What is your problem, fellow men?

The Alaska Attorney General, Kevin Clarkson, has resigned. He’s a Republican and a religious zealot, so you can guess why: harassment of a woman employee. It’s so predictable at this point.

He wasn’t saying anything explicit, and that’s his defense.

“I engaged in a series of text messages with this employee over approximately one month. The topics of these texts ranged from food, to movies, to books, to family, and all were conversational and positive, were reciprocal, and were, I believed, mutual. I sent her pictures of food that I cooked from time to time. These texts included invitations for this person and her children to come to my home to share a meal, which she politely declined. All of these texts were ‘G’ rated. In our texts we exchanged mutual endearments in words and emojis. On several occasions, this person initiated a friendly hug when I came to her work place, and I reflexively gave her a peck on top of her head.”

That’s sweet, except he sent 588 such texts in a single month, and they were rather too informal to be considered professional. Also, why does he keep commenting on her appearance?

The text messages began in March and continued for 27 days, the Daily News reported. In the texts, Clarkson invited the woman to his home 18 times. He sent her 56 kissing face emoji. He invited her to drink wine with him. He called her “beautiful” and “sweet lady.” And after they had not seen each other for a while told her, “you owe me a number of hugs.”

After the woman asked Clarkson to respect professional boundaries, he replied “OK I won’t bother you more,” the Daily News reported. He told her he had enjoyed talking to her and called the hugs that they had shared “pretty darn special.”

Then he sent her 200 more text messages, the newspaper reported.

I think her case was made at “200 text messages after being asked to stop”. Boundaries, fellow men, boundaries. Learn to respect them.

The unfixable man

This letter…wow.

Three months ago, my wife and I had a calm disagreement over whether we should start a family. A few nights later, I replayed the conversation in my mind and got extremely angry about it. I went into the bathroom, flushed her birth control pills down the toilet, left the empty case on the counter, and then went back to bed. When I woke up in the morning, I was ashamed of myself, but I knew she had already seen what I’d done. She never confronted me about it but has displayed strange behavior since then. She is unusually quiet and acts withdrawn. Her body language has changed, and although we still have sex regularly, it is different than it was before. In addition, she is constantly taking phone calls in private and leaving the house on superfluous errands. I realize I made a mistake, but I don’t think it’s fair that she continues to punish me for it by avoiding me. I want to ask my wife for us both to give up our smartphones and share one car so we can work on our communication. I don’t want to fall into the same trap of doing something rash and then regretting it later. How can I talk to my wife calmly about her behavior?

IT’S A TRAP, LADY! GET OUT!

He’s either not at all self-aware, or is nastily devious. He simultaneously tries to claim they had a calm disagreement, and that he got extremely angry about it, after days of seething apparently, and then made a bold declaration that he was going to defy her will and get her pregnant whether she likes it or not. There’s nothing strange about her behavior; she is quite aware of the message he sent, and knows that her husband is no longer trustworthy. What he thinks will fix it is if he takes away more things from her, and talks to her calmly. We all know where “calm” takes you with this guy.

I can believe this is a real letter. I’ve known of too many people who are that good at compartmentalizing and have that totally selfish perspective.

Strange bedfellows

Well, gosh, I’ve seen it all now: Answers in Genesis is eager to defend an evolutionary biologist. I suppose it helps that the biologist is an incompetent boob who promotes a lot of bad ideas, and AiG will always favor bad ideas.

Until very recently the statement that male and female are “real biological categories” wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. Most of society, academia, and even the political arena accepted without question that there are two sexes/genders—male and female. But now, what was formerly a benign statement about an obvious reality will end your career. At least, that’s what happened to one evolutionary biologist.

Colin Wright—an outspoken critic of creation and intelligent design—claims he has been “canceled” for speaking up on the biological reality of male and female. In speaking out against the transgender ideology permeating and transforming our culture, he claims he can no longer find work in academia because he’s been labeled a transphobe or as someone holding ideas simply too dangerous to risk guilt by association. (Creationists have had this same problem for decades—simply holding to what the Bible teaches, and what is confirmed by science, about the age and origin of the earth and life is enough to end careers; ironically, creationists are falsely called anti-science by people who now claim there are more than two genders of humans, which is anti-science.)

