Why are you a feminist?

I know why Laci Green is.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been one…even before I knew what it is. I felt it.

My parents married young, immediately had a string of kids, and weren’t highly educated: my father pumped gas for a living and my mother was a homemaker. Do I need to tell you we were poor? That didn’t matter to us: we could see that our parents loved each other very much and also loved us, but to be honest, you’ve got to admit that love doesn’t pay the rent. There were stresses and strains. I know my father was torn up because he was struggling so hard to meet that traditional male role as the breadwinner, and he wasn’t doing so well…and there was also a problem of binge drinking.

And then, my mother got a job to help out. And my parents argued. I knew that wasn’t right; if Dad can work, why can’t Mom? And then one night they fought. My father actually slapped my mother. I didn’t see it, but my sisters did, and they immediately started such wailing and crying and running through the house — that was wrong. Our parents were in love, they never ever hit each other. We were in total shock.

I’ll never forget what my mother did. She left. She took my sisters and moved back to stay with her parents. Our family was torn right in half, and it was probably the most traumatizing, terrible event of my childhood…but I still knew my mother had done the right thing, and that was important. My mother has always been quiet, soft-voiced, the stereotypical sensitive one, but I also knew in that moment that she was also damn strong and righteous. Even if I was crying myself to sleep every night, I was proud that she had stood up for herself.

The good news is that my father was also strong, and strength in this case meant admitting that he was wrong and changing his behavior. I never saw him drunk after that day; I never saw him strike my mother ever again. The usual description would be that he went “crawling back to her”, but that wouldn’t be it at all — it was more that two people who loved each other also realized that respect was part of the equation.

I was eight years old. I learned that forcing people into traditional roles tore them apart, and mutual respect and equality brought them together again. I also learned that women can be strong, and that good men can make mistakes. And years later, when I learned about this feminist thing, my reaction was to think, “But of course…isn’t everyone?”

The Deepening Rift

When I visited Iceland a while back, one of the sights I got to see was the dividing line between Europe and North America — one spot on the actual, physical dividing line between the tectonic plates. It was a literal rift.

rift

Another fascinating thing about it is that it’s growing. These plates are slowly drifting apart, and we expect the Atlantic Ocean to grow larger in the coming millions of years. This is not a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just what is.

You can see a growing rift right now: just look at the atheist movement. In particular, one really good marker right now is to look at Melody Hensley. Melody has been a vigorous activist for CFI, organizing many meetings in the Washington DC area, and in particular acting as the driving force behind the impressive Women in Secularism meetings. If there are real Brave Heroes in this movement, she’s one of them. I’m on Melody’s side of the rift.

On the other side…well, a mob of shrill nobodies, who don’t seem to do anything for the movement at all, but are really good at non-stop whining and lying. They are entitled shits who get furious if you block them on twitter or ban them from your personal blogs, but mainly seem to be involved in pursuing vicious vendettas against feminism, social justice, or anyone who dares to suggest that atheists ought to be doing more than just chanting that god is dead.

I am not on their side. I’m actually wishing we had a nearby subduction zone so they’d get sucked down into a more appropriate region.

Their latest cause célèbre is to howl in rage because Melody has been diagnosed (by a professional, not some ignoramus on Twitter) with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, as a consequence of years of harassment and bullying. This is a legitimate diagnosis: years of watching crime dramas on TV may have given you the impression that PTSD only affects soldiers in war zones, but real psychologists and real doctors will tell you otherwise: all kinds of prolonged stressors can produce PTSD symptoms. So if you’re one of the idiots ranting that you can’t get PTSD from bullying/stalking/harassment, you’re on the other side of the rift from me, and you’re also factually wrong. Which is amazing, considering that atheists should be putting a very high premium on following the evidence.

Then the other response is that if Melody can get PTSD from ‘mere’ online bullying, then she is demeaning the experience of soldiers who get PTSD from bombs going off near them— you know, ‘legitimate’ PTSD. This is absurd. They’re trying to rank degrees of trauma? That doesn’t discredit the fact that they’re all trauma. Someone saying they’ve got PTSD from source X is not an attack on someone getting PTSD from source Y. It’s painful to watch: it’s as if someone said they had prostate cancer, and instead of sympathy and help, they got accused of belittling breast cancer patients, because that’s a real cancer…and then someone starts tearing into those people because saying that breast cancer is a serious disease is equivalent to shitting all over pancreatic cancer patients. No, it’s not. They’re all bad. It’s a group of outsiders trying to establish a hierarchy of suffering solely so they can disparage one group. It’s dishonest and despicable.

I’m on the side of the people citing the scientific and medical evidence. I’m not on the side of people abusing the facts to further bully others.

And now, of course, their real agenda is becoming apparent: the Melody-haters who also reject the medical facts are finding common cause with misogynists and the usual incoherent ranters of the inappropriately named Men’s Rights Movement are are upset that mere rape and death threats against a woman might be wrong. It’s clear that the reason for all the bullying isn’t that Melody is weak, or lying, or oppressing people, because she isn’t — it’s because she’s a prominent, strong activist fighting for better representation of women in atheism and skepticism. That is her crime. And so those people on the other side of the rift will hound her to oppress and silence her.

