Adam Lee has an article in Salon about Divisiveness Among Teh Atheists and what a good thing it is. (No, he doesn’t say anything about “bitchy infighting” or the Judean People’s Front.)
The animating idea behind Atheism+ is that atheism isn’t a stopping point, but a beginning. We’re atheists not because we want to gather and engage in collective back-slapping, not because we want to chortle at the foolishness of benighted believers, but because we care about creating a world that’s more just, more peaceful, more enlightened, and we see organized religion as standing in the way of this goal. We consider politically engaged atheism an effective way to demolish this obstacle, to refute the beliefs that have so often throughout human history been used to excuse cruelty, inequality, ignorance, oppression and violence.
Is that bitchy of us? No, it isn’t. Joking aside, it isn’t. It’s what freethought has always been about. I bet nobody ever called G W Foote bitchy.
While Atheism+ has already seen allies flock to its banner, it has its detractors as well. The most common complaint heard from some quarters is that A+ is “divisive,” that it causes us to waste valuable time and energy on infighting rather than accomplishing the goals we all have in common. However, this is a classic example of how privilege makes it easy for people to overlook barriers that don’t personally affect them. The truth is that the atheist movement is already divided, and has been for a while: Surveys show that there’s a significant imbalance of men over women. Some of this may be due to outside cultural factors, but some of it is surely owing to the experiences that many women have spoken out about: belittling language and condescension, unwanted sexual advances, outright harassment, and sometimes violent abuse and threats when they speak up about the other things that make them feel unwelcome.
It is now. I don’t know that it was a couple of years ago (at the time I thought it was mostly just a matter of forgetfulness – conference organizers forgetting to ask women to speak and forgetting how to look for them when PZ and others told them to ask), but it sure as hell is now. There are places I won’t go near, for the simple reason that I don’t want buckets of ordure dumped over my head.
Atheism+ isn’t creating division, it’s an effort to fix an already existing division by lowering the barriers to women’s participation in the atheist movement. The widespread adoption of anti-harassment policies at most major atheist conferences, as well as the series of atheist leaders speaking out against hate directed at women, are a good start, but there’s much more progress to be made.
Like…people stopping. People stopping things like this disgusting podcast, in which Reap Paden calls Stephanie Zvan a fucking bitch over and over again in a shouting enraged rant, and later joins with some other dudes to call Rebecca Watson a stupid cunt. Just not doing that, would be progress. I don’t see Reap Paden doing a racist version of that, so progress would be not doing a sexist one either.
For many atheists, the events leading up to the formation of Atheism+ have been one dispiriting experience after another, as the depths of hate that have been festering among us have emerged into public view. It’s clear there’s a small subset of people within the atheist community, mostly but not exclusively male, who are driven into a raving fury by the idea that there should be any limitations on people’s behavior or that we should undertake to make our movement more diverse. It’s unlikely that we can rid ourselves of these people entirely; but at the very least, we hope to ensure that the larger community won’t sanction their behavior, regard it as acceptable or tacitly condone it by saying and doing nothing.
Or somewhat more than tacitly condone it by saying and doing nothing about that while pitching daily fits about “FTBullies” and their friends and allies.
Most important, we want to be clear that this isn’t a problem unique to atheism. On the contrary, it’s something that’s happened over and over through history as once-fringe ideas move into the mainstream and become more diverse. As this article on io9 notes, other conferences are having these same fights, which may well mean that feminism and social justice are ideas whose time has come.
Oh god that last part makes me want to bang my head against the wall. We thought feminism’s time had come forty years ago. Forty fucking years ago, children. It’s so sad that we’re forlornly hoping that maybe now…
You youngsters will be saying the same thing in forty years. I’m sorry to tell you that, but you will.
Only 40 year ago? Didn’t the suffragettes think that feminism’s time had come ~100 years ago?
Yes, but things regressed in some ways after them (as things have regressed in some ways since 1970), and at the same time people’s ideas expanded.
…I love the point that we don’t see these people being so reactionary with regard to questions of race though around Islam there are a LOT of incredibly racist comments…yes I know Islam is not a race….Let’s talk about the Sikhs who got torched because white Amuurikkans can’t tell the difference and do not care to try shall we?
There’s a certain line they don’t cross with being overtly racist though… that line with regard to sexism though is demolished I think precisely because it cuts so close to home…like in the home.
^ true and not only regarding hateful insults. Studies full of faulty statistics and ridiculous conclusions are tossed around to prove genetic differences in habits, tastes and intelligence between the sexes, and the “concern” keeps being raised, demanding more studies to prove biological determinism for differences between the sexes, always in the name of pure love for knowledge and immaculate scientific inquiry of course. Same exact thing racists used to do.
It goes like this:
– Study can be used to support biological determinism: SCIENCE SAYS IT, SEE? FACT. SETTLED. THE END. YOU DON’T LIKE IT? YOU’RE PART OF THE PC POLICE OUT TO BAN FREE SPEECH.
