Our new theme is a clear one: RAGE

We had a pretty good election night yesterday, but I don’t want anyone to forget what should be driving you right now, and that is a righteous anger. Read Katha Pollitt about her reaction to the past year.

But the main difference is that I hate people now. Well, not all people, of course. Just people who voted for Trump. People who do their own “research” on the Internet and discover there that President Obama is a Muslim and Michelle Obama is a man. People who use the n-word and can’t even spell it right, because—have you noticed?—Trump supporters can’t spell. Well-off people who only care about lowering their taxes. People who said they couldn’t vote for Hillary because of her emails. Excuse me, sir or madam, can you explain to me what an email server even is? People who didn’t believe Trump would bring back coal or build the wall or Make America Great Again, but just wanted to blow things up. Congratulations! We are all living in the minefield you have made.

I know what you’re thinking: you are the problem, Katha, alienating Trump voters with your snobbish liberal elitism and addiction to “identity politics.” Yes, I wanted them to have health care and child care and good schools and affordable college and real sex education and access to abortion and a much higher minimum wage. And yes, I wanted the wealthy to pay more taxes to provide for it all. Obviously, this offended the pride of the stalwart, mostly white citizens of Trumplandia, possibly because a good proportion of white people would rather not have something if black people get to have it, too. As for pussy-grabbing, sheesh! Men will be men, get over yourselves, ladies. None of that is “identity politics,” though. It is just America.

You know exactly how the defenders of the status quo will respond: sit down, be nice and polite, you might annoy the regressives/alt-right, and their anger will be more defensible than yours. We’re already composing our excuses for them that will consist of blaming you.

Lindy West is also rather angry.

Just this week, Juli Briskman, a government contractor, lost her job after a photo of her flipping off the presidential motorcade went viral. Solange, Britney Spears, Sinead O’Connor, the Dixie Chicks, Rosie O’Donnell — I struggle to think of women who lost their tempers in public and didn’t face ridicule, temporary ruin, or both. And we don’t even have to be angry to be called angry. Accusations of being an “angry black woman” chased Michelle Obama throughout her tenure at the White House, despite eight years of unflappable poise (black women suffer disproportionately under this paradigm). The decades-long smearing of Hillary Clinton as an unhinged shrew culminated one year ago today when, despite maintaining a preternatural calm throughout the most brutal campaign in living memory, she lost the election to masculinity’s apoplectic id.

Like every other feminist with a public platform, I am perpetually cast as a disapproving scold. But what’s the alternative? To approve? I do not approve.

Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it.

Ah, yes. Have you ever noticed how Social Justice Warriors in general get chastised for being “disapproving scolds”? How dare we publicly criticize Nazis and misogynists, as if we think we’re better than them! Defending people who want to murder and deport people, or want the right to batter their wives, is better virtue signaling, because the anti-SJWs are so noble that they defend the free speech rights of woman-hating skinheads.

That rage will be used to excuse assault. Take the case of Aisha Walker, a woman who saw a drunk man accosting another young woman, and she chose to stand between them, a brave act. But then another man, a bystander, came to the aid…of the drunk.

A third passenger got involved, Walker wrote, telling her and the other man that they were both being stupid. When she asked him why it was stupid to stand up for a woman being harassed, he became angry.

The bystander began swearing and shouting that he would be happy to “step off the bus” to deal with her.

Walker said when she asked what that would prove, the man punched her “directly in the mouth at full force.”

He broke many of her teeth, requiring a lot of dental work. But he made his point: anger at oppression is a greater crime to these people than the oppression itself. Moral clarity is an affront to people who want the liberty to be selfish.

Ugh, Taibbi, that doesn’t make it all better

You know all that dreadful ghastly misogynistic crap Matt Taibbi wrote about his time in Russia? Where he and his co-conspirator bragged about raping and harassing young women? He’s claiming now that it was a work of fiction, despite the clear statement in the book that all of the characters and events depicted in this book are real.

Even if it was all a lurid, revolting fantasy with no basis in fact, I have a tough time forgiving him for it. It was a glimpse into his mind, and it’s an ugly nest of snakes in there. I said this past summer that I’d never read Taibbi again, and that resolve is unchanged, even if he is now changing his story. And if he is changing his story now, that makes him a liar, and why should I trust a journalist who publishes books he retroactively claims are all lies?

