Q&A – Atheism & Sex

My two favorite topics!

“You describe yourself, presumably tongue in cheek, as a “perverted atheist”. I do think there is a special relationship between naturalistic thinking (inc. atheism) and sex positivity: how do you see the relationship? Have you encountered much sex-negativity in atheists that’s an underlying hangup from their religious days (or the religious tone society is drenched with anyways)? What’s your best counter to the related fundie claim that we’re all atheists to just “satisfy our sinful lusts”?

– Michael”

First, I do not describe myself as a “perverted atheist” as a joke. Nope, I’m really just a giant perv. I’m pretty sure I have the mind of a 16 year old boy, and if I was male, I would be destined to be a dirty old man. I’m constantly thinking about sex one way or another, and it takes a lot of self control to not always speak what dirty ways my mind is interpreting something. Unfortunately for you guys (or fortunately), typing things up is the ultimate filter, so my perviness doesn’t really come out on this blog. But give me a beer or two and you’ll see the dark side of Jen.

As for the relationship between sex and atheism, I do think naturalistic thinking leads to sex positivity. The vast majority of the weird social rules about sex are based on religion, superstition, misconception, or bad science. Why should you wait until marriage for sex? ‘Cause God told you to. Why is a girl a skank for sleeping with five guys, but a guy who sleeps with five girls still hasn’t gotten around enough? ‘Cause girls are supposed to be pure as snow…cause God told you to. Why are people too stupid to use birth control the first time they have sex? ‘Cause our sex education and scientific thinking sucks in the US. I could go on forever with this list.

But that’s not to say all atheists are going to be automatically sex positive. I think religious hang ups and society have a big part in it. While I was raised secular, I know people with religious upbringings who have certain things they’re weird about. Sometimes they feel guilty that they didn’t wait until marriage, or they’re not comfortable discussing the topic with people. Some still feel it’s wrong to occasionally have homosexual fantasies even though they’re basically straight (come on, who doesn’t do this?). But I also know formerly religious people who are even more sex positive than I am. So yes, religion influences it, but your personality has a lot to do with how you handle it.

Even without religious brainwashing, I think the way religion permeates culture still can affect us. I know I’ll still occasionally feel a twinge of guilt because I’ve slept with more than one guy. I mean, I’m not (EDIT: Whoops, left out a key word there) near the double digits yet, but there’s still this pressure for girls to keep guys out of their pants. But I deal with this guilt by taking a step back and dealing with it in a rational manner. One, it shouldn’t even matter if I do go into the double digits, because me making an arbitrary cut off for girls is an irrational thing to do. Two, if I find a guy who’s so backwards to care about how many men I’ve slept with, then I don’t want to date him anyway.

But that’s not just to say I go around constantly having sex with any stranger in some giant atheistic saturnalia. I have standards and rules, and some of them I guess were influenced by my parents. I’ll probably leave something out, but here are my general safety rules for sex:

1. Don’t be stupid. A general rule for life, thanks Dad.
2. You don’t have to wait until marriage, but you should wait until you’re mature enough to deal with sex and any of the consequences. Think how much better the world would be (and how many less teen pregnancies we’d have) if people followed this simple rule. I did wait until I was ready (well, at least for the Clinton definition of sex, which to me had the worst consequences…aka babies). There were times in high school where I was so tempted to “go all the way,” but I knew I would probably regret it. I’m glad I waited until I was more mature and had access to the pill. That’s not saying everyone should wait until college, but as a general rule, I think most high schoolers are too stupid to know if they’re mature enough to have sex.
3. For the love of FSM, use protection and birth control. It’s just irresponsible not to, for yourself and your partner.
4. If you’re not comfortable doing something, don’t do it. If your partner isn’t comfortable doing something, don’t make them do this. Within reason, of course. I agree with Dan Savage here. If someone doesn’t want to do something considered fairly normal (ie oral) and doesn’t have a good reason for it (ie rape memories) then you have the right to dump them for sexual incompatibility. But if someone wants you to wear a Ronald Reagan mask while pooping on your chest and you’re not into that, and then they badger you about it constantly, then they’re just an ass.
5. Don’t do anything that could potentially harm you or your partner. Knife play and autoerotic asphyxiation are probably bad ideas. For me, sleeping with strangers also falls in this category. As a girl (and a generally paranoid person) I’m way too nervous to go home with a random stranger, so I guess I’m just stuck doing all my friends. Poor them.
6. Numbers don’t really matter as long as you’re safe, and as long as you’re emotionally secure or dealing with emotionally secure people. What do I mean by that? If a guy has slept with 200 chicks because he’s picking up low self esteem 16 year olds behind the football field, that’s probably violating rule #4. If a guy has slept with 200 chicks because of some deep rooted psychological problems with commitment, his own self esteem, and his need for physical contact in order to be happy, that’s probably not healthy either. But if a guy has slept with 200 chicks who all happily and knowledgeably consented just because he likes sex, then go ahead.