– Study can’t be used to support it or supports an opposite position: Well, clearly further research needs to be made in order to dig deeper into this scientific question, the question remains open and we shouldn’t censor free inquiry just because some may find it politically incorrect, such political objections should not obstaculize the pursuit of the noble goals of reason and scientific enlightenment.
For a piece of positive news, a group that I am associated with (nothing to do with atheism – it’s a writer’s group) today floated the idea of a code of conduct for our conferences, indicating that we needed to be proactive about such things as sexual harrassment, and no one shouted, screamed, or indicated that they had the right to chew someone’s leg in a bar. In fact, many of them nodded.
It’ll be intereting to see what happens when it gets to the full group, thought. This was only a small subset, since the fall conference is routinely poorly attended. However, if this group adopts a policy, it will be thanks to the efforts of FTB, since it brought home to me quite clearly just how important it was. I’ll keep you posted.
theobromine. 40 years ago? Yes. I was there.
We didn’t really see the issue the same way as the vote-winning feminists of the turn of the century. Though I suppose it was a bit different here because land-owning women in South Australia had the vote from the 1860s and that was extended to all women in 1894 (New Zealand had got there a bit before us). We hadn’t had to fight as long or as hard as in the UK or the US.
We just saw ourselves as picking up the baton and running forward into newer areas. After all, a lot of the early 20th century feminists more or less presumed that other civil rights would “naturally” follow from full suffrage. Many others held the view that public life would “naturally” become more civilised and supportive of women’s rights and interests because of women’s voices being heard – even though they saw women’s interests as still being domestic and family based. Neither of those rosy pictures came “naturally” into being.
So we went for equal pay, women’s refuges from domestic violence, access to education, maternity leave and all that 1970s parcel. I really thought we’d done a reasonable job. But I, and I presume many others, fell into much the same trap as the early 20th century women. We took it almost for granted that our achievements would stand and would form the solid basis for further achievements.
It should be obvious to all women everywhere from now on that absolutely nothing will fall into place “naturally” in the course of events. We have to fight for further rights and some of the fight will have been taken out of us by defending and buttressing what we thought we’d ‘won’ in earlier battles.
Yup.
mildlymagnificent, let me quibble with you here. Nothing personal; you’re simply expressing something almost everybody has been taught.
But what almost everybody has been taught is wrong. What almost everybody has been taught is the sort of simplified “history” that erases struggles that then have to be fought all over again.
The 19th and early 20th century feminists were not focused solely on winning the vote. This is important to understand. They fought for many of the same things that the “Second Wave” of the 1960s and 1970s fought for: economic equality, access to the professions, even (some of them) an end to the sexual double standard.
At some point–when the idea of women’s suffrage became popular enough, I guess–“the Vote” became a sort of rallying cause. And, as you say, I’m sure many people then thought that “public life would ‘naturally’ become more civilised and supportive of women’s rights and interests because of women’s voices being heard.” But many of the women who went to jail and were force-fed and endured ridicule for years were not fighting only for the right to vote–important as that right is.
Of course, in the popular heuristic, once The Vote was won the struggle was over and, Shut up, sweetheart, don’t be a bitch, you got what you wanted, didntcha?
Then when the Second Wave came around, women had to fight some of the same old battles all over again often without realizing that there existed a forgotten history of struggle and resistance against the very problems they were now confronting.
So, theobromine is right, I think. This sort of historic erasure happens again and again. It happens in other social justice movements. It’s something we need to be aware of and resist.
Like I said. We had it a lot easier here with getting the vote much earlier and easier than most of the world.
And South Australia was a bit “advanced” by the standards of the rest of Australia – we had a woman who was appointed QC in 1962 and became a Supreme Court Judge in 1965! (When she retired 18 years later she was still the only Australian woman on a superior court bench. The rest of the country’s been catching up a little bit since then.) One of her major achievements, working with the League of Women Voters, was getting women onto SA juries – in 1962! A hundred years after the first women voters.
I was always fully aware of the women who’d gone before me in unions and Country Women’s Associations and the League of Women Voters and across the world – who were still pushing for various social justice issues. But it was only in the 60s and 70s that they all managed to get together in a concerted way. We wouldn’t have had IWY in 1975 if they hadn’t all put their shoulders to the one big wheel.
But the lesson still stands. Nothing achieved by women to date can be taken for granted. We have to keep constant watch that we maintain whatever gains we’ve made in law, wages and other rights and not presume that we’re safe to focus only on further improvements.
WRT George Foote, he may not have actually been called bitchy, but enough of the establishment objected him for him to be put in prison. There definitely were splits in the 19th century, I’ve got a well-thumbed biography of Bradlaugh and it’s incredible how relevant it is to our times and how much you’ll recognise.