How is this guy popular?

Did you know the way to deal with a man? Debate is only a prelude to punching his lights out.

I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me, and the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well-defined … We talk, we argue, we push and then it becomes physical. Right?

You see, if that’s how an argument is supposed to reasonably progress, then it becomes problematic to argue with a woman, because you know that eventually, according to the rules, rational dissent must culminate in socking her in the jaw, and that’s not nice to do to a woman. Perfectly OK to do that to a man, of course.

In case you’re wondering who would make such a ludicrous argument, it’s from Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist, darling of the alt-right, and Canadian. I’ve never been in such a situation, except for that time in 7th grade when I was beat up for my lunch money, and even then, I didn’t get to do any punching because I was on my back with the wind knocked out of me.

I don’t know, man, that’s such an un-Canadian attitude Peterson has got, they might have to revoke his citizenship.

Speaking of horrible people, you might want to read this post about Joshie Berger, formerly a popular participant at the Amazing Meeting, loud skeptic, and apparently an acolyte of Peterson. It seems his way of dealing with his girlfriend was to smash her face. If that has already ruined your breakfast, here’s another problem person: DJ Grothe. Grothe didn’t punch anyone, fortunately, but in his role as the TAM organizer at the time, he reportedly silenced people who complained about Berger’s general behavior. Because, I guess, that was his job, to keep everything running smoothly for abusers.

Fuck it. I’m going to Minneapolis today, to hang out with good people and get off the internet for a while.

We privileged men have to accept our culpability

Helen Lewis has a few words for the men of journalism (which also apply to every other area). It’s easy to deplore acts you haven’t done, but that by your behavior you may have enabled.

The response to the Weinstein coverage has borne this out. Over the last week, my phone has lit up with female journalists silently screaming: have you seen him decrying Weinstein? The hypocrite!

In private, there has been a cathartic outpouring of Bastards We Have Known. The colleague who texted a friend of mine, Ros Urwin of the Standard, promising that “before I die, I will kiss every freckle on your lips”. The man who told my colleague Amelia Tait that she’d have to have sex to get ahead. The sub-editor who stalked a junior member of his team, turning up outside restaurants she was at with her boyfriend. The magazine journalist who developed an obsession with a female colleague and put her on late shifts to ruin her social life. The arts journalist who would take out new colleagues for a “welcome drink” at his London club – where they’d discover he had a room booked upstairs. The guy who put his hands down a colleague’s trousers at the Christmas party. More than one man in journalism, feeling spurned, has taken to ringing his love interest’s doorbell late at night.

Those are just the overt acts of egregious harassment. She also points out that a casual boy’s club atmosphere of little crappy jokes and disparagement in bad taste fuels the confidence of the worst offenders, and that we men all contribute in various ways to a culture of entitled oppression. Have I ever actively harassed anyone? No. But have I ever trivialized the atmosphere of sexual exploitation with a lazy joke or blithe acceptance of the status quo? Yes. Should I change? Yes. Will I change? I’ll try my hardest. You have permission to slap me when I screw up.

Evolutionary Psychology poisons everything

This study comes to a happy conclusion, and then wrecks it all with EP bullshit. What the researchers did was to email requests for either a pdf of a paper or copies of the raw data to researchers, and what they found was a high degree of cooperativity: 80% were willing to send a pdf, 60% were willing to send data. They seem to think this is surprisingly prosocial, but actually, I was a little surprised the numbers were so low. I was brought up to consider this to be expected — back in my old-timey days, when you published a paper, you also ordered a great big box of reprints, because people would send you postcards asking for a copy, and you’d mail it to them. Now you just push a button on a computer, and only 80% oblige? OK, I guess that’s an alright result.

They analyzed further, though, and also found a sex difference. If you were a man requesting a paper from a man, you were 15% more likely to get a positive response. That’s troubling. I’d say that that could be interpreted as indicating a continuing sexism in science. But that’s not enough for these authors.

There is no evolutionary analysis involved in this study, but of course, the reason for their result is…evolution.

Massen and his colleagues say that one possible explanation for their results “may be that among male academics there is a network at play, in which they favor each other much like ‘Old Boy’ networks”. They also suggest that this imbalance might have evolutionary roots and point to an idea called the male-warrior hypothesis, which states that men have evolved to form strong bonds with other males in their group because in the past this enabled them to defend territory from hostile attackers.

