I have been told that the divisions over sexism racking the atheist movement are a purely American problem — this simply isn’t an issue in Europe. There’s also the implication that it’s a phony concern, ginned up by bloggin’ malcontents.
So I guess the University of Nottingham is located somewhere in Iowa, then?
“Role models” for one of the campus houses led new students in a song, chanting this charming little ditty:
I wanna be a Cavendish ranger, living a life of sex and danger.
High flying, 69-ing.
These are the girls that I love best, many times I’ve sucked their breasts.
Fuck her standing, fuck her lying,
If she had wings I’d fuck her flying.
Now she’s dead, but not forgotten, dig her up and fuck her rotten.
You wish, you wish, you wish you were in Cavendish…
We need to recognize that this kind of thing isn’t simply a local phenomenon, another curiosity of weird American culture, but is world-wide: we’ve got FGM in parts of Africa and Asia, the devaluing of daughters in parts of Asia, and piggish bro culture in the West. What’s also pernicious is the idea that if we ignore it and don’t talk about it, the problem goes away.
And that actually works! If you’re a man and you stick your head up your ass, you won’t see discrimination and prejudice anymore. And then the real problem becomes all those people trying to pry your head out and make you look around, and those people need to be stomped into silence.
It looks as though someone spirited the LSE across the Atlantic at dead of night, though it wouldn’t still have a rugby club then, would it?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2784153/London-School-Economics-disbands-rugby-club-entire-season-reaction-sexism-row-freshers-week-leaflets.html
It wouldn’t surprise me. Cornell is there, and Northwestern, and Penn.
That makes Hamlet (Shakespeare, not Ken) come to my mind:
I could live in a walnut shell and feel like the king of the universe.
Vow Maureen Brian! I heard about the row not that last development!
The LSE didn’t always cover itself in glory these past few years (what with the links to Gaddafi) but there they reacted swiftly and without equivocating. Kudos.
But yeah, don’t get me started about the sexism inherent to much of uni rugby culture.
Damn, my geography must be really rotten. All these years I thought I lived in Germany and experienced all this shit, and heard a lot more of this shit from friends, but it turns out I’ve been in the USA all along.
What – other than the risk of exposure as spoiled immature assholes – “danger”?
Maybe (I hope) U of Nottingham has a large & vigorous women’s martial-arts club.
Odd. I’m pretty sure Dawkins is in England and Nugent is in Ireland… *eyeroll*
You and me both, Giliell.
I’ve sat awkwardly by while acquaintances mocked the concept of the gender gap, I heard my father make the old tired joke about not trusting someone who “bleeds for days without dying”, I have had long debates with friends about gendered wage differences. All that and more in good ol’ Germany.
Atheism, however, isn’t that big a battle ground here, though. At least not in the north-ish; I can’t speak for, say, rural part in Bavaria.
Sexism is a US-only problem? (So says Michael Nugent, et al).
What about “Dear Muslima”? Wasn’t the whole point of that to show that US women have it so much better than anywhere else in the world?
Assholes can’t even get their own stories straight.
The “Oh, you primitive and old fashioned Americans!” dodge works both ways. On the one hand you’ll have people who claim Europeans, being more sophisticated and cultured, don’t have problem X like those American barbarians. On the other hand you have the people who claim Americans only consider problem X a problem because they aren’t sophisticated and cultured like Europeans. So it’s either that Europe has gotten past the problem of sexism, because they’re smarter etc. than Americans, or a bunch of stuff that Americans think might be sexist really isn’t, it’s just a result of Americans being puritanical and so forth.
I don’t have much to add, except that, yeah, I’ve lived in europe all my life. The iidea that sexism, or even specifically sexism within the atheist community, is a problem specific to the US is laughable.
But this isn’t about atheism in any form. It’s about a loud chant with rude words. Antisocial, and it could make women feel left out (the words clearly are meant to be shouted by men, not women). But not really about sexism in atheist circles.
I think, with little actual evidence except my 70 years experiences with people around me, that if you take random samples of people from anywhere and any gender, you will find about the same proportion of racists and geniuses in all of them. Idiots and assholes too, as well as saints (and I am using the word without it’s religious connotation – the most saintly man I ever knew was a confirmed atheist).
Oh well, boys will be boys… /s
Yeah, the atheist movement isn’t really in the picture, in the UK. There hasn’t been a generation of students that were even close to majority believers in the UK for at least 40 years, and probably longer, so “not religious” has been pretty much the default position for students since the 1960s. I was still a liberal Christian when I was at Manchester University in the early 1980s, and attended the University “Methsoc” while I was there, but I don’t recall any atheist organizations being there at all.
