Sure, I’ll Actually Think Biblically About Everything, Biola

May 28, 2013 Eli Heinabiola, christianity, morality16 Comments

The first time I heard of Biola, I thought it was an educational institute dedicated to biology. I was disappointed to find out that Biola is actually the oddly twee abbreviation for “Bible University of Los Angeles.”

Alrighty, then. Many fine (and not-so-fine) educational institutes have religious origins, even religious outlooks and messages. What can I do, really.

Then, I started seeing this billboard on my nigh-daily trek up the 55 North freeway.

The billboard was apparently part of a larger campaign to promote Biblical thinking about everything.

Think biblically. About everything. http://t.co/uj3bvXV69y #ThinkBiblically

— Biola University (@biolau) March 4, 2013

I suppose that because the re-tweets numbered fewer than a dozen and only one person re-shared the corresponding Facebook post, they realized they weren’t going viral and had to pay to get attention.

(The ever-awesome Elizabeth caught this.)

I’d imagine that they’ll elicit a snicker rather than incite Biblical thinking about everything by targeting ads to this site.

As I live relatively nearby, I contemplated a response to their marketing campaign. Showing up on campus with a posse of people each in a current state of violation of at least one Biblical principle — one person eating shrimp cocktail, another wearing mixed fibers, two people of the same gender kissing, a married woman whose husband declared that she hadn’t been a virgin on her wedding night, and so on — sounded kind of fun. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that calling out the absurdity of the Bible by violating its principles yourself is just so… played.

Instead, I’m going to think Biblically about everything. “Everything” includes Biola’s website, right?

Their faculty page reveals that they have have female instructors, ones who brazenly sport pearls and braids, no less! Unless those women teach women-only courses, they are in clear violation of the Bible.

Lest I rely too heavily on the misogyny of Paul, who is clearly a rather low-hanging fruit of a target, I turn to Leviticus, one of the favorite thump-worthy section of the Old Testament. Shockingly, according to their president, Biola isn’t in favor of putting their gay male students to death.

I wanted to continue with Leviticus by bringing up Biola’s explicit condoning of shellfish, but then I found a piece written about that very topic on their site.

Christians ought to look for the principles behind the different Old Testament laws to discern what they say about God’s unchanging holiness, he said. An essential part of this is to understand what the rest of the Bible teaches, especially in the New Testament, he said. Homosexual behavior, for instance, is clearly shown throughout the rest of Scripture to be inconsistent with God’s will – whether in Genesis or in Paul’s letters, Saucy said. “You find it as a running theme throughout the Bible,” he said. “If you didn’t have it anywhere else, and you didn’t have strong implications from creation, and all you had was Leviticus, then it would be a more difficult question.”

Am I to believe, then, that when they say “Think Biblically about everything,” what they mean is “Use your personal judgment to figure out what in the Bible is worth paying attention to and what is worth utterly ignoring”?

Sounds suspiciously like something a lot of us are accused of engaging in, that term thrown out by Bible-lovers worldwide as if it were a slur rather than a descriptor: moral relativity.

The horror.

See the alleged trump card Biola advocates using against “New Atheists.”

What makes your moral standard more than a subjective opinion or personal preference? What makes it truly binding or obligatory? Why can’t I just ignore it?

Right back atcha, Biola.

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Growing Up Online: Why & How I Care About the Comments

May 23, 2013 Eli Heinabeauty myth, body image, porn6 Comments

This post contains graphic discussions of bodies and pornography. TW for body image issues.

I can’t pretend that some of my reasons for engaging in the comment sections aren’t personal.

I first hopped online when I was just over a decade old. As I had been socialized almost exclusively among other Muslims, the Internet was my chance to interact with people who resembled the mean and mode in American society far more than my family and community did. Had I stayed a good Muslim girl, what I learned online about gender and sexuality would have affected me very little. Instead, I left Islam and began to navigate the world of dating and sex with the assumption, courtesy of the comments, that I was so physically repulsive, any male attention would be a boon.