You may see a trend, that my “rules” are very humanistic. Don’t hurt others and don’t hurt yourself. They’re also humanistic because they’re for me. I might suggest that they’re good ideas for others – I mean, if they were bad, why would I be following them? – but I won’t judge a person for not. Had a one night stand with a stranger? I don’t really care; that’s your own business. Now, will fundies still think I’m just coming up with excuses to satisfy my sinful lusts? Probably. But, like every other aspect of my life, until they prove that there is an invisible angry skydaddy, his rules won’t be touching my vagina. Nor will any body parts of fundies.

Boobs and Atheism

Man, I just can’t stop talking about boobs lately.

Anyway, Friendly Atheist shared this idea for the “Atheist Bust Campaign” the other day:

Other than the fact that it’s hard to read (should be one phrase per cup!), I personally thought it was hilarious. Bus. Bust. Har har. A play on words, plus it’s a bit ridiculous – who would expect to see this on a bra if you’re getting hot an heavy with some girl? What a silly way to advertise! Funny, right?

“Do we really need to objectify women to make our case? This seems pretty tasteless to me.”

“I know it seems to be the consensus that anyone calling this sexist needs to “lighten up,” but I’m pretty sure this is exactly what stopped a lot of people from listening to Peta (in addition to a variety of other hypocrisies of course, but this is one reason). Objectification is bad no matter who does it, and it’s especially annoying as a feminist to see another cause I care about wanting to use it in order to reach out to nonbelievers.”

“I find the ad mildly offensive and somewhat humorous, but I’d be much less annoyed if there were another ad showing off a close up of men’s filled out briefs. But then that begs the question of what exactly do a bra and briefs have to do with the message here?”

“For those of you suggesting that the users who rightfully mentioned this should just “lighten up,” I ask–do you really want atheism reflecting such narrow-minded views about gender stereotypes, too? Atheism is supposed to be a part of the movement of intelligible REASON. It’s bad enough the religious are so willing to persecute women for being even remotely sexual and the LGBT community for merely existing. Also, if you disagree that subtle forms of sexism–even sexist humor–can be harmful to women, I suggest you read up on the stereotype threat literature.”

The comments for this post annoy the crap out of me. Yes, you all need to take a fucking chill pill, and that’s coming from a fellow feminist. It was one joke based on a play on words. Maybe if there was a national campaign dedicated to nearly naked skeptic girls without equally nearly naked skeptic dudes, then I’d see the objectification and problem with exploiting female sexuality for advertisement. But it’s not. The Richard Dawkins Foundation isn’t funding it; there’s no grassroots atheist boob effort. Maybe if we had been the “Atheist Class Campaign” the joke would be a booty for the “Atheist Ass Campaign.” “Atheist Dunk Campaign” would be “Atheist Junk Campaign” and we could all stare at some guy’s crotch. My point is, the person who made this image probably wasn’t going out of their way to objectify women – bust just sounded like bus, and the idea of atheist advertisements on bras is ludicrous and funny. I hardly see how a single joke is equivalent to PETA’s trashy campaigns or religious oppression of women and LGTB groups.

Are we not allowed to joke about anything sexual at all because of the fear of not being politically correct? My friends and I make jokes that uber-feminists would consider sexist, but you know what, it’s about context. We’re not making them because we think it’s true that women are dumb or emotional or whatever – we make them because we think it’s ridiculous that people actually do think that way. We’re mocking people’s intolerance. I don’t Feminist Avenger Punch my guy friends when they jokingly tell me to get in the kitchen and make them a sammich. Why? Because I know how to take a joke. If they were the type of males who actually believed that, I wouldn’t be friends with them.