And now they can’t do imprison western readers (they can however imprison the likes of Rimsha Masih, Alexander Aan or even Pussy Riot), but they can call you “Islamophobic”, or say you want to ban Christmas, or make up all kinds of absolute piss about you discriminating against faithheads in the workplace, which I know are being lapped up by the religious right in America as part of their general Anglophobic narrative.
I have generally stayed out of the A+ arguments, and found the whole infighting to be quite sad, but it does need to be said that just about any movement is going to run into opposition, and most of the world is much worse than here. I can see the need for a movement, as faithheads are certainly extremely well-organised and atheists probably will have to overcome the distate most of us feel about “joining” to pool our resources together. We simply can’t rely on the fact that more and more people lose their faith, since raw numbers count for remarkably little and it’s the loudest voices that are generally heeded by the silent majority… whose silence is just about the only noteworthy thing about them, since they generally have no strong views or disposition to act in a particular way.
There’s that word “infighting” again. Could everybody stop using it, please? Thank you.
“Infighting” suggests “fighting within a group“, which in turn suggests that there really is a group that includes all the fighting parties at the same time. Here’s a few groups ranked by increasing level of outgroup status as I see it.
1. Unitarian Universalists.
2. Moderate Christians.
3. Fundamentalist Christians.
4. The Westboro Baptist Church, Smallpox viruses, the apologists for the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] in level 5.
5. The Taliban, Al Quaida, and the army of orcs who have flooded the internet with comments like this since a woman had the audacity to say “Guys, don’t do that”.
(…and I used to be such a nice person 🙁 )
My method of dealing with this mental trap (which I can fall into too) is to say out loud “overlapping bell curves”.
There is pretty well no characteristic of human beings that is completely polarised across “groups”. Every characteristic I examine is actually a distribution curve, often a bell curve, and while the averages may be different between “groups”, the overlap prohibits generalisations.
(I once thought I had found a valid generalisation: “if a person has ever been pregnant, that person is a woman”. Then certain transgendered people appeared to contradict that!)
Bjarte – exactly. It’s not infighting. People who call me a cunt are not part of “my community” or my team or anything like that. People who circulate nasty caricatures of me and other mouthy feminists (aka “right-on progressives”) are not part of “my community.” People who tell lies about me and other mouthy feminists ditto.
It’s really not infighting.
This started well, then it seemed to become one long whine. Sorry but i’m not interested in anyone/thing that just feels sorry for him/her/itself & goes on about persecution & how unfairly it’s been treated. It’s a tough world, deal with it, DO, don’t talk. Seems to me that some people can’t get over their own self importance, or lack of!
Wow, that’s a fascinating and insightful comment.
barrypearson #11:
Yes! Regardless of the reasons for the gender differences between humans, I am fond of reminding people that the differences *within* each group are far greater than the difference between the groups (I find this works well for the math-challenged whose eyes glaze over when talking about “overlapping curves”).
re 40 years vs 100 years:
Stacy (#7) did a good job of elaborating what I was trying to say. Hardly anyone is surprised to hear that, 37 years ago, the vice-principal of my highschool would not let me take an electronics course because it was unsuitable for a girl, despite the fact that I had excelled in all the prerequisite math and physics courses. But *I* was astonished to hear a 20-something university student tell me that she had been told by her guidance counselor that math and science were too hard for girls.
@gglikeahorsey. The following line from a song by Chumbawamba strikes me as particularly fitting in response to your post:
40 years ago, and 40 years before and 40 years hence.
It is unfair to think that feminism is supposed to solve the trouble that has crawled out after the elevator incident. Everyone SHOULD posesss the moral and intellectual knowhow to see that Atheism+ is nothing more than Atheism in the real world.
We are like the Papists, or the Boy Scouts, or whatever. Our hopes for the better don’t–of themselves–prevent the intrusion of personal and social pathologies that undo the good we would do.
The personal pathology of misogynist pigs dovetails with the social pathology of those “..’driven into a raving fury by the idea that there should be any limitations on people’s behavior…”
These were there all along, now we see them and the view is spoiled, at least for a while.
Yours didn’t even get that far.
Since when is talking about a problem not doing something? That’s what starts change. Do you really not understand the concept of an idea? And how we go about changing them in other people when they are harmful?
I think you do. What I think you aren’t interested in is self-reflection. Change requires effort. It requires insight into how you can improve yourself and that means actually listening to what other people say. When my black friend tells what it’s like for him, I don’t accuse him of whining. I listen to what he’s saying, in part so I know how to change my own bad behaviors.
That requires me to admit I’ve been wrong, acknowlege that I’ve been incredibly callous and self-righteous about other people’s experiences (much like you are now) and hopefully make an effort to avoid in the future. All you can do is pat yourself on the back in a smug blog post about how little you care, as if we couldn’t have figured that out from your very first sentence.
See, I can think of a few things you could do as well 🙂