Hi, Richard. So you saw that mess last night. . . .

You can see that hierarchies can exist in any culture or system that involves at least 2 mammals. This includes anywhere where there is Buddhism, (including this site). People need to expect this.
Yeah, this pretty much goes without saying. I went to grad school for 10 years and literary theory was all about deconstruction and New Historicism. So this knowledge has been quite conscious for me for a long time, longer than I've been a Buddhist by far. I identified as a feminist for a long time, and, in many conventional and philosophical/theoretical respects, still do. Heirarchy is actually built into our languages, our signifcation systems, our laws. No way around it, so one must deal with it, with oneself, with the other. It is difficult necessary work. Morality is never mastered.
There's a healthy area of competition where certain people should be leaders and others followers but this can be tenuous when people become addicted/used to the power and they lose the virtues that got them there in the first place.
In the case of patriarchy, I'm not sure it is completely accurate to say
virtues got men dominant over women in the first place. I think women historically were disempowered and are so even today, although perhaps more subtlely than when they couldn't even own property, merely because of the brute physical strength of men.
The lack of presence of women on this site in and of itself should, at least I would
think, prompt all the men here to ask themselve what implictly or overty is going on here that makes women unwelcome. Why is this question not spoken out loud and discussed, like, at all? All these other ways you guys are mentioning of reverting this elephant-in-the-room question to what any individual practitioner should be working on within herself, via dharma practice, is, from an important conventional-world perspective, an avoidance of a sociopolitical question that is going to have effects even if everyone here goes on pretending that it won't.
To me the moderators should keep it about practice on this site (including materialist vs. religious views) so it remains interesting and multiplicity can surivive. That's all I would expect.
I communicated with Daniel in the middle of the night last night (3:30 a.m., to be precise). He pointed out to me that when this site works well it tends to be on threads that discuss the practice. When problems erupt, it is almost always on a thread discussing topics other than practice. Sawfoot apparently has no practice to discuss, so his threads seem to be hotbed of wedge politics, if you will allow the mixed metaphor.
When you say the moderators should keep it about practice (including materialist verus religious views), I'm unsure what you mean. Do you mean that scientific materialist naysayers should be able to assert and discuss that worldview so long as they have a meditation practice? I'm just wondering what criteria for participation you specifically have in mind. These are important considerations. I think that the guidelines are currently too vague and need some clarity and specificity. That's why I'm asking. What is okay here? What is not? If we require members to have a "practice," what kind of practice? I know Buddhists who almost never meditate but spend a lot of energy in morality training. Is that "practice"? Or is this purely a formal-meditation discussion forum? And how do we know whether someone has a meditation practice? How do we patrol and enforce such a weird behaviorial requirement? So, although I agree that when discussions stick to the goals of the site matters go well, how can "you must have a practice" be an enforceable requirement for speech acts?
I think, more to the point of behavioral expectations, there needs to be a list of unacceptable speech acts, definitions/examples of them, and an objective schedule of consequences. And a stated appeal process. Clarity, honesty, and consistency in enforcement, in my experience as an instructor, are always healthful in policies meant to govern a discourse community.