This is why a lot of times I hate calling myself a feminist. I want equal pay, equal opportunities, etc, etc… Why don’t we worry about the big problems instead of flipping out over a joke about a bra? Yes, we should have concerns about the objectification of women in our culture – but when it’s something minor like that, I think we all need to calm the fuck down. I hate the fact that I’ve been told I’m not a “real feminist” because I’m not totally extreme. I had a friend once try to argue with me that shaving your legs was just conforming to the oppressive patriarchal rules, and if I disagreed with her I was just not educated enough to understand. No, I fucking like having smooth legs. It feels good. Even if it’s a symbol of the higher standards of beauty women face, I really don’t care. And that was an argument from someone who wears make up, and I don’t wear any. Should we start a jihad against lipstick because of what it symbolically represents, or try to tackle the bigger problem of women’s self image and social standards of beauty?

That being said, here’s a SMBC that I like to believe was released today especially for this post:
Now if you excuse me, I’m going to go prepare myself for the upcoming feminist flame war. *crawls in her barricade*

Because two tiny triangles of fabric mark the line between sexy and slutty

Womanist Musings has a great summary of why the new development in the Miss California controversy sucks. If you desperately try to avoid tabloid style news, let me fill you in on what has happened. Miss California says she’s against gay marriage during the Miss USA pageant to Perez Hilton, of all people. She loses, scandal ensues saying she lost because of her views, yadda yadda. Miss C claims she’s just a good Christian girls with strong morals and all that jazz. Photos are released of a topless Miss C that she took when she was trying to become a Victoria’s secret model. Both sides freak out. Conservative pageant people are pissed because you’re not allowed to have any nude or semi-nude photographs. Liberal people are gleefully chuckling at her hypocrisy and are glad she’ll probably lose her title.

There is so much Wrong floating around that I don’t even know where to start. Pageants are such patriarchal stereotypical sexist bullshit to begin with that ranting about them is a waste of time, but one thing really bugs me. Let’s compare the two photos, shall we?

What the hell is the big flipping difference here? It’s okay for girls to parade around in skimpy bikinis so we can judge them on their sex appeal, but remove two tiny pieces of fabric and it instantly becomes slutty and bad? It’s not like the right photo is hard core porn (which still shouldn’t matter, but whatever, I have to fight the small battles first). I’d even say it’s a pretty tasteful nude if you removed all the Dirty watermarks. It really makes me wonder what’s going to happen when my generation is the politicians and businessmen of the world. There will probably be so many “scandalous” photos floating around that they won’t be scandalous anymore.

“Ms. President, another topless photo has surfaced. The elderly members of the press want a statement.”
“Oooh, I remember that one! That was some good tequila. Man, look how nice my boobs looked.”
“Uh, they’re great, Ms. President.”

But you know what, okay. She signed a contract saying she didn’t have any nude or semi-nude problems, and the pageant people get to make their own dumb rules. So fine, punish away. But to all the liberal people who think these rules are stupid and don’t have a problem with boobies, but are just glad to get revenge on a conservative girl…shame on you. She’s not the freaking Westboro Baptist Church. She said she doesn’t support gay marriage, not “all fags should die in a fire” or something. People say she’s a hypocrite because she’s claiming to have conservative values yet has posed topless…but seriously, so what? Why are liberals forcing anti-toplessness to be a conservative value? If we want people to stop freaking out about women’s boobs, we need to stop treating it like it matters. Why can’t we all be accepting of teh boobies?

Maybe I’m just a softie, but I don’t wish bad things upon people even if I fervently disagree with their political viewpoints. I also think boob scandals are about the most stupid thing ever (the Janet Jackson incident made my head nearly explode), so I just wish we’d stop making such a big deal out of them. Pro-boobs people unite!