Here I stand, on my side. Not only will I take pride in my choice, but if you try to tell me that I somehow have to heal this rift, I’ll ask you…”WHY?”

Connect the dots

Start here. Andrew Breibart attended a white nationalist conference in 2006, with panels by Jared Taylor and John Derbyshire.

He was attending with his protege, James O’Keefe.

O’Keefe has acquired some notoriety for dishonest stunts in the name of far right wingnuttiness. Among them was the Landrieu break-in.

According to reports, on January 25, 2010, O’Keefe and his friends Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan visited the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu. Basel and Flanagan disguised themselves as repairmen, and attempted to access the office’s telephone system by saying there was something wrong with the phone lines. O’Keefe was in the office and videotaped the some of the events with his cell phone camera. Office workers smelled a rat and called the authorities. The three of them were arrested, along with a fourth man Stan Dai, and charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

okeefeandcrew

Notice the guy on the right? That’s Joe Basel. It’s a bit embarrassing, but he attended UMM a few years ago — we did not get along. I do find it amusing that one of his complaints was that the university ought to remove all reference to me from its website, because I offended him. So if O’Keefe was Breitbart’s protege, Basel was O’Keefe’s — I guess he’s kind of a third rate Breibart imitator, which is not something to be proud of.

Basel previously was the editor (or some such role) at the Counterweight, the conservative alternative newspaper here at Morris a few years ago. He is now the CEO of something called the American Phoenix Foundation, which is yet another wingnut ‘thinktank’ with a mission.

The mission of the American Phoenix Foundation is to protect the American Republic through ethical, innovative, and technologically driven journalism.

A descendant of Breitbart/O’Keefe/Basel is protecting ethical journalism? OK. I’m laughing, but OK.

Thankfully, Basel is now gone from UMM, and the Counterweight is defunct. Unfortunately, its successor is that rather nasty racist rag, The North Star. It’s editor, John Geiger, was named a Phoenix Fellow by the foundation last year.

Breitbart → O’Keefe → Basel → Geiger, all with a nice infusion of racism throughout. It’s all kind of ugly and incestuous, isn’t it?

Know any philatelic homophobes?

You can blow their minds now. The US has released a commemorative stamp honoring Harvey Milk, which is a great step forward.

But we’ve been totally eclipsed by Finland, which has just created Tom of Finland stamps.

I have to say, though, that Tom of Finland makes me vaguely uncomfortable — not because of the open homosexuality, but because his drawings of men are so objectifying and sexually idealized, and I know that I can not, have not, do not, and never will look anything like them. They are the masculinized version of the airbrushed/photoshopped women’s magazine cover, and I can see how if these kinds of men were as ubiquitous as the plasticized-sexified images of women in advertising, I might feel a bit intimidated.

Kilstein is in flyover country

Just a reminder that tomorrow, Friday evening, Jamie Kilstein will be performing at Freethought Festival 3 in Madison, WI. This video is definitely NSFW, but it’s hilarious.

I am tempted to just hop in my car and make the 7 hour drive to Madison…but I’m going to be trapped in grading all weekend instead. I do not want to be a grown up anymore.

By the way, he makes a good point that I’ve noticed, too. Piss off the Catholics, they’ll swarm you with letters accusing you of persecuting them, with lots of “I’ll pray for you” noise, and only an occasional death threat. Piss off the anti-feminists, especially the sexist atheists, and you will get real rage-hate of a magnitude I never saw from the Christians. It’s actually the most appalling and disappointing failure of movement atheism, its failure to strongly support equality.

It’s Equal Pay Day

We had a troll pop by yesterday to whine that women don’t actually get paid less than men, they’re just worth less, which was a good reminder of the injustice; but I mainly take note because my wife is a member of AAUW so of course she took me by the ear and told me I had to remind everyone that women are getting ripped off everywhere, and also that it’s compounded by racial discrimination.

For African-American and Hispanic women, the wage gap is worse, which means it takes even longer for their salaries to "equal" the salaries of their white male counterparts. White men are used as a benchmark because they are the largest demographic group in the labor force. African-American and Hispanic women are paid less than their white and Asian-American peers, even when they have the same educational credentials. Asian-American women’s salaries show the smallest pay gap, at 87 percent of white men’s salaries. Hispanic women’s salaries show the largest gap, at 53 percent of white men’s salaries.

The Democrats have a petition. It wouldn’t hurt to sign, since the Republicans wobble between denying the problem exists and admitting there’s a pay gap, but having no clue about what to do about it.

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Pink is a preference policed by experience

Cordelia Fine reviews the scientific literature, and discovers that the evidence that girls innately prefer pink toys just isn’t there.

