“People are terrible.”

Rebecca Watson summarizes the daily harassment and stalking she’s been experiencing ever since the stupid “elevatorgate” kerfuffle broke. I don’t care how you feel about the original issue – this response is excessively vile and misogynist. And downright disappointing, since these are actual members of the atheist and skeptical community, not random trolls or bipolar substance abusing Montrealers or 12-year-olds with an internet connection. And this is the exactly the reason why we’re going to keep talking about stuff like this.

I sympathize. I’ve had my share of internet drama, though not to this extent. But even though I haven’t exploded the internet recently, I still get the occasional email about how I’m pathetic and stupid for supporting Rebecca, or how I need to get off my high horse because I haven’t been called a Nazi and that’s so much worse. Or how I’m “too ugly for sex.”

It’s easy to laugh them off when it’s a slow trickle of inane insults, but even the thickest skin takes a beating when they come in a flood – a flood that’s been constant for Rebecca for months. So like her, while I want to keep fighting the good fight, sometimes I need to take a break from the internet and play some video games, go to a bar with friends, or watch Game of Thrones while cuddling with a cute guy. My sanity can’t handle being a feminist warrior 24/7.

The perception of female graduate students

Guy in bar: So, what brought you to Seattle?
Me: I just started grad school
Guy: What are you studying?
Me: Genetics
Guy: Oh, I would have thought it would be more shallow-like
Me: … *eyes bug out*

While I think the details are irrelevant, I feel compelled to add that I wasn’t wearing anything that could be even remotely perceived as “shallow-like.” Jeans and a t-shirt, no makeup. Nope, I just had boobs.

On the sexist failures of geek culture

Read this piece. It’s long, but worth it. Seriously, go, shoo.

I know far too many male (and female) geeks who slip into the type of hypocritical, misogynistic vitriol this article describes. But before you think I’m out to slander all geeks guys, I also know plenty that are kind, thoughtful, and – dare I say it? – feminists.

Oddly enough, those are the geek guys I date. What an peculiar coincidence!

The science of calling out sexism?

A lot of people, male and female, are often afraid of calling out instances of sexism. They don’t want to be perceived as oversensitive or troublemakers, or they’re afraid of angry backlash.
I say “they,” because I obviously don’t have a problem with blowing up the whole internet in order to call out sexism.

But is this an accurate representation of how men respond to accusations of sexism? One study says otherwise:

In a recent study, conducted by Robyn Mallett and Dana Wagner at Loyola University Chicago, male participants were teamed with a female partner (who was actually a confederate in the experiment). Their assignment was to read a set of moral or ethical dilemmas and discuss together how to deal with each situation, including one in which a nurse discovers that a hospital patient has been given tainted blood.

During their discussion, the female confederate confronted her male partner either for sexism (i.e., having assumed the nurse in the story was female, which every male participant did) or in a gender-neutral way (i.e., disagreeing with the male’s suggested solution to the dilemma).

As expected, men had much stronger reactions to being told that their remark was sexist than they did to mere disagreement. But the reactions weren’t what you might expect. The men accused of sexism smiled and laughed more, appeared more surprised, gestured more often and with greater energy, and were more likely to try to justify or apologize for their remark. But they did not react with more hostility or anger – in fact, they reported liking the female partner in both conditions equally well, and were generally pleasant across the board.

At first, that sounds great. Yay, men who were called out for the sexism smiled more and didn’t respond with hostility! Time to go politely tell MRAs how they’re wrong!

But I have a couple of concerns about the study. For one, their sexist remark…isn’t that sexist. Assuming a nurse is female is based on pure probability rather than assumptions about gender roles. The vast, vast majority of nurses are female, therefore a nurse in a story is much more likely to be female. It’s not like 50% of nurses are actually male, but it’s still perceived as women’s work.

This may seem like nitpicking, but I have a feeling men would react differently depending on what type of sexism is being addressed. It’s easy for a man to go “Whoops, yes, I suppose some nurses are male.” But it’s hard for a man to go “Whoops, yes, I suppose I do have (insert any type of male privilege I’ve never thought about and vehemently disagree with here).”

I’d also like to see results from how the men felt long after the exercise concluded. Were they just acting nicer when they were in immediate social interaction with the woman? Was in genuine? Did they turn around and start telling their buddies about how she’s a stupid oversensitive bitch, or did they really change their minds about sexism?

And finally, I’d love to see this repeated in the setting of blog comments or a forum. What happens when you put the internet between two people, and you have the drug of anonymity in your system? I know it’s anecdotal evidence, but I don’t exactly see people skipping together through e-fields of daisies after an accusation of sexism.