Book Review: The Professor and the Dominatrix

This weekend our club received a copy of the book The Professor and the Dominatrix in the mail. It included a two page (form) letter from the author, John Harrigan. Let me just include snippets from it, so we’re all on the same page:

“I am a secular humanist, John Harrigan by name. … My suspense novel is dripping with sex and has occasional violence along the way–to attract those who don’t read science or who never have seriously examined their religious beliefs, our regular folks. The hero of the story is a humanist professor, the villian a pious serial killer. … So, I am promoting The Professor and the Dominatrix by sending a free copy to each secular humanist group, especially college campus ones. I ask only, if you like the story, talk it up. … It is selling in Germany for an astounding sixty dollars, presently at Amazon for twenty-five. Frankly my publisher over priced it–worth about fifteen.”

Dripping with sex and violence? Humanist professor and a sexy dominatrix? Showing random people what atheism is really about? Hell yeah, I thought, I’ll read it! I had nothing else to do this Sunday, anyway.

Oh God.

I really wanted to be nice to this book, I really did. I was all ready to give it a chance and write up an honest review to help this guy out. Well, this review will be honest, but not what he was looking for. This has to be one of the worst books I’ve ever read. At first, I thought may it would get better if I kept reading…maybe the plot would pick up. Then it got to the point where it was so bad that it was making me laugh. Then it went back to just being plain awful, but I had already wasted my time reading half of the book. I figured I would finish it and write a complete review so no one would have to suffer through this novel ever again. Unless they like torturing themselves and making Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary…in which case, you’ll absolutely love it. I’ll warn people that there are spoilers below, but no one in their right mind should even read this book anyway.

There is so much stuff wrong, I’ll have to break it into sections. I know it’s long, so I’ve bolded the especially ridiculous stuff in case you want to skim.

Rhetoric

Dear lord, this man is not a good writer. You’d think a retired professor would have some sort of verbal ability, but no. I had to stop myself from writing corrections on the pages because it felt like I was reading a first draft. Sometimes I didn’t know what sentences were even trying to say until I reread them three times. There were even typos, including this gem:

“Homosexuals would be demons working for Satin.”

Damn the minions of satin, with their smooth, silky seduction!

Most of the book is rambling nonsensical monologues by our protagonist, Professor Synan Slane. There would literally be pages without any description or action, not even “he said.” All of Ch. 4 is describing him in class with his students…and if a real lecture was as unorganized as this, I’d drop the class. It looks like the author tried to condense every argument against religion and for atheism into one chapter…without any flow between ideas or description. Let me summarize the topics he flies through on a single page to give you an idea:

People used to believe in geocentrism > Eucharist comes from cannabilism > Rejection of evolution > Thinking Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife > Not knowing the difference between Sunni and Shiite > Sweden being atheistic > Bonobos turning into fundamentalists (wtf?) > Child rape by priests

That continues for a solid 33 pages. The rest of the book is littered with it as well.

The descriptions, when he actually had any, were awful as well. When setting a scene and describing a dog in the room, I don’t need to know that it had “balls the size of honeydews.” Actually, most of the book was completely irrelevant to the “plot” (if it had any). I had to skip a two page discussion on boxing that was literally two people having small talk with each other. Maybe instead of all the pointless filler, he could have actually described what was going on with the murder mystery, since I was constantly lost.

And for the love of god, don’t phonetically spell accents. No. NO. Especially when you decide 90% of your characters need some sort of bizarro accent. It’s not cute, it’s annoying.

Character Development

The above phrase is something this author has obviously never heard of. Professor Slane is a giant Mary Sue. For this of you who aren’t knowledgeable about fanfiction lingo, a Mary Sue is a “pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers.” Hmm, now why would I ever think Professor Slane is a Mary Sue? Maybe I’m being too judgemental.

Professor Slane

Author

Psychology professor

Psychology professor

Angry atheist

Angry atheist

Mustache

Mustache

Former combat marine

Former combat marine

Boxer

Writes crap that makes me want to punch babies

The kicker is that Slane, along with every other character, is completely 2 dimensional. You’d think if you were just writing yourself, you could give the character some depth. But nope – instead every character is just the voice of the author. I even thought maybe everyone seemed like a flat stereotype because he was being tongue in cheek…but I’ll get back to that later. He desperately tries to make up for this by describing each character’s entire live history in a giant wall of text. You know what, I don’t need to know that Joey Damico (random police officer #5) has a mickey mouse watch and a mother named Rita, especially when that character is never mentioned again. Or really, why are all these random passing characters even getting full names? There were so many names and pointless characters floating around that I couldn’t even keep track of the important ones. I don’t need to know that the janitor who never even appears in the book is Theodore Poopface Von Winklehiemer III. Just call him the fricking janitor.