Because almost every body type can be found depicted in a sexualized fashion online, the Internet is often hailed as a great sexual equalizer. It is far from so for those uninterested in seeking out visual sexual imagery. I fell into that camp; accordingly, whatever I saw in the way of porn was a video or picture link that I encountered on non-porn sites.

I am a child of the much-maligned self-esteem-obsessed 1990s. Jean Kilbourne had made her Killing Us Softly presentation at my school, I had heard Oprah talk about loving yourself, and so on. Despite all that, I fell for the Internet’s version of the beauty myth. I failed to apply media literacy to what I saw online since what I read did not represent The Media. No one was trying to brainwash me into thinking that I wasn’t beautiful so that multinational corporations could sell me stuff, the commenters were men directly informing me of their desires.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with people expressing their sexual desires. The problem was that they didn’t stop at “she’s hot” and instead defended their lack of interest in the women they found unappealing with incredible vitriol. Their vicious verbal evisceration of images of women whom I found to be impossibly attractive led me to wonder how exactly I could hope to be found beautiful by anyone but my mother. Any dissent from the overall opinion of women was so rare that, out of all the things I saw in the hours and hours I spent online, I can remember the specific instances when it occurred.

In two words, I learned that what straight men physically craved in women was not me.

Convinced that I had to compensate for my utterly flawed body, I paid attention to the most-repeated complaints that straight men made of straight women. As was the case with my exposure to porn, I did not seek out the information as much as stumble upon it during my usual Internet use. The consensus in the comments was that women are invariably terrible for a variety of reasons and the only reason to bother with them is their sexual desirability. Although my own experiences directly contradicted many of the things the men said about women, I resolved that no man would ever complain about me like that. After all, with my inadequate body, what else did I have to recommend me to a man? It took me years to even realize that I had such a hot mess of internalized misogyny entangled in my brain, let alone that I ought to rid myself of it.

My particular extenuating circumstances are certainly not common. Being young, naive and online, however, is a situation that grows more common by the day. Whenever someone tells me that it’s not worth the effort to provide a dissenting voice to a shitty opinion on a mainstream website, I relay the implicit message back to my teenage self and her current-day compatriots:

No one’s time and energy, even in the small amount that is required to drop off a comment, is worth your coming to understand that what is said here is not the only way of seeing things.

This is not to say that I recommend that everyone get on YouTube or any of the other more mainstream yet vile places and engage in ceaseless debates with obvious trolls. Lowering yourself to the level of the lowest common denominator can affect life outside of the comments there, and not in a good way. What I do advocate is, at the very least, a drop-off.

Whenever I can, I drop off a simple “no,” “that’s not always true,” or pointed “for you” into comment sections dominated by unquestioned yet horrid opinions. By this, I mean that I make as reasonable (and pointed as well as funny, if I can manage it) of a comment as I can muster, downvote a few things, and leave. This isn’t due to some vague hope that the asshole I’m responding to will suddenly have a change of heart thanks to a single comment, it’s so that the kids following along at home know that the opinions they’re reading are, at the very least, not quite unanimous.

Talking About Unwanted Attention & Harassment Differently

May 22, 2013 Eli Heinadating, friends, friendzone, harassment, nice guys, sex, sexual harassment11 Comments

Included in yesterday’s Quickies is a link addressing the internet-infamous phenomenon of the Nice Guy. The clever piece turned the narrative of the Nice Guy around and humorously expressed female frustration with the “Girlfriend Zone.” Earlier, more crude versions call it the “Fuck Zone.”

I understand that it’s meant to be a flip of the classic “Friend Zone” (or even “Ladder Theory”) narrative and a criticism of the “Nice Guy” mentality. These are all things I can certainly get behind. At the same time, I’m not certain that complaints about the single-mindedness of men, no matter how hilariously-worded and -framed said complaints might be, are the best way to criticize sexual entitlement. Not only do such notions demean men, they also belittle women who are not targeted for sexual attention.