Oh, Colin Wright. He’s been whining for a while now that nobody wants to hire him, particularly on his venue of choice, Quillette, where he is a managing editor (which explains a lot). I’m not surprised — if his name came up on a job search here, I’d be arguing strongly that he ought to be rejected, and I doubt he’d even get out of the first round of reviews. He’s an evolutionary psychologist! He claims that if you don’t accept his weird understanding of race and sex, you’re an “evolution denier”. He is a transphobe who is confident that there is no continuum of sex and gender, that there is only an absolute binary. He’s also fond of calling everyone who understands that there are more factors than just genes that affect individual identity “blank slaters”, that inanity that Steven Pinker made popular.

It’s not at all odd that Ken Ham would support a crank scientist who believes bullshit that defies our modern understanding and evidence, and further endorses a lot of regressive, conservative views. The only question is…how does Colin Wright feel about his new best friend?

By the way, another reason to shun the idiots at AiG, besides their stupid ideas about evolution, is that they are deeply transphobic.

BethAnn McLaughlin is now famous, in a bad way

Once upon a time, when I first heard about BethAnn McLaughlin, I posted approvingly about her. She was a founder of #MeTooSTEM, and she was struggling to get tenure at Vanderbilt, but it was held up by “allegations that she had posted anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues” — those accusations were made by someone being investigated for sexual harassment. It seemed like she was fighting a righteous battle.

Later it turns out that McLaughlin abused her positions as leader of #MeTooSTEM to bully and harass. Large numbers of people resigned rather than work with her.

I still followed her on Twitter, but with reservations. There was something askew there.

Then, recently, one surge of news on that medium was the death from COVID-19 of @sciencing_bi, a Hopi bisexual scientist. Something seemed off about it, though, in part because McLaughlin was promoting the story hard, and in larger part because it was drama entirely on Twitter — there were no corroborating news stories, no obits, no press releases from @sciencing_bi’s university. It felt like a bubble floating entirely in the virtual world of the Twitterverse, which was odd, given that this was the kind of tragedy that would at least have students begging local papers to tell the story.

Now the bubble has popped. @Sciencing_Bi has been revealed to be a sockpuppet of BethAnn McLaughlin.

As the questions swirled, the account settings were switched to private. Then late on Sunday, Twitter suspended both McLaughlin’s and the @Sciencing_Bi accounts.

“We’re aware of this activity and have suspended these accounts for violating our spam and platform manipulation policies,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News by email. The company declined to comment on whether it had any forensic evidence linking the two accounts to the same device or person.

A spokesperson from ASU told BuzzFeed News they had no record of any faculty matching @Sciencing_Bi’s description. And other parts of @Sciencing_Bi’s accounts did not match up: The university closed its campus in March, switching to online instruction, and did not implement salary cuts.

It was truly a sockpuppet, in the traditional sense of the term — @Sciencing_Bi was created to support McLaughlin, and donations sent to @Sciencing_Bi to assist in their struggle with chronic disease went to…McLaughlin.

The @Sciencing_Bi account was created in October 2016 and frequently mentioned McLaughlin. Over the past couple of years, with McLaughlin facing mounting criticism after MeTooSTEM volunteers left the organization complaining of mistreatment and a lack of transparency, @Sciencing_Bi had supported McLaughlin in these disputes.

Recall that one of the accusations that halted McLaughlin’s progress towards tenure at Vanderbilt was that she had posted anonymous accusations against other faculty. That begins to fit her standard MO now, as someone who takes advantage of anonymous online narratives to build an imaginary claque. Worst of all, though, she did deep harm to real causes while flailing about for attention.

As @Sciencing_Bi’s narrative seemed to fall apart, scientists reacted with outrage that someone would fabricate a persona who was a COVID-19 patient, an Indigenous person, and a victim of sexual harassment.

“This faking being Native has a long history of being tied to the actual theft of resources and land,” Kim TallBear of the University of Alberta in Canada, who studies the engagement of Indigenous people with science and technology, told BuzzFeed News. “The fact that this woman thought she could get away with this tells you how little she understands about the actual state of affairs for Native people in the United States.”

