The shame of the fishing industry

Back when I was a young man, the thing many college students chose to do over summer break was to sign on to a fishing boat (or a fish processing plant, which was less romantic) and spend the summer making great money at hard, cold, rather dangerous labor. I knew several of my fellows who did that at least once; I was tempted myself, but veered away at the notion of “hard work”. Physical labor? Me?

I think my younger brother might have been trying to show me up, because he signed on for a career in the North Pacific crab fishery. No, no way. That’s cold and scary.

But you know who I would not recommend such a job to? Any woman. It turns out the fishing boats, even the Canadian fishing boats, are hellish dens of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault.

You might not want to read the article at that link if you’re at all sensitive. Women who wanted to make the world better by signing on as observers on fishing boats — the people who tracked bycatch and were making sure the regulations were being followed — were being horrifically abused and pressured to ignore criminal activity, and often came back with absolutely no interest in continuing a career in fisheries biology.

There. Now you know what’s in it and don’t need to read it.

I will say, though, that there are a bunch of fishermen and fishing captains who need to be arrested and prosecuted, and there are laws that need to be changed to protect observers.

So…pronouns make the man? Or woman?

If you ask fundagelical Christians about God’s sex, they are adamant that He is definitely male. It doesn’t make sense to me — to use the usual TERFy arguments, does “he” have a penis? Does “he” make small mobile gametes? Does “he” even have gametes? Is “he” a “born biological male”? How does this even work? I have to wonder if this supernatural being should even be regarded as possessing any of the characteristics of a physical person. We could ask whether he has two arms, two eyes, or ten fingers, or even needs eyes and fingers, but some Christians are obsessed with questions about whether “he” has an adequate penis. The smarter metaphysical types are content to argue that “his” masculinity is a matter of essence, not crude biological bits.

Austin Powers is an ass, so perfectly appropriate to use him to illustrate AiG.

“Smarter” is not a term often used for the rascals at Answers in Genesis, who are so committed to a superficial literalism that they believe their god created the world in precisely 6 days. Of course, to them, God is MALE. It says so in the Bible. So now they’ve published a twisty little essay justifying the fact that God is a man, baby. What this silly theology boils down to is this:

God uses male pronouns, therefore he is male. Well, that sure was easy!

The pronouns and verbs used in the Bible to describe God are always masculine, as are most of the nouns and images (Lord, King, Redeemer, Father, husband):

The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ (Numbers 14:18)

Our Redeemer—the Lord of hosts is his name— is the Holy One of Israel. (Isaiah 47:4)

For your husband is your Maker, whose name is the Lord of armies; and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, who is called the God of all the earth. (Isaiah 54:5)

Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matthew 6:9)

Jesus said…I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” (John 20:17).

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named (Ephesians 3:14–15)

he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, (1 Timothy 6:15)

Well, that’s easy. It’s probably sacrilegious to ponder the length of God’s penis, or his sperm count, or his testosterone levels, so let us respect his privacy and avoid all the discussion of genitals, or which restroom he’s allowed to use when he urinates. I hope AiG applies the same courtesy to their fellow humans.

I do have to note that the essay does briefly nod at the idea that their god’s masculinity is a metaphor, and that most scholars agree with that, but only to immediately dismiss it on the authority of someone named John C. P. Smith. AiG is not going to tolerate any weakening of the literal language of the Bible!

Some may argue that it is true that God is presented as male but that this is only metaphorical language used to describe God’s character. Even though the modern scholarly consensus seems to suggest this latter view is correct, it is by no means a unanimous view. Pastor and Old Testament scholar John C. P. Smith gives several good reasons to think this is not the case: (1) God consistently and repeatedly represents himself as male making a deliberate assertion about his nature; (2) The presentation of God as male throughout the Bible is ubiquitous and supports the notion that his maleness is a reality and not a metaphor; and (3) the term Father is not simply one metaphor among others in the Bible: it is what God in actuality is for his worshippers.

Note, of course, that god’s masculinity is entirely a product of what words he chooses to use to describe himself, which seems fair. You might wonder who John C. P. Smith is — I never heard of him, but he’s a pastor in the UK who writes articles for — you guessed it — Answers in Genesis. He’s not a guy who was privileged to peek under God’s robes.

The Wall Street Journal opinion pages have always been garbage, anyway

In case you hadn’t heard already, the WSJ published an appalling bit of nonsense from a Joseph Epstein in which, for some unexplained reason, he decided the important issue of the day is to berate Jill Biden for using the title “Dr.” I know. It’s idiotic. She earned the title, use it. There’s a serious reek of sour grapes here, since Epstein has, at best, a BA. Nothing wrong with that, all of my students graduate with a BA, and I’m proud of them. If you want to see it dissected, with excerpts, here’s the summary for you, complete with summary diagram.

But here’s the deal: among themselves, academics tend not to use fancy titles for each other. We might use them when introducing a colleague to others (but see below), but many of us won’t expect it even with our students, or anyone else for that matter. That goes for all you readers, too — I’d rather you didn’t address me as Dr Myers. That feels weird.