More science! We need more science!

Non-religious arguments for being pro-choice?

A friend of mine who’s in med school is looking for some good, credible resources on non-religious arguments for being pro-choice. Obviously the logical move was to ask a feminist atheist blogger, but I’ve failed him since I 1) Live in Blog Land, where good, credible resources are elusive creatures, and 2) Have a horrible memory and suck at recalling good things I have read.
But I know non-religious, humanist arguments for being pro-choice are out there. I could spend a couple hours writing a huge post myself on my own humanist arguments for being pro-choice. Oooooorrrrr I can be lazy since I know I have an intelligent well-read readership who likes to help me out (especially when I suck up to them by saying how intelligent and well-read they are). So what do you recommend? What are some good articles or books that address this subject? And I suppose blog posts are fine if they’re from a more reputable individual.

And if you just want to throw in your own godless 2 cents on the abortion issue, consider this an open thread. I’ll be hiding in the corner behind some bullet proof glass.

That’s not skepticism – that’s bubbleheaded post modern BS

EDIT: A couple readers have pointed out that I’m wrong about skepticism not being the claim that we can know nothing. Apparently the definition of “skepticism” that I am familiar with – and honestly, the only definition I’ve heard after years in the skeptical movement – is really methodological skepticism. The author at Feministe is likely talking about philosophical skepticism. I believe my misconception came from the fact that the former is the more commonly accepted, modern definition of “skepticism” alone, and that post modernism also claims that there is a problem with objective truth. But I’m a good scientist, so I’ll admit where I’m wrong. She’s using the term fine, though I still think her views are utter hogwash.

It pains me whenever anti-science claptrap surfaces in feminist blogs I typically enjoy. It’s more evidence that feminism isn’t some monolithic entity or hive mind that constantly agrees. It’s also more evidence that we need to keep talking about how skepticism can aid feminism, because some feminists are writing rubbish like this:

As you may know from the numerous threads in which I’ve gone about it ad nauseum, I’m a skeptic (an fallibilist, existentialist …sort of). Without boring you to death, here’s the short version. I don’t think you can know things. I mean know them, know them. Not feel them, not experience them…but KNOW them. We (humans) cannot (probably) be absolutely certain of anything.

Skepticism is not some ideology where one cannot know anything. And before someone runs in screaming “No true Scottman!” – you could claim skepticism means you enjoy picking your nose while riding elephants, but that wouldn’t make it so. Skepticism is, at the very core, the application of the scientific method. To relabel it as some bizarro philosophy in where there is no such thing as knowledge is ridiculous. I can’t help but think of Tim Minchin’s wonderful Storm:


Conversation is initially bright and light-hearted

But it’s not long before Storm gets started:

“You can’t know anything,

Knowledge is merely opinion”

She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon

Vis-à-vis,

Some un–hippily

Empirical comment made by me


Hint: You don’t want to be making the same arguments as Storm.

There are a lot of reasons that Certainty, or at least certainty of the world outside ourselves, doesn’t work. There are the limits of human cognition. The limits of human perception. The unbridled arrogance of dogmatism. The centrality of certitude in the oppression of many, many people. But the one I want to talk about today is that dogma means that you stop learning, you stop listening to other people. In that sense I see certitude as antithetical to social justice.

Ok, I’m with you so far. Dogma = bad. Our brain messes up sometimes. That’s why we have science, right? To get around the limits of human cognition and perception. She then goes on to talk about how this sort of dogma that’s accepted as the most popular belief often gives privilege to those groups and oppresses others. Sure, I can see that. But then the argument goes back into lala land:

In my view, we can tear down all of the institutions, create perfect equality of resources or equality of opportunity, reshape the external world to our liking, but unless we reshape ourselves, address the underlying flaw in our understanding of the world and each other we will simply recreate the same power dynamics over and over again. One group will see their collective perspective as truth, as more valid than the perspectives of others, then they will once again attempt for force that reality on to others.

Which brings me back to skepticism. If we accept that we (probably) can’t know what is real, that as much as we consider, think, feel, explore we will (likely) never grasp the totality of truth, we are free to accept or learn from other people’s perspectives. We are free to accept contradictory perspectives, holding each as true for that person in that moment. We dismantle not just the current dominant narrative but also the very concept of a dominant narrative.

That to me is the goal of social justice.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The idea that we can’t definitively know what’s 100% true, therefore we must accept all people’s views of reality as equally valid is fucking ridiculous. You can’t simultaneously accept that there is no god and that the Christian God is sitting up in the sky hating on gays, just like you can’t simultaneously accept that gravity exists and doesn’t exist. Reality is independent of whatever delusional ideas our brains come up with.

