I just despair.

There is sexism everywhere, and there are battles to be fought. I agree completely that there are strong strains of odious stereotypy running through our culture, and that we have to be vocal in opposing them. Much of it is unconscious and not intended maliciously, but it still perpetuates a problem. It’s good to oppose it.

But this morning a raging flame war exploded in a thread about a cute bunny cartoon. The bunny who is the voice of religion is wearing a dress; the practical bunny playing the role of science wears pants. Some people said it’s sexist; some people said it wasn’t. And then the war was launched.

This is the WRONG BATTLE.

Are you really fighting for the right for the cute bunny in the dress in a cartoon to not be the religious one? I have never seen feminism reduced to such appalling depths of triviality as I have in that thread. I am literally embarrassed to see a 300+-comment thread erupt over this inanity, and to see it begin in only the second comment to the thread…it’s ridiculous.

I tried tracing down the source of the image, with no luck; it appeared on reddit, on a couple of discussion forums, but no one seems to give credit to the artist. If we found more examples of this person’s work, and there were a pattern of always making the girl bunny the dumb bunny, then you’d have a case — the artist is consciously or unconsciously expressing a sexist trope. Without more information, you cannot possibly judge this cartoon as a reflection of an underlying bias against women. You cannot see a pattern in a sample of one. It’s also simply not true that portraying women as stupid is a staple of cartoons — from Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson, the trend goes the other way. Yes, it’s still sexism — but if the comic in question had swapped the pants and dress on the bunnies, someone could object just as strongly. Given only two characters, one representing reason and one irrationality, there is actually no combination of sexes that isn’t going to offend someone, if you choose to see it only as a parable of sexual relations.

It isn’t. The two characters are having a conversation about science and religion, they are not using gendered language, and they’ve both been made childlike by portraying them as little cute bunnies. It’s fair to note that there are sexist biases in our culture, and that many of them belittle women, but that’s not what the comic was about; note it and move on.

Move on to change it where it matters. You want to say society diminishes women’s roles? I’ll agree with you. You want to complain about the unjustified authority given to men? I’ll back you 100%. You found some weasel who wants to deny that women are treated like second-rate citizens? I’ll join in the stomping. But show prolonged outrage at one twee cartoon that just happens to have a bunny in a dress playing the role of Simplicio, and you’ve lost me.

I’m going off to Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m not going to pay any attention to Pharyngula for a while. Go ahead and make me the target for your ire for a while, I expect this thread to turn into a screaming melee, too. I’ll be more impressed, though, if you take a moment to instead come up with real instances of oppression, discrimination, and intimidation of women (they’re not hard to find), rather than railing about the importance of toy bunny dresses.

In this TED video, Philip Zimbardo talks about an ongoing concern, the opting out of boys from academically and socially — boys are more likely to drop out of school, girls outperform boys at all academic levels, boys are 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADD. The difference also leads to many man-boys who can’t interact with women except on the most superficial and cartoonish level.

He’s talking about a real problem, but I was not convinced by his explanation. He attributes it to a phenomenon called arousal addiction, where people are hooked on constant stimulation of any kind, and he blames it on the internet, video games, and porn. I get very suspicious when anyone starts talking about the internet rewiring our brains (Susan Greenfield, anyone?) because a) I haven’t seen any persuasive data that it’s a serious and significant, let alone deleterious phenomenon, and b) everything rewires our brains — we respond to experience.

This talk has a serious flaw in that the first half is all about statistics and differences between males and females, and the second half is all about a putative general phenomenon that changes our brains…but it doesn’t say anything anymore about the differences between males and females. Women aren’t excluded from the internet — they get sucked into social media, they play video games, they even watch porn. So how does this explain the declining performance of men in schools and social situations?

(Also on Sb)

It’s like an avalanche. I’ve heard women speaking out about the online abuse they receive for years, but suddenly, it’s as if it has media traction, and more and more women are coming out to denounce the anti-woman hate speech that seems to be common currency on the internet. Laurie Penny, Helen Lewis Hasteley, Kate Smurthwaite, and now a profile of multiple female online writers all tell the same story: there’s a misogyny epidemic on the net. Ophelia Benson, who gets her share of the abuse too, highlights their stories.

I’m a guy who also gets a fair number of abusive emails — I even have a hobby of posting some of them now and then on the web — but there’s a qualitative difference to what I see. I get death threats regularly, but they’re usually of the form “you should get [violent fate] for [hating god, violating crackers, being liberal]”; I don’t get threats of the form, “[Man], I need to [crude sexual assault] you”. As a man, I can get threats for speaking against some cherished dogma, which I can sort of halfway understand, but I don’t get the threats for just being of my sex and speaking out, period.