As a single college student, I got to hear the “Nice Guys” in my life complain about how there were just no women around to date or fuck since all women led them along as “friends” (all while looking right at me, the adorably clueless jerks). To exacerbate matters, the clubs I joined, hobbies in which I engaged, social groups I helped to form, and major whose classes I most attended were all widely reputed to be, in cissexist language, “sausage-fests.” Indeed, the mention of any of those male-dominated groups in the presence of a woman or more socially-aware man often solicited a derisive snort and a warning that, as one of the few girls, I would be relentlessly pursued by desperate young men.

Confused, I watched as the few other girls in each of the aforementioned groups dealt with their particular lovesick swains while no one seemed to notice that I was also a girl. To this day, I’m more than a little confused by why things went the way that they did. All that I know is that I was not mobbed by male “friends” secretly hoping to put in just the right amount of kindness coins that would lead to sex.

In terms of harassment, women are warned by other women and well-meaning men that they should be on their guard whenever they join groups with skewed gender ratios. I was certainly so warned when it came to secular groups of all stripes, only to find myself the target of straight-up sexism rather than pick-up lines.

All this can leave women who tend not to be targeted by non-platonic male attention (positive or negative) with an odd sense of resentment. It was, for example, incredibly hard for me to be sympathetic with women complaining about how much harassment they experience when they issue universally-worded (but clearly not universally-applicable) warnings. Instead of feeling sympathy for their mistreatment, I would feel annoyed at their thoughtless overlooking of my femaleness. I had to fight the urge to think of them as somehow allied with their harassers in their shared inability to acknowledge the fact that I am also a woman.

Ditto for the exclamations of “Oh my glob, you didn’t know that [insert name here] is creepy! Ha! Duh, he’s a creeper!” All that the mocking of a woman who haven’t realized that a certain man has a reputation accomplishes is to point out that he hasn’t harassed her. There are better ways to potentially warn someone than to single them out as undesirable to someone (albeit a “creeper”). Mention that he has a reputation for lechery, perhaps, instead of declaring that he hits on all girls.

The same applies to situations where the sexual attention is wanted. I’ve been turned down by more than a few men for everything from a casual coffee date to a vacation fling. I’m sure any woman could find a man to whom she is attracted but who would reject her advances. Men should have the right to say no and be selective and women should be able to hear “no” from a man without being utterly crushed. It’s hard for a woman to not to be crushed by a “no” from a man when society informs her that men are desperate for any female attention.

Less personally and more philosophically, calling more attention to men who want sex with women who want platonic friendship, even from the point of view of the woman, reinforces the ridiculous Mars-Venus mentality. Why not attack the problem at its root by challenging patriarchal notions of entitlement to women, differentiating between entitled sexual aggression and non-threatening expressions of desire, reiterating that yes means yes and no means no, and combating the “he’s a stud, she’s a slut” thinking that makes it difficult for men to say no and women to say yes?

Ceasing the use of sweeping language with regards to women as recipients of sexual attention, wanted or unwanted, would lead to more good and less harm than discussing sexism in a way that invalidates the femininity of women who are unappealing to Nice Guys and/or harassers.

Why I Will Always & Forever Read the Comments

May 21, 2013 Eli Heinareddit, the Internet14 Comments

Lately, it seems that I can’t turn anywhere on the Internet without coming across statuses, memes, and even entire Twitter accounts dedicated to anti-comment sentiment. People repeat the refrain over and over: don’t read the comments. While I understand that reading and engaging with the comments can be incredibly exhausting and that not everyone is up for the task, I am troubled by the active discouraging of people who want to engage from engaging if they so choose.

I am going to use the above meme to illustrate what I find to be dismissive and dangerous about the “just don’t deal with the comments” argument. The meme embodies exactly what is wrong with the sentiments expressed by those who keep telling everyone to never engage commenters. Again, I am not addressing those who feel better off with the choice to not engage, but those who believe that no one should engage, that engagement is an utterly unworthy goal and a waste of time.

First of all, such thinking divides people along very questionable lines. To call on people to divide the world into “haters/”jerks” (i.e. people who aren’t worth engaging) and the rest of us, (i.e. who are worth engaging) is to foster rather knee-jerk assessments of people. After all, isn’t part of the reason why “the comments” as a whole are so bad is that we’ve forgotten that it’s another human being at the other end making said comments? How exactly is stooping to the bad-comment-maker’s level and dehumanizing them going to encourage them to humanize others?