“I am disgusted that anyone would take advantage of persistent sexism, racism, homophobia, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and COVID fears for their own personal gain,” Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, told BuzzFeed News. “This is a person that did harm to very real movements and people.”

The terrible thing is that BethAnn McLaughlin will be back, under a new pseudonym, trying to recover the attention she formerly held while poisoning the discourse with lies yet again. These people always creep back. It’s what they do.

But look! Right now she’s in Science, and Heavy, and The Daily Beast! That counts for something, I guess. McLaughlin has gained notoriety at the expense of social justice.

“My real concern, though,” Gill added, “is that someone leveraged racism, sexism, homophobia, and COVID fears for their own personal gain. Any time someone fakes a marginalized identity, it provides fuel for people who don’t want social justice movements to succeed.”

Just an ordinary TERF talking about biology

You wanna see reductive? She’s gonna give you reductive.

My first thought was, “Why are these aliens murdering us all, and why does she care what pile of corpses we end up in? And why are these aliens sorting us this way?” I mean, once we’re reduced to dead meat and tossed into rotting piles for some inscrutable purpose (Mulching into fertilizer? Animal fodder? Party decorations?) why are chromosomes even relevant?

There are also a few people wandering around with fragmented Y chromosomes and translocations that make this distinction difficult. I picture the aliens wandering around the heap of corpses sampling bits of tissue and being totally baffled by the occasional individual and flicking them off to — oh no — a third pile. Maybe that small third pile will be marketed as rare exotic meat.

Of course, if the aliens sorted by some other criterion, like penises, or size, or the presence of the A blood antigen, you could also throw them into two piles by setting your boundary values to whatever you want, and then find there are a few individuals who fall into boundary conditions. This is a pointless thought exercise.

Wouldn’t you know that this TERF also has strange ideas about evolution.

Using this same logic, we could say that humans evolved to be squishy, unarmored, and lacking in natural armament so leopards could eat them more easily. Everything has an evolutionary purpose, after all. As we all know, we men have testicles in a convenient external pouch to simplify extracting gametes with a biopsy needle. The predictive powers of evolutionary prophesying are truly astounding!

The NY Times version of spin isn’t at all subtle

When the New York Times got around to reporting Ted Yoho’s vicious outburst at Ocasio-Cortez, they put all the emphasis on the woman’s anger, as if Yoho was in a boys will be boys moment, and Ocasio-Cortez was over-sensitive. Rebecca Traister explains what the Times was up to.

The Times’ story on the speech bore the headline “A.O.C. Unleashes a Viral Condemnation of Sexism in Congress” and kicked off by noting that Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman in Congress, who arrived there in 2019, “has upended traditions.” It called her speech on Thursday “norm-shattering” and described supporting speeches made by her colleagues — including one in which Pramila Jayapal recalled being referred to as a “young lady” who did not “know a damn thing” by Alaska representative Don Young — as a moment of “cultural upheaval.”

All these words somehow cast Ocasio-Cortez and her female colleagues as the disruptive and chaotic forces unleashed in this scenario, suggesting that they shattered norms in a way that Representative Yoho’s original, profane outburst apparently did not. (Perhaps Yoho’s words weren’t understood as eruptive and norm-shattering because calling women nasty names, in your head or with your friends or on the steps of your workplace, is much more of a norm than most want to acknowledge).

As Mark Harris pointed out on Twitter, the Times only printed the full epithet in a piece about Ocasio-Cortez reading it into the House record, after declining to print the words in an earlier story, when they would have been attributed to Yoho. This offered the faint impression that the only person who actually said the actual words “fucking bitch” was AOC herself, and not the man who aimed them at her. What’s more, the paper described her as “punching each syllable in the vulgarity,” reinforcing a view of Ocasio-Cortez’s utterances as pugilistic, without acknowledgment that while she enunciated clearly, she delivered her speech in the calmest and most genial tones imaginable. (An earlier Times story on Yoho’s non-apology and Ocasio-Cortez’s initial response to it described her as having “upbraided” him, and opened with a description of how she “forcefully rejected” his apology.)

This is a perfect summary.