“Men are more ready to cooperate with genetic-stranger males to form these fighting coalitions,” says Mark van Vugt, an evolutionary psychologist at the Free University of Amsterdam who first suggested the theory in 2007. Some of the evidence for this idea comes from lab-based tasks such as public-goods games (in which volunteers choose how many tokens to keep or share), but there are some real-world hints too, he says. Boys tend to play in larger groups than girls, van Vugt says, and in sports such as tennis and boxing, men make more effort to bond with their opponent after a match or fight than women do. However cultural factors are also thought to be at work.

Jebus. Can I just say the words “US Women’s Soccer Team” and see this whole bogus line of reasoning vanish in a spray of flop sweat and tears from the men’s team?

Silence that female!

More and more of these accounts of being “Harveyed” are coming out of Hollywood: now it’s Léa Seydoux and Zoë Brock. These are terrible, dreadful stories, and it’s clear that there is a pervasive problem in the industry (and many other industries).

One of the voices that has been singing out for years on this problem is that of Rose McGowan. She recently called out Ben Affleck for hypocrisy, accusing him of lying in his pious condemnation of Weinstein — he knew about him for years, and now that he’s been outed, he’s jumping on the tut-tutting bandwagon.

Don’t you dare be mean to Ben Affleck! Because now Rose McGowan has been suspended from Twitter over telling him to “fuck off”. I read her recent Twitter feed, and that is literally the most offensive tweet on it…and it’s mild compared to the toxic shrieking I get from MRAs/racists on a routine basis. I have a few times (I don’t bother anymore, since it is pointless) reported the more abusive, incredibly misogynist, horrifyingly racist jerks who like to troll, and gotten nothing but apathetic shrugs from their management. The fact that Donald Trump still gets to rant dangerously on that medium tells you how little they care about “offensive tweets”.

Appalling.

It’s not clear which specific one of the actress’ tweets was targeted and reported to Twitter, and was apparently so offensive that the company decided it’d be a good idea to silence a woman at the heart of an entire scandal based around women being hushed-up and ignored.

Who else?

The New Yorker has detailed coverage of Harvey Weinstein’s criminal behavior. And by detailed, I mean fairly explicit, names named, horrifying encounters recounted, and a history of extortion and rape spelled out repellently.

Most awful is how Weinstein used his influence to silence any revelations until there were so many they could no longer be contained. He’s been taking advantage of his power for decades, and yet his lawyer has released a statement saying, “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.” If you read the story, you’ll realize that is a lie. They even have a case where one of his victims wore a wire to get open admissions of his tactics, which was taken by the police, and then…a series of stories were ‘coincidentally’ leaked to the media to portray her as a slut, and the charges evaporated.

But now I’m wondering…who else? Matt Damon, Russell Crowe, and Ben Affleck have been called out as enablers of Weinstein’s behavior — how many cowards covered for abuse by powerful men in the entertainment industry (or any industry, for that matter), and how many powerful men have similar histories? They’re out there. I guarantee you that Weinstein is not a solitary case.

I know from personal experience that calling out the Big Men with reprehensible behavior has high personal costs (I still get accusatory email every day saying I’m a terrible person for exposing Michael Shermer, for instance), but it has to be done. It has to be done now. If anyone is hiding abuse now out of fear of the repercussions to your career, we have to make clear that the repercussions will be even more severe if you wait and wait and wait until the revelations are inescapable.

Does David Marchant believe he provided a quality learning experience?

Multiple women are filing sexual harassment charges against a prominent geologist, David Marchant. After reading the accusations, if true, Marchant is not at all suited to a life of teaching.

Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.

One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.

“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.

As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

That isn’t just sexual harassment, it’s sadistic abuse of a student who is dependent on her instructor and isolated from any support network of any kind. There is also corroboration from other students who were in the field with them.

Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.

I would hope they feel guilt. Allies ought to speak up when they hear of these things.

Speaking of allies…

Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”

Jesus fucking christ. An academic reputation ought not to shield you from criminal failures to meet your academic obligations as a scholar and a teacher and a citizen of a research community. Bringing in grant money is not the weregild for mistreating those in your care.

I’m impressed with Willenbring for persisting in the face of such traumatic abuse to earn a career of her own in science. I’m not at all impressed with Marchant, no matter how many publications and grants he might have.