One exception, though: if you try to tell me that you’re not going to call me Dr because I only have a mere biology Ph.D., then for you, I’m going to have to insist on the formality.

Also, these data bring me up short. There’s a tendency for male academics to be more informal with female academics than with their fellow men.

Wow. When women introduce women, they’ll nearly 100% of the time use their title; when men introduce women, it’s down to less than half the time. That’s simple misogyny, diminishing the accomplishments of women, which Epstein has to an extreme degree, but a surprising number of us men also share. I think I tend to get formal when doing formal introductions, so I don’t think I’m guilty of that, but I’ll be more conscious of the problem in the future. I wouldn’t want to Joey Epstein myself, you know. No one wants that.

The worst takes on Elliot Page

I’m seeing two kinds of negative reactions to Elliot Page’s revelation. One is outright denial, verging on rage; the other is dull, stupid incomprehension. Neither are particularly attractive, or complimentary to the character of those making them.

The loudest example of the first is this editorial by Brendan O’Neill, in which he deadnames him and goes on and on, stupidly upset that a woman cannot just click her fingers and become a ‘he’. It’s about what I would expect from O’Neill, who is one of those peculiarly British reactionaries, a shrieking Trotskyite who always favors conservative authoritarianism. I really don’t get Brendan O’Neill, he’s such a strange creature. But here’s what he says about Elliot Page:

So that’s it, is it? Ellen Page is no more? She’s been disappeared? She’s been shoved down the memory hole, left to stalk that netherworld of people whose names must never be uttered out loud, like Bruce Jenner, Frank Maloney, Voldemort? Ellen Page, the actress most famous for starring in irritant quirkhouse movie Juno, has now declared that she is Elliot Page and that she’s a he. And, boom, just like that, Ellen’s gone. She’s being erased from film history. People are getting into trouble even for saying the word ‘Ellen’. ‘Who?’, woke identitarians ask, as if they’ve all gone mad.

It goes on and on like that, but the gist of it seems to be that he acts as if “Ellen Page”, the female, has been dragged out and shot, to be replaced by “Elliot Page”, the male, and that we’ve betrayed her by accepting their evolution. It’s an odd view that isn’t believed by anyone. There was a person, a human being, who was assigned female at birth, and who lived and grew and realized that the identity forced on them by the conventions of culture was not the identity they held inside. The person isn’t gone or erased, they’re still here — they just aren’t the person you thought they were, and they definitely don’t fit into the one of the binary cartoons you wanted them to conform to…but then, nobody does. Get over it.

The second type of anti-trans sentiment I’m seeing is the chickenshit sarcastic ‘skeptic’ who is Just Asking Questions, because they want to be able to run away fast if called out on their bigotry. Who else could better represent that view than Michael Shermer?

What a buffoon.

Oh, he’s serious (not trolling). Do I need to point out that he’s published many books, which he likes to claim are the product of “research”, and that he should have the tools at his fingertips to find all kinds of sources that could explain to him in great detail how to answer those questions? Does he usually “research” his books by asking leading questions on Twitter of his followers, who, he must know by now, tend to have a bit of a bias against the progressive views that he’d need to listen to? Shermer is definitely trolling. He’s just playing the dumbass to build some plausible deniability, and to pretend to be more open-minded than he actually is.

Also, he left off the question he really wants to ask. If Michael Shermer thinks Elliot Page is attractive and wants to assault him, would that make Shermer gay? Go away, Shermer, you’re just an awful person.

Pinker does automatically love the Patriarchy

Steven Pinker rushed to defend an overpaid Eton school teacher who had been fired for making a video called “The Patriarchy Paradox”. You can watch it if you must, but it’s incredibly bad — he seems obsessed with movie portrayals of men as being an accurate representation of True Masculinity. His first examples are of Marvel superheroes: The Marvel movies showed that in popular culture, masculine archetypes, such as Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man, described by the philosopher Edward Feser as a patriotic soldier, the son of a heavenly father come to Earth, and a strutting capitalist alpha male, retain their appeal. The whole thing sounds like that. He relies mainly on fictional sources, bad statistics, and biased presentation of data to make a case for the intrinsic superiority of men, therefore justifying patriarchy. I mean, really, how can anyone be persuaded by this bullshit?

He then uses a clip from Goodfellas of Henry Hill beating up his neighbour for molesting his girlfriend as evidence that ‘male aggression is a biological fact… whether we like it or not’ (25:42). He also seems to agree with Scarface’s Tony Montana’s observation that ‘first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women’ (29:12), as if psychotic, murderous, cokehead gangsters are a valid voice of reason.

It is notable that many of Knowland’s arguments would not look out of place on an incel Reddit forum. Knowland repeatedly says that women use their sexuality to their advantage, stating that they can ‘exploit their power of sexual choice to get males to compete to do things for them’ (22:32). This is classic incel rhetoric: believing that women use their sexual appeal to manipulate and control men, and that if men can’t get sex, it’s because of women withholding it from them. This is a terrible message to teach teenage boys. The problem is not a discussion of such claims, the problem is with Knowland’s presentation; his lack of analysis, his failure to question the assertions made in his video. If this incident raises questions of free debate, then where’s the debate?

