This diary is obviously in response to the controversy that has been generated over the diaries dealing with women and their lifelong experience of violence and the fear of it. I want to move beyond the one diary with the controversial title and open a discussion about how the community can constructively address the issues that were being addressed in the body of the diary.
The way this site works is that Markos as the site owner makes some general rules that we all have to observe if we want to post diaries and comments here. Many of those rules are stated in a way that make it possible for reasonable people to interpret them somewhat differently, particularly when discussing them in the abstract. Community moderation is a process for developing a working consensus about how they should be applied in specific situations and contexts. There are a series of options for implementing that consensus.
One of the general rules is that diary hijacking is prohibited. It is considered something to be discouraged and if necessary an appropriate reason for the use of an HR. The problem comes in defining just what constitutes diary hijacking. There are instances such as someone who insist on discussing football in a diary about cooking. However, most of the time it's not that simple and clear cut.
My memory is that the last time that Markos issued a general update of site rules he made it clear that this is a site where people should expect discussion and debate but he also made allowances for diary hijacking. The problem we have is finding the line between debate and diary hijacking. I don't think that there is any way to do that in a single general all purpose statement. It is something that has to be determined in the context of a particular discussion.
The issue that has arisen is that a number of women were prompted by the mass murder in Isla Vista, CA to write diaries about women and violence. There general stated purpose and subject of the diaries was to get people to listen to what it is like for women to spend their entire lives dealing with an ever present threat of violence. There was a broad perception of women and men that a small number of men were posting comments in these diaries that derailed the stated purpose of those discussions. That led to a series of increasingly heated arguments.
What I am suggesting here is that as a community it might be useful to discuss some of those comments in terms of whether they constituted diary hijacking. To the extent that there might be a preponderance of opinion about where the line should be drawn in this particular context, it might provide a working approach for dealing with the problem.
I am not presuming to make pronouncements about where it should be drawn. I do have some personal opinions about it. I am proposing a discussion that tries to focus on specifics and not a general war of gender.