Plot

I was constantly lost, because whatever murder plot this book might have had was interrupted by atheist rants. Oh, and the climax occurs on the last page of the last chapter. There’s a page and a half afterward to sum up what happened to everyone. Great writing, there.

Violence

I have to give it to him, the gratuitous violence was the only part he did well. Which is sad, because it just ended up freaking me out more.

Sex

I felt weird knowing some 60 year old professor wrote this, especially with his photo staring at me on the back of the book, but I thought I’d give him a chance. It only takes two sentences before there’s some awkward discussion about a guy’s erection, but then there’s no sex for a while. At first I’m a little upset. I was told the book was dripping with sex! Finally I sense a sex scene coming, so I start getting excited.

Oh God.

There are two sex scenes in the book, and it’s a blessing there aren’t more. The first is the most frightening description of oral sex I’ve ever read. If you want to subject yourself to the whole thing, ask politely and I’ll type it up. To summarize, the entire segment refers to the guy’s penis as “Captain Marvel.” For two pages. What the hell. The description included such Shakespearean writing, such as:

“She was a connoisseur. A gobbler of whangs par excellence.”

Seriously? That’s the most horrible, amazing, ridiculous thing I have ever read in a book. Not just wangs, but whangs. Hhhwwhhaanngs. This may honestly be the only good thing that’s come out of this book, because I’m going to use this phrase as frequently as possible.

And if the oral sex wasn’t bad enough, the sex later was even more horrible. No foreplay whatsoever, guy just sticks it in and rams home, the girl instantly orgasms after insertion, keeps orgasming over and over again just from penetration alone…what the hell? Has this guy ever even had sex? If he has, I feel bad for whatever woman had to put up with it. And in a later scene he describes someone’s behind as a “bummy.” Really, are we all five years old now? You couldn’t say ass, butt, booty, anything else?

Atheism

The author apparently thinks the best way to win people over to atheism is by being a gigantic troll. The killer, and really any villain in the book, is shown to be overtly and over the top religious. Slane and his atheistic partner, the Dominatrix, both show the error in theists’ ways by constantly ridiculing and mocking them. I don’t know how any Christians could read the first page and still want to read the rest of the book, let alone get through his Chapter 4 diatribe.

Since Slane has absolutely no personality, his only purpose is to insert random facts and quotes about atheism and religion into the book. Some of his long monologues about random topics would be good as blog entries… that is, they’re (mostly) factual, they explain concepts decently…but a book meant to be fiction shouldn’t read like a one sided debate. But that’s the problem – it’s only good enough for a blog entry. Not even a great blog entry. In fact, I’ve seen these arguments explained much better in various blogs. It’s like he wanted to write a book about atheism but his arguments weren’t well thought out enough, so he filled the gaps with a poorly written murder plot. Even then, they’re not the sort of arguments that are going to win over people to atheism…they’re mostly just random facts about all the horrible things religion can potentially lead people to do.

I had a neutral view on the book’s atheism (I thought the random facts were mostly just disjointed and annoying) until the end of the book. The two atheist “protagonists” (I use the term lightly, as I eventually came to hate every character in this book) get into a televised debate with two evangelists. Long story short, the atheists insult and mock the intelligence of the evangelists, the preacher tries to punch Slane, and Slane the macho boxer procedes to beat the crap out of him. The female evangelist then tries to attack the Dominatrix, but the Dominatrix rips off christian girl’s dress so she’s naked on TV. The atheists then laugh and joke about their victory. All of this occurs while a man dressed as Jesus gets a handjob in the audience. What the fuck? How the hell is this book supposed to make me like atheists? How the FUCK is this promoting atheism and secular humanism in a positive light?

Sexism

Holy shit was this book sexist. Now, I consider myself a feminist, but I’m usually pretty laid back about things. I do things that are “bad” like making and laughing at sexist jokes. But this book crossed way over the line, and was packed with stuff offensive to women. At first I wanted to believe that some of the characters were just being described as jerks…but even the enlightened “Professor” would spew garbage about women all the time. And it really didn’t matter, since every character basically came off as the author speaking through them (this holds true for the next two sections as well). That is, even when characters said dumbass, bigoted stuff, no where in the book was there context to show these are bad points of view. Sometimes they were even shown as being positive.