Secondly, it assumes that people who say terrible things in the comments are either commenting in bad faith or with completely unshakable certainty in the terrible beliefs they are expressing.

If someone really is commenting in bad faith, allowing their comment to stand without a peep in the way of disagreement can serve as unintentional validation. The audience following along at home can readily assume, at the very least, that everyone is okay with what was expressed. Worse, they might assume that the opinion is not only valid but also representative and acceptable. Who is really that gullible, you ask? How about children, or adults who, for whatever reason, are socially isolated?

If someone’s comment reflects a sincerely horrible belief, why do we assume that they cannot be “whispered” to? How many of us can claim that we have never held an incorrect view, one that we eventually changed thanks to being exposed to new evidence and arguments? Heck, how many of us can confidently assert that we will never eventually change a current belief because it will turn out to be wrong? We all have believed, said, and done things of which, in hindsight, we are properly ashamed. We are currently chagrined at their memory because at some point, something that someone said got to us in some way and led us to our currently reformed states. Sure, a single comment is unlikely to change someone’s worldview, but to aim for such an improbable end is unrealistic in the first place.

Commenting is, in this way, like debating a theist. You don’t do it expecting someone to instantly declare to you that they agree with you and are ready to fully renounce their past views. Instead, you’re calling on your opponent and their sympathizers in the audience to examine their views more closely. Furthermore, you’re debating more for the benefit of the doubters in your audience than in the hopes of your opponent recanting.

Lastly, and most importantly, enforcing disengagement from the comments allows the very people anti-comment types brand “haters” and “jerks” to win the Internet. It becomes their space to spew their bile in a completely unchecked fashion. This is especially true when people advise others to not only refrain from reading the comments, but also to steer entirely clear of certain parts of the Internet. The logic goes something like this: “everybody knows” that YouTube comments, all default subreddits, etc. are “bad,” so just don’t go there. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. All it does is make it easy to avoid the ugliness of society. It doesn’t solve anything to allow assholes to reign unchecked on mainstream, popular websites. In the case of YouTube comments, that particular video site is the second most popular search engine in the world. That means that most people are going to use it at some point; at least some of them might look below the videos they are viewing and see what’s been posted there. As for Reddit, is it not troubling that the default subreddits there, i.e. the most popular by definition, are such cesspools? Are we really going to let what amounts to the public square of the Internet be overrun by vileness?

Of course, it pays to be selective about where we choose to engage and none is obligated to engage. All I ask is that those who choose not to engage quit pretending that any and all engagement is foolish, futile, or naive. Their personal reasons for not engaging do not erase the social need for engagement, and those of us who can and want do it ought to do it whenever possible.

If we silence ourselves, we’ve already lost.

How to Stop Patronizing Your Fat Friend: Self-Loathing Edition

May 20, 2013 Eli Heinabody image, fat, fat acceptance, fat phobia, HAES29 Comments

Trigger Warning for Body Image Issues and Eating Disorders

So you’ve stopped making the political into the personal when it comes to your fat friend. That’s awesome! Thank you so much for hearing what your fat friend has to say rather than your own internalized assumptions about her feelings.

“But sometimes,” you tentatively begin, “I hear her actually hating on herself. I hear her call herself worthless, ugly, and so on. What should I do then?”

Definitely, definitely don’t tell her to just love herself, ignore the “haters,” or otherwise pretend that your assessment of her attractiveness will make it all okay.

In addition to robbing us of our ability to discuss that which affects us, telling fat women to self-love away anti-fat bias asks quite a lot of us. Are we just supposed to turn ourselves into rubber and all of the fat-haters into glue? Ignore everything that we happen to see or overhear? Pretend that everything that is said to us was never uttered?

