Saturday Storytime: Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream

Maria Dahvana Headley’s first novel, Queen of Kings, combines magic, mythology, and a love that is powerful enough to transform the landscape around it, not necessarily for the better. Those are themes you’ll find in this Nebula-nominated story as well.

They are each with someone else, but the other two people in this four-person equation are not at this wedding. They know nothing.

Yet.

In the shadow of a chestnut tree, confetti in her cleavage, party favors in his pockets, they find themselves falling madly, falling utterly, falling without the use of words, into one another’s arms.

Run. There is always a monster—

No one runs. She puts her hand over her mouth and mumbles three words into her palm. She bites said hand, hard.

“What did you say?” he asks.

“I didn’t,” she answers.

So, this is what is meant when people say love at first sight. So this is what everyone has been talking about for seven thousand years.

He looks at her. He shakes his head, his brow furrowed.

They touch fingertips in the dark. Her fingerprints to his. Ridge against furrow. They fit together as though they are two parts of the same tree. He moves his hand from hers, and touches her breastbone. Her heart beats against his fingers.

“What are you?” he asks.

“What are you?” she replies, and her heart pounds so hard that the Japanese lanterns jostle and the moths sucking light there complain and reshuffle their wings.

They lean into each other, his hands moving first on her shoulders, and then on her waist, and then, rumpling the blue dress, shifting the hem upward, onto her thighs. Her mouth opens onto his mouth, and—

Then it’s done. It doesn’t take any work to make it magic. It doesn’t even take any magic to make it magic.

Sometime soon after, he carries her to the bed in his hotel room. In the morning, though she does not notice it now, the hooks that fasten her bra will be bent over backward. The black lace of her underwear will be torn.

This is what falling in love looks like. It is birds and wings and voodoo dolls pricking their fingers as they sing of desire. It is blood bond and flooded street and champagne and O, holy night.

It is Happily Ever.

***

Give it a minute. Soon it will be After.

Keep reading.

Saturday Storytime: Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream
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When You Take Women Out of the Abortion Debate

So…Richard Dawkins is still insisting on Twitter today that his comparison of fetuses to pigs and talking about their relative pain is critical to the abortion debate, more important than talking about the actual pregnant person involved.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/312497197801410560″]

He’s not saying why his is the better argument. He’s ignoring all the people who are telling him that an argument based on lack of pain opens up several other cans of worms. He’s just claiming his argument is better because…reasons.

He certainly doesn’t respond to Ana Mardoll’s excellent post yesterday that has already explained why his position is wrong.

From a consequentialist standpoint, a woman’s right to bodily autonomy outweighs fetal pain not because the fetal pain is or is not arguably less important than pig pain, but because the fetal pain is demonstrably less than the woman’s pain. Abortion is safer than childbirth. If Dawkins wishes to make the point that pain matters when discussing the morality of abortion and that relative pain is relative, then he should focus on the pain of the women carrying an unwanted and potentially unsafe pregnancy rather than invisibling that woman in order to focus on farm animals. To suggest that we once again effectively erase pregnant women from the discussion about the rights of pregnant women is to suggest that they are the least important entity in this on-going debate. That’s not consequentialism; it’s rank marginalization.

I wish I’d written that post. I wish Dawkins had read that post and taken the time to think about it. Continue reading “When You Take Women Out of the Abortion Debate”

When You Take Women Out of the Abortion Debate

"Atheism for Dummies", Dale McGowan on Atheists Talk

Dale McGowan is an accomplished writer and leader in the atheist community. Dale is perhaps best known for his book, Parenting Beyond Belief, the first resource of its kind for freethinkers raising children. He has also written Raising Freethinkers, Voices of Unbelief and two fictional novels, Calling Bernadette’s Bluff and Good Thunder. He blogs about his life and family at The Meming of Life.

Dale’s newest book, Atheism For Dummies, is now available from Wiley Publishing. From the publisher’s website: 

For people seeking a non-religious philosophy of life, as well as believers with atheist friends, Atheism For Dummies offers an intelligent exploration of the historical and moral case for atheism. Often wildly misunderstood, atheism is a secular approach to life based on the understanding that reality is an arrangement of physical matter, with no consideration of unverifiable spiritual forces.