In describing her team’s decisions about how to respond, the Times put scare quotes around their plans “to discuss how she ‘was accosted and publicly ridiculed,’” rather than simply reporting that she had been … accosted and publicly ridiculed. The whole thing suggests that she had somehow connived to set this all in motion; that her actions were the active and self-serving ones, while Yoho was a passive actor, his only contribution to the situation providing the platform from which she might spring. As the Times put it: “Republicans have long labored to cast Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as an avatar of the evils of the Democratic Party, a move that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has used to bolster her own cheeky, suffer-no-fools reputation.”

The Times has long been a master of framing, whether it’s the he-said-she-said style of reporting, or this, pandering to the conservative businessman in a suit reading the paper in his limousine, aghast at the fact that women are in the workplace, the boardroom, even in the halls of power.

As we read commentators tell the story of women’s ambition and savvy and drive, all of which are surely politically animating forces — as they have been for all the many men who have preceded them in American politics — I hope people can remember that the analysis is not wrong, exactly, but that it is woefully incomplete. Because until we can see how white men have taken advantage of sexism and racism for their own gain — how they’ve built their own “brand,” the American brand — on the backs of the fucking bitches forever, we’re not really reading a full story.

Remember this: The NY Times is and always has been an agent of the status quo, working to build and reinforce the “American brand”. We won’t be able to rebuild our country by letting “the newspaper of record” tell the story.

If only he’d shot himself a day earlier

I can’t imagine working at home, and having one of my kids getting murdered for answering the door by some angry asshole who was gunning for me. That’s what happened to federal judge Esther Salas, whose 20 year old son Daniel Anderl was shot through the heart by a men’s rights coward, Roy Den Hollander, who had a long history of anti-feminist bullshit. I suppose I should say “alleged” murderer, but he had recently written hate-filled screeds against Salas, and his dead body (by suicide) was found with a package addressed to Salas. He has been featured on We Hunted the Mammoth several times for his irrational MRA obsession.

Anyone who rages against women generically is a danger to the world. The pain they cause with their self-righteous bigotry is intolerable.

Capitalism and sexism wrecks comic books now

I remember when comic books were synonymous with weekends at my grandmother’s, buying 10 for a dollar, swapping old comics with my cousins, picking up a paper sack full of tattered, coverless copies at the Goodwill store. It was all innocence and fun times. Maybe not so much now.

The month of June saw the comics industry rocked by successive waves of predatory conduct allegations, amid similar reckonings around sexual harassment in the affiliated worlds of video games, twitch streaming, tabletop games, professional wrestling, and professional illustration. Some of the allegations, as with superstar writer Warren Ellis, were new. Others brought renewed scrutiny to lingering problems like the allegations against Dark Horse editor Scott Allie and DC writer Scott Lobdell. Most of the stories came from marginalized creators who’d previously been silent for fear of being blacklisted. In June, that wall of silence cracked, and what showed beneath was red and raw and deeply, viscerally angry.

“A huge reason why abusive, predatory, and discriminatory practices go unchecked in the comics industry is this: the impetus is always put on the victims to come forward,” Maï wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “Victims are expected to speak out at great personal cost—at risk of losing jobs and damaging their financial livelihood, at detriment to their mental health and threats to their personal safety… For every story you hear, there is also an unimaginable amount more that are not heard.” (Stewart did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.)

Maybe not so much when I was a kid, either.

The comics industry has long been synonymous with exploitation. The early comics publishers were wheeler-dealers and back-room grifters, with their hands in everything from the pulps to softcore pornography. They cut vague handshake deals, crushed attempts to collectively organize and built their industry almost entirely on “work for hire” contracts and freelance labor. The result is a history of dirty dealing that has, over time, been reduced to a litany of names, a Mount Rushmore of the fucked: DC’s mistreatment and neglect of Superman creators Siegel and Shuster; Jack Kirby’s struggle for his original artwork and equal credit for his work with Stan Lee; Alan Moore being screwed out of the rights for Watchmen; Steve Gerber’s long-running battle with Marvel over Howard the Duck.