The campus song is an example of the typical “laddism” that’s been around for a quite a while (and is anti-feminist). No doubt you will find it all over the place, but I suspect it isn’t quite as prevalent in the UK as in US colleges. British universities don’t have frat houses, and I believe that the vast majority of student housing is co-ed these days, which tends to discourage boorish behaviour. The hall of residence I was in was male only, (not that I ever saw anything beyond the typically infantile behaviour you get when there are lots of young males around) but it started taking in women students a few years after I left.
If you want a taste of British university life, I would highly recommend the excellent British comedy drama “Fresh Meat” which I believe is available on Netflix at the moment. One of the characters is the archetypal upper-class “lad” who believes women are there just to serve his needs, but of course, he finds out differently. The show has won several awards, and is recommended viewing if you like British TV (though if you have a son or daughter at college at the moment, it might be a little more difficult to watch!).
Agreed, but it’s not as bad in some countries as in others. Scandinavian countries have long been in the forefront of equal rights, and very much doubt there is anywhere close to the amount of rampant sexism seen in the US (or the UK for that matter).
Just a few months ago wasn’t there some a-hole pickup “artist” blogger who was travelling around Europe trying to sleep with as many women as he could, but when he got to Denmark, he kept striking out. The Danish women just wouldn’t fall for his shtick, which, of course, made them sexless feminist robots in his eyes.
So, attitudes can change, it just takes a lot of time and effort from a lot of people, both men and women.
Y’all are misunderstanding. It’s not about sexism not being a thing in Europe; it’s about how Europeans are just too cool to be prudish and shrill SJW and actually do something so horrible as to divide the movement over mere sexism.
Because there are no European bloggers at FTB. Nor are there European Skepticks. Or commenters at either of these. Nuh-uh.
It’s simply more of the “in Europe, ‘wanna come up for coffee’ doesn’t mean sex and also only a prude American would be upset at being propositioned” bullshittery we’ve been seeing for years.
@tacitus, #16:
That was Roosh V. Check out the archives of We Hunted The Mammoth and you’ll find something on it, I’m sure.
tacitus – yep, like Crip Dyke said, that’s Roosh V. He’s currently skulking in Ukraine, I believe. This is David’s latest post on him.
Why pickup artist Roosh V resents women for “forcing” him to clip his fingernails and wipe his own ass
I heard a version of that EXACT ditty being sung by prospective engineering students, as a teenager on a national science camp in Canberra. The year was 1989.
This shit has been around a LONG time, and it’s not confined to the US.
I am deeply embarrassed to say that I work at the University of Nottingham. I don’t think the attitudes are any different at other universities, but it’s something that should be confronted.
A few years ago we had a compulsory diversity lecture for staff and post-grad. It was only half an hour. I was shocked and disappointed at a) the resistance to attending in the first place and b) the whining from men afterwards. There are a number of deeply sexist people on our staff and I guess this permeates through the whole establishment.
As mentioned above: some halls of residence are single-sex and this encourages the attitudes expressed by these songs.
OT: tacitus I too was at the University of Manchester in the early 80s!
I was in a mixed-gender dorm in university, and it was in no way my experience that this made it ‘less sexist’. If anything, it offered more opportunities for sexist and rapey assholes to behave badly: they had more women available to be abusive to, and more time in the day to do it.
Sexism, for women, is lived on a far more persistent basis than just assholes singing disgusting songs in Frosh Week. So, mixed dorms: a bit less organised chanting in Frosh Week, traded for breathing sexism throughout the school year. Not a great bargain.
Your right CaitieCat . I guess you can’t win either way: in a single-gender hall everyone outside the hall becomes ‘the other’ and therefore becomes something to fear/hate/use. Whereas in a mixed hall it can just be an opportunity to be directly discriminatory. The only solution is to somehow get people to realize that discriminatory behavior is wrong. It’s going to be a long painful process.
I work in a college with many, many international students. Yesterday, I had an unhappy duality: one, I was unexpectedly a substitute teacher teaching computer literacy with no working computers; and two, I had to listen to a group of seven male students openly discuss which men’s club one of the student’s should go to on his 21st birthday. Multiculturalism is great, but it truly seemed there was only one culture in that room- accepted and expected sexism.
depressingly common among the younger generation:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2014/oct/10/10-things-female-students-face-university-misogyny-banter
Isn’t what used to be called in Old Speak “Germany” now known as Airstrip Two?