Every female character was a demeaning stereotype. This is especially annoying when the majority of atheists are men, and they should be trying to actively recruit more women…not scare them away by acting like chauvinistic douchebags. If you’re not a hot, young, ditsy sex object, you’re old and disgusting. Don’t believe me? Let me list all the female characters, major and minor:

  1. Mindless university secretary, submissive, easily scared
  2. Two raging butch dykes in charge of “Dykes Taking Over”, lesbians only because they had bad experiences with men/their fathers (WTF?), short crew cut hair and hiking boots
  3. Coy cunning Dominatrix…who seemed like an independent woman for about a page, but then she reveals her inner most desire is to just find a good man. 24 hours after meeting main character wants to have his baby and marry him, they talk about marriage after the first time they have sex, and she doesn’t use protection so she can get pregnant. They get married after knowing each other a week.
  4. Frumpy neighbor lady whose physical appearance disgusts Slane.
  5. Frumpy dense secretary at police station, easily manipulated by men in order to get facts about the case.
  6. Cheating wife of the murder victim, has many DUIs, shoplifted, used to be a skanky “ho” who was in pornos.
  7. Police officer that doesn’t say much. Her only purpose is to supply someone for the male officers to hit on. When she has to interview someone about sex she gets all bashful. While the other officers talk about furthering her career, she is more worried about flirting with her boss. Actually the most independent female in the book…until she gets brutally murdered at the end for no reason. Yay.
  8. “Fem-nazi” department head/woman’s studies professor who flunks students if they don’t spell woman “womyn.” Sleeps with female students, total man hater.
  9. Student described as sleeping with the female womyn’s study professor in order to get an A, airhead who jumps from one religion to the next for whatever is popular. Training to be a dominatrix.
  10. Militant Christian female student…who instantly sees the light once atheist superhero professor owns her arguments, because she’s a dumb girl (note: all the male classmates are atheistic to some extent and “get it”)
  11. Girl working at a sex shop who’s also a hooker…and hitting on everyone, giggly idiot
  12. Frumpy old hotel maid who does nothing but talk about her deceased husband.
  13. Slane talks about his two middle school teachers. One was a hot young teacher who wore skirts without underwear and knew the boys would try to peek up them, and would let them do this. Slane still found this wonderfully awesome. The other teacher was an angry fat old lady that everyone hated.

If those characters aren’t enough, huge chunks of the books are devoted to bashing “gender feminists” and just females in general. Of course, it’s not just females he bashes…

Racism

There are two full pages dedicated to describing how the town’s mayor, the only African American in the book, speaks “black English,” not “proper” “standard” English. All of his dialog is written to seem ignorant, and he’s constantly swearing. This is in light of the fact that everyone else in the book, including the police officers, hookers, pimps, dominatrixes, and students all talk with the vocabulary of a college professor (aka, the author). Wow, way to go.

Homophobia, etc

The whole plot revolves around two gay guys, one a closeted pastor obviously meant to parallel Haggard, being brutally murdered. At first I thought the plot would be pro-gay since it’s about investigating this hate crime. Nope. Every homosexual in this book is a flaming stereotypical nancy boy. Even one guy’s name is Sisley, which sounds like “sissy.” I don’t think I’m stretching here, since the forward states that the characters have metaphorical names meant to mirror their personality. In fact, any sort of gender or sexual deviation is associated with a villian or outwardly mocked by the characters. The only sex scene shown in a “positive” light is Slane’s minute man missionary no-foreplay romp. Let me just show you some of the gems the book had to offer:

About a boy Slane went to school with: “Everyone called him Sis [not related to Sisley]. He really should have been a girl. He didn’t play with the boys or know and dirty jokes, or want to. If you started to tell him one, he’d throw his hands up and turn away. No normal boy would act like that.” WTF

About the closeted pastor/bisexualism: “Wright seems to have been bisexual, probably never formed a clear gender identity or more likely is genetically different from the norm, perhaps has a brain pattern or map more like a woman’s than the average hetereosexual male’s.” WTFFF

And I need this whole section to make my point:

Alfie thought back to what Evan had said when he faced off with Charles who had become Charlene. “That Evan had some good lines: ‘Female hormone injections and having your penis mutilated does not make you a woman, just a medical mess. God made you a man, a surgeon can’t change that.”