I also don’t get much in the way of sexual threats, except for one telling class of insults: the ones that accuse me of being a woman. Vox Day is one of the milder practitioners of this habit: he refers to me as “Pharyngurl”, because after all, it’s demeaning to just reference me as a woman. I’ve had other, nastier messages where I’ve been called a “bitch” and threatened with anal rape, for instance; it’s as if they are first metaphorically translating me into a female so they can then really degrade me thoroughly.

So I get a faint echo of the female experience, and it’s utterly repulsive. As we’re beginning to see as more and more women speak out, the wretchedness is being more thoroughly exposed.

What’s also dismaying is that I once would have thought that people of my ideological stripe, you know, those all-inclusive egalitarian liberals and the rational, objective atheists, wouldn’t be guilty of such anti-woman attitudes. The other guys are the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing thugs, right? But no — read about Caroline Farrow, a more conservative Catholic blogger — she gets five sexually threatening emails a day! And of course the atheist community in general has experienced some turmoil in the last few months over the revelation that there are openly misogynistic creatures in our ranks.

It’s dismaying. I don’t know what to do, other than to personally reject the attitudes of the people who treat women as lesser beings. I also hope the media doesn’t let attention to this problem flag. I’m sure it’s all going to be major topic at the Women in Secularism conference in May, and I hope journalists are paying attention — there will be some powerful stories coming out of that event. They shouldn’t miss it. As is often the case, an important first step in correcting an injustice is to first shine a light on it.

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One other datum: over the years, I’ve had an actual decline in threats. Part of it is because the one event that prompted the most hateful letters, the cracker desecration, has receded into the past. But I think a contributing factor has also been my willingness to post the crazy email, so everyone can point and laugh at it (ridicule really does work), and because I’ve been open about my willingness to expose patent death threats with full source information. The unfortunate side-effect is that my inbox has gotten slightly less weird, the good side is that it’s also gotten slightly less hostile. When women publicize the fact that scum-sucking bottom feeders write the kind of crap they get, it’s going to make the scum-sucking bottom feeders more cautious.

Feministe has a long, thorough, and scholarly overview of the most common kind of rape: acquaintance rape. It’s not the stereotypical violent assault that is going to affect most women, but the guy who gets them drunk and assaults them quietly, in situations with reasonable deniability. The article is loaded with triggers for you women who have experienced those situations, so I’ll just briefly summarize. The good news: it’s only a small percentage of men who are these kind of sexual predators. The bad news: they do it repeatedly, and usually get away with it. A few guys are making the rest of us look bad, and are inspiring a culture of fear in women.

One very useful part of the article is a summary of what we can do to isolate and stop the recidivist rapists.

(1) Men who inhabit cis- and het- identified social spaces need to listen to women. The women we know will tell us when the men they thought they could trust assaulted them; if and only if they know we won’t stonewall, deny, blame or judge. We need to listen without defending that guy. That guy is more likely than not a recidivist. He has probably done it before. He will probably do it again.

(2) The same men need to listen to other men. The men who rape will all but declare themselves. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. Men who rape look for assurance that their social license to operate is in effect; they look for little confirmations that if he takes home the drunkest woman at the party and she says the next day that she said no, that she’ll be blamed and not believed. Choosing not to be part of a rape-supportive environment actually tells the rapist that his behavior has risks, and not everyone will take his side against an accuser.

(3) We need to change the culture of discourse about rape (and I mean all of us). Rapists know that the right combination of factors — alcohol and sex shame, mostly — will keep their victims quiet. Otherwise, they would be identified earlier and have a harder time finding victims. Women need social permission to talk frankly about sexual assault, because the more women can say what happened to them, the more difficult it is for the same man to rape six women without facing legal or even social consequences.

(4) Because the rapists have a fairly well-developed modus operandi, is is possible to spot it and interrupt it. We can look for the tactics and interrupt the routine. We can spot the rapist deliberately getting the woman drunk or angling to get the drunk woman alone in an unfamiliar place, and intervene. A guy offering a drunk woman a ride home may just be offering a ride, but if he is insistent when someone else offers a ride, this ought to raise a flag. If a guy is antagonistic towards women and places a lot of emphasis on sex as scoring or conquest, and he’s violating a woman’s boundaries and trying to end up with her drunk and alone, we don’t have to be sure what he’s doing to be concerned, and to start trying to give her exit ramps from his predatory slide.

I think #2 is going to be the toughest one. The men who engage in that sort of behavior tend to hang together and reinforce each other, and the men who will speak out and shut down predatory behavior in their pals at its onset will quickly find themselves excluded from the wolf pack. The problem, as we’ve seen in online behavior by the self-centered pigs, is that there’s no shortage of men (and women!) willing to form a support group for misogyny and rape culture.