I’ve worked my ass off to feel good about myself but I have my down moments. A head-pat that frizzes up my carefully-arranged hair and a “you should give yourself more credit, hun” doesn’t help me in those moments. All the self-given credit in the world won’t change the fact that sizeism is, indeed, A Thing, and that my experiences are real. One person’s individual feelings doesn’t exactly change all of my external experiences.

The relentlessness of the message that fat women are repulsive means that fat women have to grow quite a thick skin in order to be confident at all. To make matters worse, confidence in fat women is often mocked and derided even more than their fatness is. One person’s declaration that a particular fat woman isn’t “actually fat,” that she is “proportional,” that she is worthy and beautiful, won’t magically make all that disappear.

What to do about your fat friend, then?

If she mentions any kind of positive feelings towards her body, you should be damn proud of her. She has managed to resist a pretty incessant message in favor of being happy with herself and living a full life. Direct some kudos her way.

On the flip side, if she mentions anxieties about her body, blaming her for not being confident enough is a rather jerkface move. Think about just how hard she would have to work to never once internalize the message she’s constantly being force-fed. Give her some of that credit you think she isn’t giving herself in her moments of self-hate and refrain from blaming her. Instead, offer the truth: that you feel she’s a worthwhile person and that you’re not sure what you can do to help her feel better, so until she indicates otherwise, you will offer a friendly ear, sympathetic murmurs, and a hug if she wants one.

How to Stop Patronizing Your Fat Friend: Fatphobia Edition

May 16, 2013 Eli Heinabody image, fat, fat acceptance, fat phobia, HAES10 Comments

Trigger Warning for Body Image Issues and Eating Disorders

Ah, fat — that charged, overloaded, connotation-carrying word. There is a lot I could say about the word, but for the sake of my point, let us fast-forward past the debates over fat-shaming, Health at Every Size, thin privilege, BMI, and so on. Let us make even more haste as we zoom right past people who simply hate fat people for whatever (or no real) reason.

Oh, and for the love of all that is creamy and delicious, let me acknowledge that I am aware that thin women face incredible amounts of body-shame, body image issues, and lookism as well. My discussing issues related specifically to being a fat woman does not invalidate thin women’s problems and pain. As a lifelong fattie, I simply cannot speak for them.

I want to focus on the well-meaning friends, relatives, and lovers of fat people who, in their haste to reassure the people they care about, can’t see the difference between discussions regarding external reality versus talk about self-image.

Over and over again, well-meaning people take away fat women’s ability to discuss the issues that affect them. Often, when a fat woman dares to mention anti-fat bigotry in society, she is told that she should “accept herself” or some variation of that sentiment thereof. Alternately, she might be told that the person in question finds her attractive. What happens is that the assumption that all fat women need to be cheered up and reassured takes precedence over anything the fat woman in question is actually saying.

Some of the most confident, self-assured ladies I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering are lectured about self-esteem and self-acceptance instead of having their thoughts acknowledged when they speak of anti-fat bias. How incredibly condescending it is to insist that someone is talking about personal sadness when they are describing the reality of their lived experiences. How disappointing it is to the lady in question to find that others’ perceptions of her self-image automatically override the words coming out of her mouth.*

Although I’ve lost a decent amount of weight in the past 18 months, I still firmly qualify as fat, especially here in sunny, superficial Southern California. After years of self-loathing followed by years of working on my self-image issues, I’ve come to a few conclusions, conclusions about which I speak only using the most carefully-curated of words. No matter how much I try to denote exactly what I’m saying, I still get well-meaning but wholly misguided people attempting to soothe me where I needed no comfort in the first place. Worse, their focus on what they perceive to be the issue, i.e. my self-image, robs me of the power to talk about a real issue that affects me, i.e. fat-hate.

I do not think that I am ugly. Au contraire. Why would I spend so much time and effort on buying fun clothing, experimenting with make-up and hair products, and hunting down cute shoes that fit my size 10-11 wide feet — because I think I’m not worth looking at?

Ha.

There was certainly a time when I thought I wasn’t worth much at all. I shrouded myself in dowdy clothing and applied overly-thick black lines around my eyes, hoping to bring attention to what I thought was my only good feature. That time is well behind me, thank you very much, and I’d like to be treated as the woman I am, not the self-loathing girl I once was.