Please join us this Sunday when we speak with Dale McGowan about parenting, his work in the secular communities, and of course, Atheism For Dummies.

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"Atheism for Dummies", Dale McGowan on Atheists Talk

Where the Women Are…Not

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville is the latest atheist woman (in a very long line indeed) to give her personal answer to “Where are the women?” She starts by explaining why she isn’t part of the church. It isn’t just because she isn’t a believer.

The religious community in which I’d been raised did not allow female ministers, did not allow female presidents of the congregation, did not allow female elders, and did not, for most of my childhood, even allow female lectors to read the selected Bible readings during the service each week. Women were for teaching children—and for cleaning: Communionware, the kitchen, maybe a vestment.

I started asking questions about this disparity at age 7, possibly earlier. I got the usual bullshit answers that are used to justify these things. I was good enough to be an acolyte (especially since there were precious few teenage boys willing to do it) and scrub the toilets—both of which I did countless times—but not good enough to be ordained. I was less than.

Further, my objections to being told, on the one hand, that we are all equal in the eyes of god, and, on the other, that my gender nonetheless rendered me incapable of serving god in every capacity available to men, were greeted with contempt—and sometimes outright hostility. One minister told my mother that I needed to stop asking questions. Another told me I was “divisive,” at an age that required my looking up “divisive” in the dictionary when I got home from church to understand his meaning. Another told me that my rebellious attitude would find me pregnant or dead by the time I was 16.

Even then I found the conflation of the two…interesting.

This was a community of which I did not want to be a part—and I left it, even before I knew, with clarity and certainty, that I am an atheist.

Then she talks about what she found in movement atheism. Many of you can probably guess by now. You should still go read it.

Thanks to Sarah, who made sure I didn’t miss this post.

Where the Women Are…Not

Ways of Knowing

A perpetual pet peeve is the concept of “different ways of knowing”. All too often, it’s a shorthand for “Don’t take my cherished beliefs away!”

Sometimes it refers to real phenomena. Observation is an important part of collecting information about our world, but our society has a nasty tendency to limit the groups of people we consider to be valid observers. Or we get so focused on rigorous strategies for making observations that we forget that our ideas about what we should observe come from less rigorous, less formal processes. We exclude personal observation, particularly from marginalized groups, instead of understanding it as a first step to more structured observations.

Much of the time, though, what people refer to as “ways of knowing” have nothing to do with epistemology. What we’re talking about isn’t knowing. We aren’t talking about ways to collect information we can rely on, but ways to conceptualize the world. We’re talking about ways to share perspectives or frames of reference with other people. We’re talking about making things make sense, not figuring out what is and what is not.

It’s still busy around here, so I don’t have time to flesh the idea out, but I wanted to throw it out for discussion. How much of the confusion over “ways of knowing” really because we should be differentiating between those and “ways of understanding” or “ways of communicating”.

Discuss.

Ways of Knowing

Fetal Pain and Maternal Rights

I don’t usually do reposts this quickly, but this is timely. The post was written about fetal viability, but you can generally change “viability” to “pain” in the argument section of the post, shift the lines on the graph a bit to the left, and walk out exactly the same. Even granting the best argument possible to abortion opponents, something that our current best understanding of fetal development makes very problematic, the flaw in this argument is in its premises. 

That makes me sad. We should really be able to put this argument and all the others like it to rest simply by remembering that women don’t lose their rights by becoming–or staying–pregnant.

A couple of months ago, I said something about abortion on Dogma Debate that I wanted to repeat and expand upon here. I’d just written a couple of posts about abortion, and David Smalley thought that would be a good controversial topic. As a challenge to my position (basically, make abortion cheap and easy to get), fetal viability was brought up. It turned out we didn’t have much to argue about. In fact, the matter seemed so straightforward to me that I’m surprised I don’t see it presented this way more often. Continue reading “Fetal Pain and Maternal Rights”

Fetal Pain and Maternal Rights

Minnesota Atheists Testify on Marriage Equality

The proposed Minnesota laws legalizing marriage equality went before committees yesterday. Former president of Minnesota Atheists, August Berkshire, was there to make the case for marriage equality as a question of church-state separation. The UpTake, which does an amazing job getting footage of local news out, has all the testimony. August spoke to the House Civil Law Committee at their evening hearing. (Sorry, not an embeddable video.) His testimony starts at about 22:30.