The modern industry is almost entirely made up of freelancers: writers, artists, colorists and letterers. “Freelancers and people trying to break in are incredibly vulnerable,” writer Devin Grayson (Nightwing, Black Widow, Gotham Nights) told The Daily Beast, particularly when it comes to people working for companies centered around the comics direct market—DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, Oni, and the like. That senior editors hold the power to hire and fire is true across most industries, she said. “But then add in factors like freelancers having zero job security, no health insurance, no access to HR departments or higher-ups, no union. If we’re talking mainstream superhero comics, [there are] essentially two large companies—so two chances, period—to get their foot in the door. What happens to you if you piss off just one person in one of those companies, much less voice your concerns in a wider arena?”

If it was so awful in the 50s and 60s, and it’s getting worse now, and they’re screwing over the labor, where is all the money going? Marvel is making bank right now with their movies, and none of that is benefiting the talent that brought them to where they are? It sounds like an industry taken over by amoral profiteers.

Cultivating a British flavor of narrow-mindedness

Trying to figure out why so many TERFs are British, I think this answer hits the nail on the head.

The answer lies in part to the coalescence of a certain set of ideas in a very specific circle of voices in the early 21st century — voices that later went on to hold high profile positions in much of the U.K.’s print and broadcast media.

I’m referring here to the U.K. Skeptics movement of the early 2000s. Despite the fact that it was basically a loose network of people who were far too impressed with themselves for not believing in astrology and homeopathy, they have an outsized legacy. The movement consisted largely of groups meeting in pubs and organising talks promoting a specific brand of scientific skepticism and concerned primarily with the “debunking” of alternative medicine and pseudoscience. So far, so niche, but there is compelling evidence that suggests that both the ideological basis and some of the specific proponents of U.K. skepticism in the noughties are implicated in the spread of transphobic thinking into the mainstream media in this country.

While claiming to be the country’s foremost critical thinkers, the group was riddled with anti-humanities bias and a fetish for a certain kind of “science” that it held to reveal a set of immutable principles upon which the world was built with almost no regard whatsoever for interpretative analysis based on social or historical factors. Part of this mode of thinking was an especially reductivist biologism: the idea that there are immutable realities to be found in our DNA, and if we just paid enough attention to Science and stopped trying to split hairs and discover meaning over in the superfluous disciplines of the humanities, then everything would be much simpler. It’s precisely this kind of biological essentialism — which skirts dangerously close to eugenics — that leads people to think they can “debunk” a person’s claim to their gender identity, or that it should be subjected to rigorous testing by someone in a lab coat before we can believe the subject is who they say they are.

I saw the same thing in US skeptics, of course. But there was something fundamental going on that is also reflected in the British school of evolutionary biology, represented by Maynard Smith and Dawkins, that totally embraced reductive explanations and adaptationism, vs. the American subset led by Lewontin and Gould, who fiercely opposed eugenics and detested the arrogance of thinking biology could be reduced to a catalog of alleles. My experience may also be colored by the fact that there were several prominent UK skeptics (at least, I was told over and over that they were big names) who I had to ban here because they were persistently obnoxious and insistent that there are only two sexes/genders because “biology”.

Then there’s the outcome of all this activity by bigots claiming the mantle of science — some people actually believed them.

Tracey King, a skeptic activist who credits herself with establishing American-style organized skepticism in the U.K., has pointed out that the movement collapsed in the last decade. She attributes this to some good reasons (turns out it was full of sexists, which the rise of social justice concerns helped bring to light.) But these voices did not go away; many of the figures who made up the movement are now prominent voices at one level or another. Helen Lewis, for example, is the deputy editor of the center-left political magazine the New Statesman, and has promoted a barrage of anti-trans articles. Julie Bindel at the Guardian and elsewhere has a well-documented history of transphobia.

Then there’s Graham Linehan, a formerly beloved high-profile comedy writer who has recently been given a warning by police for directly harassing trans women online. Imagine if Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld suddenly started a social media hate campaign against a particular group of people that took up most of their time and you had to accept that was just part of your reality now. It feels a bit like that.

I met Linehan — he came to one of my talks in Dublin. Then, I was quite pleased to see him, but now…oh god what kind of wanker was I inspiring/being inspired by?

By the way, Seinfeld has been a loud voice whining about PC culture on college campuses — if I were him, I’d be wondering why smart young people no longer find him funny, rather than blaming it on a contrived slogan like “political correctness” — but at least he hasn’t carried his obsession as far as Linehan has.