionary behavior. They are a threat, not a good faith user.
They got caught red-handed. They were careful enough not to be an open bigot (they had no choice, if they were less clever they’d have been zeroed much earlier) but what more proof would you need? If I’d not posted this, let them continue to post content for another month, would there have been any more evidence of the facts at hand that couldn’t be dismissed in the same way? It would just be more locked posts for a community whose very existence is a site rule violation as it focuses on a reactionary website and spreading its content uncritically. Community sidebar called the content “useful infographics”.
I ask you respectfully to reconsider that given the overwhelming evidence that has no other reasonable explanation. I believe this person acted in bad faith, will continue to do so. I do not think they are a comrade, I do not think they make lemmygrad better. They had all the time to contribute actual good mens-lib content, discussions, etc, including in their own sub but they didn’t.
Especially when they’ve shown no remorse, no interest in engaging in good faith discussion, just dipped out rather than face the music and scorn of the users here and initially what tipped me to this was the locking of any ability for others to interact or engage with their content critically. They’ve just acted defensive. In what way is such a person a good fit for this website when their beliefs include oppressive thinking towards half the world’s population and spreading sexist propaganda to other users here who may be vulnerable to it?
Because I think they’ll be back. I strongly think this given people mention this wasn’t their first account. And I think they shouldn’t be allowed back and should be given the boot if they try another account. But I’m not an admin here. Just a member of that half of the world whose oppression this person was denying and continued to deny to the last.
Thank you for taking the time to read all my rambling. I hope you might see some sense in it.
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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.
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The first ever comment from demoncracy was talking about how they were used to hexbear, so yeah not a new user, or was lurking
I don’t think the two are necessarily the same person, wrecker “behaviour” is a thing at all because they tend to follow predictable patterns, they try to ingratiate themselves with the community, then push against the boundaries just a little bit, to see if there is any reaction, if no reaction, they escalate, and continue to escalate, using the tolerance of their previous behaviour as justification for their current, more extreme behaviour. If they are called out too early, they just cut and run, wreckers rely on having enough of a reputation within a group to make people bend the rules for them, so if their earliest and softest attempts don’t work, they’ll just start again from scratch.
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Just kinda shouting out here as the admin of the menslib sub.
I have this tendency to have so much drive to complete something for a couple of days, weeks, months, etc. and then burn myself out and find it difficult to dig back in.
Plus a lot of hilarious shit has been going on in my life that has kept me from engaging with the comm like I want to.
Anyway, point being: I’m going to try to be more active and hopefully give the sub the booster shot it needs. Please use the menslib sub for posts surrounding men’s liberation from violence and patriarchy!!
Perhaps it would be reasonable for you to care to corroborate - what it is that made you think “misandry” is “shielded” here. Simply said - please provide proof. Judging by the phrase “leaving Lemmy as a whole” - it seems to me you’re not coming from an honest place.
So, instead of doing that you’re just going to downvote this comment, huh?
Yea, I’m evil and deceitful! Shit like this makes my blood boil. People dismiss men being raped literally not acknowledged by law, hidden from statistics, little boys making the most of children being available for adoption with adoptive parents vastly preferring to adopt girls - the things I reposted with sources - hiding behind labeling those as misogyny. How am I supposed to wish to engage with you when you do such deplorable things, not to mention automatically jumping to pretending I’m a bad person to discredit me? Of course I do not wish to engage with you.
You said I joined a week ago. Your account is 6 months old. This is my new account, because my @ differed to the username I used, so I made a new one. Even in the short week with this new account I participated vastly more in the community as a whole than you - with plenty to reference to who I am as a person.
…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.
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