“No wonder Charles now Charlene broke down and screamed.”

“Remember when he called him-her an it then said, ‘Homosexuality is an abomination.'”

“God, yes! When the it jumped up and scratched Evan, that was the highlight of the show.”

“It was quite a show,” Alfie agreed.

“Ya know,” Grant said, “this whole homosexual and sex change stuff is weird. Put it this way, if women are no more than makeup, so to speak, that falls right onto the lap of the gender feminists. The only difference they recognize is that anyone with a giblet is bad, rotten, evil, oppressive – you name it. Men are bad just because they’re men; women are good just because they’re women. So, the name is the difference? Some of those gender feminists want to keep as few men around as possible, ten percent I’ve heard, for breeding only. Jesus! What will they do? Drown nine out of ten baby boys? Well – not long ago gays and lesbians were called unnaturals, now they’re considered okay, a preferred minority, and anyone who doesn’t think homosexuality is okay is a fucking homophobe, has a mental called homophobia. The gays calling in were saying Evan is a big homophobe. Boy, when it comes to name calling, the shoe is on the other foot now.”

Conclusion

Don’t read this book unless you get off on being angry at this sort of tripe. This proves to me that not all atheists or professors are enlightened intellectuals. I just hope theists don’t get a hold of this book as see it as a representation of all atheists, because this guy does NOT speak for me. The only positive thing that came out of reading this is that I’m now more motivated to finish my own books I’ve been working on…because hell, I KNOW I can do better than that.

Friend: do you need a drink now? or at the very least, good sex?

Me: This book has made sex disgusting to me currently. I don’t want to think about someone’s Captain Marvel.

Friend: that’s a real feat

Me: Yes, yes it is

EDIT: Except of the awful Purple Prose is up

EDIT 2: The Professor responds, and he’s not happy

Can you spot the differences?

Look closely:

Still can’t tell? Israel’s two female ministers were photoshopped out and replaced with men. Wow, just wow. Apparently this ran in an extremely Orthodox paper, but still. I think the cynical (or realistic) among us expect the media to twist/bend/distort the facts, but rewriting history? That’s sort of a big no-no.

I guess when you’re upset that your country is progressing in terms of gender equality and there’s nothing you can do about it, all you have left to do is pretend it’s not happening.

(via Feministe)

What’s the cure for lesbianism? Rape, of course!

From this story:

“Lesbians living in South Africa are being subjected to ‘corrective rape’ and severe violence by men trying to ‘cure’ them of their sexual orientation, human rights groups have said.”

Obviously a woman who isn’t attracted to men will see the error in her ways once she’s brutally raped! Who wouldn’t love men after that?

The “logic” behind acts like this just amazes me. It’s bad enough that people think you can cure homosexuality at all – or that even if you could, that it needs curing. But it takes some twisted thinking to believe rape will have any sort of positive outcome. And I hate to say this, but it makes me wonder if these men are just looking for an excuse. Would they rape anyway, and now they just have easy targets? Does raping a straight woman = bad, while raping a lesbian = teaching her a lesson for the good of society?

People amaze me sometimes…and not in a good way.

What's the cure for lesbianism? Rape, of course!

From this story:

“Lesbians living in South Africa are being subjected to ‘corrective rape’ and severe violence by men trying to ‘cure’ them of their sexual orientation, human rights groups have said.”

Obviously a woman who isn’t attracted to men will see the error in her ways once she’s brutally raped! Who wouldn’t love men after that?

The “logic” behind acts like this just amazes me. It’s bad enough that people think you can cure homosexuality at all – or that even if you could, that it needs curing. But it takes some twisted thinking to believe rape will have any sort of positive outcome. And I hate to say this, but it makes me wonder if these men are just looking for an excuse. Would they rape anyway, and now they just have easy targets? Does raping a straight woman = bad, while raping a lesbian = teaching her a lesson for the good of society?

People amaze me sometimes…and not in a good way.