If you’re so deluded that you can’t tell that Henry Hill and Tony Montana are psychopathic monsters and the villains of those movies, you aren’t fit to be a teacher.

But, surprise surprise surprise, Steven Pinker was among the very first well-known academics to try and defend this guy and make ludicrous claims of protecting academic freedom, and even bigger surprise, he now admits to never having even seen the video!

Keep this in mind if ever you have to evaluate Pinker’s opinion on anything.

I heard about this case last week as I was deep in the throes of grading, and the first thing I did before judging this Knowland guy was to check out his video, and then I judged the hell out of him.

By the way, that video has 5.7K upvotes and only 524 downvotes. YouTube remains a cesspool of misogyny.

Richard Dawkins loses the plot

Apparently, there’s a bit of a row going on over in the UK because Cambridge University is planning to impose a policy that would require Cambridge’s academics, students and visiting speakers to treat others and their opinions with “respect”. This is bugging a few people, who don’t want to respect others, and they want to change the word “respect” to “tolerate”, which is in itself a revealing bit of jiggery-pokery. I mean, really, asking people to treat others with respect is not an onerous demand: I’ve listened to creationists and Republicans speaking on campus, and managed treat them with respect even while regarding their ideas as horseshit, and being able to tear into them with questions. It’s not hard. It’s also a demand with a strange context.

Supported by the actor Stephen Fry, who read English at Cambridge, and Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering, Ahmed fears the new code could be used to stifle views deemed to be “disrespectful” on subjects such as transgender rights, anti-vaccination, religion, race or climate change. They fear it could lead to academics who satirise certain views being sacked.

Mock away! The only restriction I see that might be in place is that you don’t get to dehumanize people over their gender, their politics, their religion, or their race. What I see here is typical right-wing paranoia — a fear that they might be abused in the same way they abuse minorities.

As usual in these academic matters in the UK, we just have to get the opinion of Richard Dawkins. So he appeared on this radio program (skip ahead to the 1:44 mark to hear Dawkins), and just totally embarrasses himself.

The radio host brings up a message from a listener, Zoe. Zoe says “as a post-op transsexual woman married to a man and being a respectful member of society, I would hope to be respected as a person rather than being merely tolerated, otherwise incorrect assumptions and bigotry will thrive,” and akss what Dawkins would say to Zoe. This is his reply.

I would say if she wants to be called she, I am very happy to call her she. That’s a matter of courtesy. But if she wants me to say she’s a woman, when she has an XY karyotype, then as a biologist, then I would say that I would define a woman, as a biologist, as a member of the species Homo sapiens with XX karyotype. That’s a matter of definition. People can say what they want to be called, and I’m happy as a matter of courtesy, I do this myself, a person who was a man who becomes a woman, I’m happy to use pronouns like she, but I’m not happy to be dictated to and told that you must use this pronoun as a matter of law or coercion.

First problem: that doesn’t address the point at all! He’s rambling off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the issue brought up. Does he understand how someone might see “tolerance” as a minimal expectation? Zoe wants to be respected as an equal member of society, not as some aberration to be tolerated.

She’s not asking about what pronoun she’d prefer. He’s not being particularly magnaminous by conceding to address her as she wants, as if we should all appreciate his graciousness. This is minimal courtesy he is offering.

WHat does he do next? He offers some unasked-for pedantry, telling us how he, as a biologist, defines “woman”, as a way of saying that he does not regard Zoe as a woman. Very respectful!

He’s also wrong. “Woman” is a complex multifactorial entity, and it is not identical with “reproductive female”, as he is using it. As a biologist, I would not analogize womanhood with the function of one half of a breeding pair of fruit flies or spiders or zebrafish or mice. Furthermore, I would not make the mistake of correlating even that with a simplistic version of chromosome organization. A biologist should know better.

He’s not particularly consistent. He calls Zoe “a man who becomes a woman”, right after tellins us that she isn’t really a woman. He needs to get his story straight.

Finally, this petty declaration that he doesn’t like being dictated to…is he also being dictated to when polite convention tells him address a woman (even the ones he recognizes as a True Woman!) by masculine pronouns? No one is talking about legal impositions, and the only coercion is the same kind that compels us to behave in mutually respectful ways as members of a civil society.

So let’s get it straight: what the Richard Dawkinses and Stephen Frys want is to be able to exclude transgender men and women from their civil society.

John Cleese disappoints me

This is just sad.

It’s not even creative or original or good — it’s just a variant of the creaky dumb “I want to be an attack helicopter” “joke” that lazy right-wing comedians have been dumping on us. I guess that puts him in a particular category, a specific “social construct” if you will, that I don’t find very interesting, but good on him for being his true self.

By the way, it’s interesting his three parameters — a nationality, a profession, and a gender identity — are all social constructs as well, and are achievable with a truly deep commitment and dedication to a goal. Not that I think he’s seriously interested. He’s too wrapped up in his current identity as an indignant male-presenting British ex-comedian.

Here’s a photo of Cambodian police women. Cleese should stop fetishizing them.