It’s a statement of principle, which may not be as affecting as many of the stories told at the hearings, but it beats the hell out of the nonsense Katherine Kersten trotted out for the occasion.

I rather hope she’s feeling sour today. The votes are what is important, and they didn’t go her way:

Tuesday afternoon Minnesota’s Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill legalizing same-sex marriage by a 5-3 vote. The House Civil Law Committee approved a similar bill Tuesday evening 10-7.

Now it’s time for those of us in Minnesota to call or write our state senators and representatives to tell them how we want them to vote. Yes, even me, even though my state rep was one of the people testifying in favor. We need to make our legislators feel safe doing the right thing. Showing them they have the numbers behind them now, not just a few years down the road after they’ve lost their re-election bids, is the way to do that.

One step closer.

Minnesota Atheists Testify on Marriage Equality

Short Trip, Long Week

Work is still nuts, I’m still sick, I have a bunch of commitments hanging over my head, and there is now time pressure to turn the construction site that is our house back into someplace that can comfortably hold more than two people for a while. Things may be sparse around here this week.

In the meantime, you can catch up on how the panel in Chicago went at Brute Reason. Ian has his own impressions as well.

It was funny. I had to remind myself that Ian and I hadn’t met before in meatspace. Andrew and Miri and Kate and Chana I’d met and talked to before, and I enjoyed seeing again. Jamie and Lynne and William I’ve interacted only barely with, so it truly felt like meeting someone for the first time. Sikivu and Tony are people whose work I admire and whose scholarship I’m still working to integrate into my own thinking, so it was grand to have a (far too short) opportunity to pick their brains. Ashley and Emmett I mostly saw at too much distance for anything but knowing I need to talk to them again some other time. Debbie and Brianne are old friends by this point.

Ian, though…well, I almost forgot we’d never spent time together. It took standing next to him and realizing I didn’t think he was that tall–or maybe that I was that short–to remind me. Funny.

Then there was the fact that he referred to me as a stealth “intellect” in his write-up. That’s going to take some time to assimilate. When Ian says I don’t advertise myself as an intellect, it’s because I don’t think of myself that way.

Being an intellectual is so far from the world in which I grew up that it just doesn’t compute. I don’t know the shibboleths. I speak the language only as an acquired vocabulary and without the ease that comes from been trained to it by native speakers. When it comes to the cultural trappings, I’m a fraud.

I’ll just have to keep reminding myself that those aren’t the bits that matter.

Short Trip, Long Week

Mock the Movie: Good Alien, Bad Alien Edition

Last time, Mock the Movie brought you The Hollywood Cover Girls as black-leotarded, moon-based schemers. If you prefer your viewing pleasure male and your aliens a bit more alien, this is your week. This Wednesday, we present Dolph Lundgren in Dark Angel.

How many cop movies explicitly credit actors as “good alien” and “bad alien”? As we try to do as often as possible, this movie is free on YouTube. Now with updated link. Continue reading “Mock the Movie: Good Alien, Bad Alien Edition”

Mock the Movie: Good Alien, Bad Alien Edition

Bring in the Experts!

If you’ve been to SkepchickCON before (as part of CONvergence), you know that part of the Skepchick’s strategy for bringing good science and skepticism into a science fiction is adding more expertise to the mix. We regular attendees can study up for our panels, but we are no substitute for a scientist or journalist who has made an in-depth study of a particular field. In past years, Skepchick has brought in astronomers and climate scientists, journalists and activists to make sure that the information presented to our audiences is the best it can be.

Expertise, however, isn’t free. Our experts are generous with their time, but there are still travel and hotel costs to be paid. That money, as with so much in skepticism, comes from donations.

Skepchick is coming up on its first funding target tomorrow. They’re close to their goal (closer than it looks on the widget due to an outside donation, but they’re still not there. As an incentive for donations, Surly Amy is turning psychic and answering reader questions. All the same guaranteed accuracy as any other psychic with much more entertainment.

If you have some spare cash and want to support successful skeptical and scientific outreach, won’t you consider donating to help SkepchickCON this year? It will help determine how many and which experts Skepchick can bring in.

Bring in the Experts!