No time! I was going to do a quick post last night just to say Rebecca Goldstein’s talk was brilliant, but using the lobby Wifi means one sees all one’s favorite people right in front of one – so, in short, I had deeply interesting conversations with Amanda Knief and Michael DeDora and Seanna Watson and others and the post didn’t get written. So: Goldstein’s talk was brilliant. I’ll tell you why later – meanwhile Miri has a post.
Maryam is on in half an hour, along with others. It’s going to be amazing.
It’s too bad Ron elected to open the conference by using a lot of anti-feminist talking points like “sister punisher” and “privilege” and “shut up and listen” by way of telling us to be Good feminists. Sigh. A couple of people have said “sister punisher” on one or two occasions; it’s hardly a central platform of the demonic Secular Feminists. Telling us, essentially, not to be stupid and dogmatic and coercive wasn’t really a good welcoming intro. (Hint: we weren’t planning to be stupid and dogmatic and coercive, and we’re not children, and we’re not thick.)
So that was a sour note, and has caused a good deal of puzzlement and irritation, but other than that – it’s being amazing.
Maybe he was trying to make Justin Vacula feel welcome.
/snark
There’s been an effort to track down the origins and usage of “sister punisher” (along with its siblings “gender traitor” and “chill girl”):
http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4457&sid=e7cda753a24af8cacfa84a3a7cd27489#p80439
Needless to say, it’s barely used in a direct sense.
Feminism is not one of Ron Lindsay’s causes. He supports the idea of women as human beings and I’m sure some of his best friends are women but feminism isn’t really important to him.
I read his opening remarks to WiS2. They were patronizing, tepid towards women, and mildly supportive of the slymepit. He kinda-sorta accepts that maybe Atheism+ is perhaps okay, for certain values of okay, and perhaps skepticism is a big enough tent that A+ could possibly fit in if they’re not too noisy. He quite obviously doesn’t understand privilege and the concept of mansplaining is foreign to him.
It was a seriously sour note to start on, and I was glad the speakers didn’t let it drag them down. As he spoke all I could think was “what the hell is wrong with him, and why didn’t anyone review his talk and set him straight before he got up there?!”
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t say Lindsay has no understanding of mansplaining, as he provided a pretty good example yesterday. Puzzling and very disappointing.
Martha @5
I agree that Lindsay is excellent at mansplaining. He just doesn’t recognize when he and others do it.
Wait — do you really mean that a conference on women in secularism was opened by a man telling women how to act??? Surely that’s a major facepalm moment for him??? Surely someone called him on it???
He was called on it and basically accused those calling him out of bigotry because they were, “..focused on my race and gender and not the content ..”. The man is a clueless, smug, ass. How did he miss that he was the opening speaker at a secular women’s conference and therefore in no way silenced? Well, there is this thing called privilege and Ron doesn’t want to hear about it or understand it because he’s rather invested in keeping it.
Huh? Why was oolon banned on that link?
Sorry for the derail.
We have not come a long way, baby.
Mehn as still selling their old song and prace. Time to hold them All accountable for what they have and have not done to help half the human race to flourish.
Why should CFI be anything other than patriarchal? Do we think humanism started out as anything but man-ism: the love and worship of all things male? Women are a distinct afterthouth. Same as any religion: mehn on top. Women struggling to speak the truth of our lives.
Sili
He wasn’t. It was a joke.
“not focused on content” ? All of the criticisms i’ve read were pretty well focused on the content. He apparently just can’t read past any comments about him being a white male to see that all of the rest of the sentences were about the content.
I’m really curious what the other speakers at the conference thought about his opening remarks. Maybe if enough of them said that they thought there was something wrong with them, then maybe he would back off. Who knows?