I just watched our very own Sikivu Hutchinson and Ophelia Benson, along with Rebecca Watson, brilliantly discuss this silly question, “Are women afraid of atheism?” I think this embed code below will work, but who knows…it was through the Huffington Post, and they have to make everything weird and difficult.
There was also a concurrent text stream, and wouldn’t you know it, all the usual dudebros were there to complain that there is no problem, women are all equally represented, atheism has no cultural relevance anyway so why are these women talking?
Howdy. I’m a 51-year-old atheist woman. And most of my friends are too. We exist and we certainly aren’t afraid of atheism.
…. “and they are the ones oppressing the women who disagree with them by calling them ‘sister punishers’ and ‘chill girls’… and MISANDRY! and COMMUNISM!”
I can tell Screechymonkey was also watching the text stream. Yeah, that was about it.
I get so tired of interviewers who ask three or four questions, complete with various contexts for each question, before they let the person or people being interviewed respond. One question at a time would work much better.
Link for Rebecca is borked, btw.
The stream isn’t working for me… :(
YouTube? Link to story?
Gah, that text stream. Couldn’t Vacula have typed “shut up” once and been done with it? Did anybody else get anything more constructive than that from his multiple contributions? I’m going to read Gruntled & Hinged again and drink. Probably won’t eliminate the “grrrrrr” noise in my head but it couldn’t hurt.
Liked this a lot, but Rebecca’s reference to FGM as ‘circumcision’ seems a bit suspect?
skepchick.org/author/rebecca would be an actual link
Smart, eloquent atheists? Absolutely.
Women whose stuff I’d read even if it was just their grocery lists? In a heartbeat.
Stars? Sadly, that’s a completely socially-determined thing and mostly a matter of promotion. It’s like the difference between a top-notch actor and a “star”.
They haven’t captured the popular imagination yet. They’ll be stars when the Huddled Masses of Atheism (including the dudebros) wake up and realize what they’re missing.
@JohnnieCanuck, yes it would. Once PZ gets around to fixing the link so it actually points there, then people who don’t already know that will be able to find it, yes?
I have to agree with anuran. These women are not “stars”. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I *want* them to be stars. In a just world they would be, but that’s not the case.
Stuff like this, of course, is definitely a step in the right direction.
vacula: “I am pretending to have absolutely no idea what any of these women are saying.” Bleagh. How someone can be so painfully wilfully ignorant, blind and self-deceiving I have no idea! (“La la la there is no sexism and no online harassment, la la la.”)
Vacula’s just mad because nobody’s brought him up in over a month. “Look at meee! I’m still heeeeere! I need attention!!!!”
We are supposed to be promoting women but using the Huffingtin post which spends most of its bandwidth objectifying women. Smooth move.
Alexgabriel, suspect of what, exactly? “Female circumcision” as a descriptive phrase is deprecated these days in favour of “FGM”, because it made the practice sound — whether the speaker meant it that way or not — inconsequential, but not so long ago it was what the practice was commonly called, so it hangs around in several people’s vocabularies and will leak out in conversation when the speaker would be more careful in writing. I don’t care to go and check right now what Watson’s views on FGM are, but I doubt that she thinks it’s inconsequential.