Existing science simply doesn’t support the view that gender-neutral toys or books are, at best, a pointless railing against nature or, at worse, politically correct meddling with children’s "true" natures. Social experience isn’t something that interferes with the emergence of a child’s "real," underlying design. It is an integral part of the construction, step by step, of the developmental pathway—destination uncertain.

Moreover, developmental psychologists have found that children are very aware of the importance placed on the social category of gender and highly motivated to discover what is "for boys" and what is "for girls." Socialization isn’t just imposed by others; a child actively self-socializes. Once a child realizes (at about 2 to 3 years of age) on which side of the great gender divide he or she belongs, the well-known dynamics of norms, in-group preference, and out-group prejudice kick-in.

I don’t know why so many people discount the importance of socialization. It’s a very intense experience, and almost all of us went through it — most children will freak out if you try to get them to wear inappropriately gendered clothing choices. Put a 5 year old boy in a pink dress and send him off to school, and he might initially have no problem with it…until the other 5 year olds of both sexes in the Gender Police start mocking, teasing, and tormenting him. We learn fast what will help us fit into the group.

Try to figure out what is disturbing about this image. Do you think it’s because it violates genetic norms?

(Well, he might think so.)

A good mission for MRAs

Have you heard of the Prison Rape Elimination Act? It was passed a long time ago.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was passed in 2003 with unanimous support from both parties in Congress. The purpose of the act was to “provide for the analysis of the incidence and effects of prison rape in Federal, State, and local institutions and to provide information, resources, recommendations and funding to protect individuals from prison rape.” (Prison Rape Elimination Act, 2003). In addition to creating a mandate for significant research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and through the National Institute of Justice, funding through the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Institute of Corrections supported major efforts in many state correctional, juvenile detention, community corrections, and jail systems.

This law sounds like a good idea, and since the most common (but not the only!) victims of prison rape are men, you’d think this would be a major cause for men’s rights advocacy. I’m sure they’re poised to leap into action.

If you want an immediate focus for action, try this: Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has refused to comply, over a decade after the act was passed. His arguments aren’t very good: he claims that Texas standards have been sufficient, that it would cost too much to comply, and that they have far too many prisons and prisoners to be able to cover with the available auditing tools.

If Texas has adequate safeguards against prison rape, why is Texas one of the worst states in the country for sexual abuses in prison?

Years of government research, as well as thousands of letters to JDI from Texas inmates, show that rape is rampant in Texas prisons. In a 2013 report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) singled out more detention facilities in Texas than in any other state for having high levels of inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse. That report, which was based on a nationwide survey of tens of thousands of inmates, was no aberration; two prior BJS inmate surveys, released in 2010 and 2007, also ranked Texas prisons as having some of the highest rates of sexual victimization in the country.

And maybe they could save some money and protect society humanely if they didn’t lock up so many men that they need hundreds of prisons. We have obscene incarceration rates, not just in Texas, but all across America.

It just seems to me that this prison problem ought to be a major focus of a men’s human rights movement, rather than abusing women and blaming them for all of their ills. Let me know when it happens.

The smartest thing written about #CancelColbert

When the Colbert Report twitter account posted that ‘joke’, “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever”, I understood exactly what he was talking about: that kind of remark was exactly what you’d hear said by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, in complete seriousness, and since Colbert is in the business of lampooning that kind of crap, I saw it as satire against casual racism.

But at the same time, it really bugged me. It was a lazy ass joke — it relied on a racist stereotype for laughs. And don’t talk to me about context; if you’ve got a joke that thoroughly depends on context, don’t put it on twitter, the worst possible medium for a lengthy build up. It also greatly put me off that Colbert doubled down afterwards. He’s a comedian. Are you going to tell me that comedians don’t understand that sometimes jokes fall flat? Is it a common response for comedians who tell a dud joke to then blame the audience for not appreciating it enough?

Maybe we should ask a comedian. Keith Lowell Jensen has some thoughts on Suey Park and the Colbert Report.

While many people of color defended Colbert, there were enough condemning the joke, even after the context was clear, that I had the choice to either consider the complaint further or assume that THAT large a number of people of color either didn’t understand satire and/or were hysterical and knee jerk and completely irrational. This seemed a poor assumption to make.

And while I considered Colbert’s joke, I don’t mean that I considered whether or not he should be cancelled (never Park’s real goal) or whether he was intentionally being racist (I have no doubt his intent was the opposite) but rather it was a good joke or not, whether this particular joke might have been a miss.

This discussion went on in my brain. I may have talked with a few friends about it, but I did so privately. What I didn’t do, was to immediately publicly condemn Suey Park and everyone else supporting #CancelColbert.

It seems to me that if an Asian woman finds a joke about racism against Asians (and about racism against Native Americans once context is added) offensive, the white guy should probably listen to her carefully and give her argument a lot of thought. The white guy should maybe not be SO quick to assume he knows more about racism than she does and should not be so quick to assume that she doesn’t comprehend or that she is hysterical and irrational. When many other people of color feel the same, this is magnified. I feel like a white guy navigating discussion of racism might want to be slower to respond, more eager to listen, less cocky.

That says it perfectly.