The Toronto Star has interviews with eight women who were abused in various ways by Jian Ghomeshi, and here’s a personal story about the conspiracy of silence. Almost everyone knew about Jian, almost everyone whispered warnings about Jian, but no one would stand up and shout about Jian, so Jian thrived.
That’s depressing, the way it always works.
So Anita Sarkeesian appeared on Colbert. How do you think the #gamergaters reacted?
If you found yourself repulsed by Andrew Sullivan’s ugly weaseling on #gamergate, here’s an antidote: Anita Sarkeesian on Colbert. She’s a reasonable person defending reasonable views.
Andrew Sullivan commits a classic rhetorical error.
So let me make a few limited points. The tactics of harassment, threats of violence, foul misogyny, and stalking have absolutely no legitimate place in any discourse. Having read about what has happened to several women, who have merely dared to exercise their First Amendment rights, I can only say it’s been one of those rare stories that still has the capacity to shock me. I know it isn’t fair to tarnish an entire tendency with this kind of extremism, but the fact that this tactic seemed to be the first thing that some gamergate advocates deployed should send off some red flashing lights as to the culture it is defending.
All well and good, but…there’s a “but” coming. It doesn’t really need to be a “but”. And unfortunately, Sullivan throws out a real stinker of a “but”.
It’s a great place for walking; I’ve strolled from the World Trade Center site to the Village to the Empire State Building to the AMNH and through Central Park. But somehow, I never experienced this:
Last year, Carla Ciccone went on a bad date, a really bad date, and she wrote about it, while protecting the obnoxious handsy fellow’s identity with a pseudonym. Apparently, there were enough clues at the time — “Canadian radio celebrity”, how many of those can there be? — and people figured out who she was talking about. That’s where it got weird.
The guy she described got uncomfortably physical with her on a concert date, and later pursued her with text messages that assumed a degree of interest that she plainly disavowed, asking him to leave her alone. This is creepy behavior. It’s patently rude, inconsiderate, and possessive, and you’d think everyone would agree that this is stuff guys shouldn’t do.
But that’s not the response she got.
I’ve done it. Usually, though, it’s done to illustrate, for instance, normal morphology, for contrast with your experimental results. Or as a key for the anatomy. Or even sometimes as a small, tasteful bit of decoration, as long as it doesn’t detract or distract from the data. In this poster, Use of yeast lysate in women with recurrent vulvovaginal candidiasis by Vrzal et al., presented at the 8th Vaccine & ISV Congress in Philadelphia, I’m rather at a loss to figure out the purpose of these illustrations.
That’s the answer to the question, “Why are there so few women invited to an academic conference on alternatives to sexual reproduction?“
Other possible explanations:
I’m sure that one of the great joys of being an opinion columnist for Breitbart is that you are completely unbounded by reality — you can just float on the clouds of wishful thinking, and even internal contradictions are irrelevant. Milo Yiannopoulos, right-wing non-gaming gamergater, was interviewed on NPR. Here’s the first bit of wafting non-reality:
You may have heard the latest MRA talking point, the claim that more men are raped than women in the US. Echidne of the Snakes takes that apart beautifully: it turns out it’s only true if you compare a bushel basket full of apples and oranges to a handful of grapefruit that you’ve pulled out of another basket containing a bunch of avocados and bananas.