But her views (not valid) make a lot more sense when you see what she says in the comments:

“Science to me contains the same claims to certainty (in many instances) as the most fundamentalist religion.”

Hooooooooo boy.

Science is the antithesis of dogma. We don’t base our views of truth and reality on whatever idea pops into our poorly evolved ape brains. We collect evidence, perform experiments, and repeatedly try to correct our view of the world so it’s close and closer to reality.

The fact that you’re making the same arguments as in-character Stephen Colbert should be a giant red flag:

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Michael Shermer
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Shermer: The only way to tell, really, the difference between these true patterns and false patterns is science.
Colbert: Really? You think science is the answer? But isn’t that just your belief? You are a skeptic. You are inclined to believe that skepticism is – the scientific method – the right idea, so you look for evidence out in the world that evidence is a good thing to luck for. But isn’t science just another belief system?
Shermer: It is another belief system, but it’s sets apart from another belief systems because it has built into it self correcting machinery, that says if you don’t look for your disconfirming evidence that debunks your own beliefs, someone else will, usually with great glee in a published form.

To claim that that science is bunk, or worse, just another religion, is to obviously not understand how skepticism, science, or the universe works. You may label yourself as a skeptic, but you’re the complete opposite.

The Mennonite mass rapes

I hate to follow one horrifyingly depressing rape story with another, but this needs to be shared. File this one away in “Proof Religion Doesn’t Automatically Make You a Good Person.” If you can find room, that is (emphasis mine):

Wall is among 130 women and girls of the Mennonite colony in Manitoba Colony, who claim that from 2005 to ’09, the same cloudy horror visited them. They’re the victims of what is allegedly one of the ugliest sex scandals in the history of the Mennonites, a pacifist Christian Anabaptist denomination founded in Europe in the 1500s, if not Bolivia and South America. In a criminal trial now under way in nearby Santa Cruz, Peter Weiber, 48, a Mennonite veterinarian, is accused of transforming a chemical meant to anesthetize cows into a spray to be used on humans. For four years, Weiber and eight other Mennonite men allegedly sprayed the chemical through bedroom windows in Manitoba at night, sedating entire families and raping the females. One of the men is a fugitive, the others have pleaded not guilty. If convicted, each faces a maximum 30-year prison sentence.

The criminal charges detail depraved acts few would expect inside a supposedly upright sect like the Mennonites. “When there were no grown women” in the houses that the men allegedly targeted, says Wilfredo Mariscal, an attorney for the victims, “they did what they wanted with the kids.” Court-ordered medical exams reveal a 3-year-old girl with a broken hymen (most likely, doctors note, from finger and not penis penetration). The formal indictments list victims ages 8 to 60 years old, including one who is mentally retarded and another who was pregnant and sent into premature labor after allegedly being raped by one of the men — her brother.

If you can stomach it, the whole article is worth the read. It goes more in depth with how the women in the Mennonite community are completely isolated from the world through various patriarchal rules, and how the men on trial for the rapes have been spending the trial goofing off, laughing, and falling asleep.

…Can I ragequit humanity yet?

Girl expelled for being raped, then raped again

Disgusting (emphasis mine):

According to the Springfield News-Leader, the 7th grade special ed student at Republic Middle School in Springfield, MO reported her rape in the spring of 2009. The lawsuit alleges that school officials told her they didn’t believe her, and after “multiple intimidating interrogations,” she recanted. The lawsuit also notes that a school psychological report said the girl “would forego her own needs and wishes to satisfy the request of others around so that she can be accepted,” meaning she might have been especially susceptible to pressure to change her story. But the pressure allegedly didn’t end there. The girl says she was made to write an apology note to her attacker and hand-deliver it to him. She was also expelled for the remainder of the school year.

When she came back the following year, the school allegedly refused her mother’s request for extra monitoring and did not separate her from her alleged attacker. In February 2010, the lawsuit says he “was able to hunt [her] down, drag her to the back of the school library, and again forcibly rape her.” She and her mother reported this rape to the police, and a rape kit tested positive for her attacker’s semen — he plead guilty to charges in juvenile court. But instead of taking her seriously at long last, the school suspended her, this time for “Disrespectful Conduct” and “Public Display of Affection.” Her lawsuit requests damages for medical expenses, emotional distress, and attorneys’ fees, as well as “punitive damages to deter School Officials and others from similar conduct in the future.”

…I have nothing to add. This atrocity speaks for itself.

The reason why you’re single

No, it’s not because you have reasonable standards of attraction and Seattle is just filled with ugly bitches who are deluded into thinking they’re prettier than they are.

It’s because you’re a self absorbed douchebag.

This seems like a brand of Nice Guy Syndrome, but slightly different. “Nice Guys” focus on how women don’t appreciate all of their nice acts, despite said nice acts being shallow manipulative ploys so Nice Guy can stick his dick in you, rather than genuine kindness, empathy, or respect. No, this seems like “Not Ugly Guy,” where he has reasonable standards of who he’s attracted to, but a city of over 500,000 people happens to be full of nothing but ugly women. Ugly, “dumpy” women who spend their free time sitting in (metaphorical) circle jerks talking about how pretty they are and concocting plans for tricking attractive men to stay in miserable relationships with them.

Slightly different, but there is a common denominator: Passive aggressiveness and pure delusion to avoid the possibility that you, Oh Perfect Penis Bearer, could have any sort of flaw.

It really boggles my mind how so many men can’t comprehend that the way to get a date is to treat women like human beings, rather than some monolithic hivemind or dungeon level that can be easily solved with a strategy guide. Or worse, an item they quite obviously deserve, despite being raging dickbags who can’t take a hint when their friends are saying they have too high of standards.

Translation: That’s the nice way of saying you don’t deserve the women you’re aiming for. Probably because you’re a raging dickbag whose justification for 13 years of singledom is blogging not-so-thinly-veiled misogyny.

Oh wait. I just disagree because I’m not pretty enough. Right. I always forget that.

EDIT: The author says he received a death threat because of his post. If this is true, that’s despicable. I hope it wasn’t any of my readers who did that, since we just got done talking about how that’s not okay. Shred someone’s arguments to pieces and point out their idiocy, but never threaten them.

The first ever Women in Secularism conference

The Center for Inquiry has just announced an exciting new event for next year – the Women in Secularism conference. It will be May 18 – 20 2012 in Washington, DC, and the speaker lineup looks amazing:

  • Ophelia Benson
  • Jamila Bey
  • Greta Christina
  • Elisabeth Cornwell
  • Margaret Downey
  • Annie Laurie Gaylor
  • Jennifer Michael Hecht
  • Sikivu Hutchinson
  • Susan Jacoby
  • Jennifer McCreight
  • Wafa Sultan
  • Rebecca Watson

Look! Somehow my name snuck in there! Woohoo!

This conference is a wonderful idea – hats off to Melody Hensley of CFI for creating and organizing it. No longer will people be able to say that men outnumber women as speakers because there just aren’t as many deserving or interesting women. …Well, people will still say that because people can be frustratingly dense, but now we can hold up this event as evidence.

I also hope that it’s well attended. The other argument I hear a lot is that we need to keep inviting the Big Names, not because they’re old white men, but because they’re popular and otherwise no one would come to the conference. But frankly, as much as I enjoy hearing Dawkins and PZ speak, seeing them for the 49839847th time gets a little old. I’m way more excited about seeing a bunch of people I’ve still yet to see – Annie Laurie Gaylor, Susan Jacoby, and Wafa Sultan. And usually I never see these amazing women all at the same time – I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when you stick us in a room together.

But really, I see the goal of this event is to make itself obsolete. We shouldn’t need specific women in secularism conferences in order to get the voices of women heard. We shouldn’t be shocked when conferences occasionally have more women speaking then men – we certainly take the opposite to be the norm. So while I’m greatly looking forward to it, I’m being optimistic that we won’t always need it.

Of course, some people are already whining in the comments of the announcement, claiming that the atheist movement obviously has no problems recruiting women or dealing with sexism. Surprise, surprise. My favorites so far are by John D:

“A conference just for women featuring several very vocal self described “Liberal/Progressive Feminists”… I have a feeling that trouble is brewing. I suspect I will enjoy the free flowing man bashing that will come from this event. I also look forward to the blog explosion which will result.”
“I will listen if only because I have respect for Susan Jacoby. Inclusion of Watcon, McCreight, and Christina insure that the pot will be stirred with great vigor and that the misandry will be served up rare!”

Stuff like this cracks me up. Yes, I am that radical, man-bashing, misandrist! And so is Greta (though we all obviously knew Rebecca was one). Seriously, do these men know that I’m kind of Feminism Lite? A Feminism Gateway Drug? I’m the type of feminist that’s one of the easiest for outsiders to tolerate – I’m extremely sex positive, pro-porn, have written about how we shouldn’t suspend skepticism in all rape cases… If you think I’m a man-hater, just wait ’til you meet the feminists who don’t like me! Your brain will surely explode.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the conference, and the pre-freakout from insecure men is just going to fuel my fire.