Though the personal is often political, the political is not always personal.

So if I don’t think I’m ugly, why bring up fat hate? call myself fat or a fattie? mention anti-fat bigotry that has been hurled in my direction?

As good as I feel about myself most of the time, that I don’t live in denial of fat-hate doesn’t mean that I think of myself as unattractive, it means I acknowledge my reality and my lived experiences. I direct attention to society’s hatred of fat people for the exact same reasons that I clamor for attention for unfair discrimination of any kind: in the hopes that people will recognize what they’re doing and, you know, work to change it.

I’m talking not about any perceived ugliness in myself, I’m talking about how ugly society can be.

So, how exactly can you stop patronizing your fat relative, friend, or lover when she speaks of that kind of ugliness? If she mentions society’s shitty treatment of her, you can stop denying her experiences and instead say, “Wow, that is really shitty!” Even better, when you see shitty behavior, you can call it out or at least not participate in it.

* If she is actually hating on herself, that’s a different matter, one to be addressed in a future post.

Tiger Moms: Harsh Parenting, Harsh Outcomes

May 15, 2013 Eli Heinaasian, asian-american, depression, suicide3 Comments

Trigger Warning for Suicide, Self-Harm, and Depression

Remember Amy Chua, the woman who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother but ended up singing The Siren Song of the Back-Pedaler? Over two years after the publishing of her memoir and the explosion surrounding it, her name is passing lips again thanks to Slate reporting on pertinent research regarding Asian-American parenting styles:

Since “tigers” in Kim’s study scored highly on the shaming practice believed more common among Asian-Americans, it seems that, pre-Chua at least, tiger parenting would be less common among whites. (The moms rated themselves more highly on shaming than even their kids, suggesting tiger moms—like Chua, who recounted such instances in her best-seller—feel no shame in their shaming)

And although Chua presented her own children as Exhibit A of why her parenting style works, Kim said, “Our data shows Tiger parenting produces the opposite effect. Not just the general public but Asian-American parents have adopted this idea that if I’m a tiger parent, my kids will be whizzes like Chua’s kids. Unfortunately, tiger children’s GPA’s and depressive symptoms are similar to those whose parents who are very harsh.

I cannot express how glad I am that the study took a look at depressive symptoms. This is due to the unhappy facts about the suicide rates among young US-born Asian-American women.

According to Dr. Elizabeth Noh:

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Asian American women, ages 15-24.

Asian American women, ages 15-24 and over 65, have the highest female suicide rates across all racial/ethnic groups.

Asian American adolescent girls (grades 5-12) demonstrate the highest rates of depression across both race/ethnicity and gender.

“Model minority” expectations and family pressures often are cited as factors of suicide.

I can attest to this. As a college student, I attended a support group by and for Asian-American women where we discussed the real-life, non-theoretical intersection of race, class, and gender that affected our everyday lives; the struggles that no one knew lurked behind the straightened-teeth smiles and college admission letters; the never-ending battle to please just about everyone in our filial, social, academic, and professional lives.

Every one of us, by virtue of being in that room, were highly successful students attending a relatively highly-ranked school. Not one of us had passed our teenage years without major suicidal ideation and depressive episodes.

It really does come down to this: are parents like Amy Chua willing to sacrifice some of their daughters so that the ones who survive become piano prodigies and Harvard graduates?

Though the notion that tigresses eat their young is mostly an urban legend, I suppose self-described tiger moms have taken the old quote to heart.

Politeness as Manipulation: Ray Comfort

May 9, 2013 Eli Heinabanana, christianity, darwin, evolution, ray comfort4 Comments

In addition to helping fund-raise for the Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference this year, I’ve been a volunteer for the con since its first year and spoke there last year. People who knew I was there asked me if I ran into Ray Comfort. When I’ve told them that I left during the dinner break, they have lamented the fact that I missed out on encountering the infamous Banana Man (he doesn’t like talking about that particular yellow, phallic fruit anymore).

The truth of the matter is that I’m incredibly glad that I left before I was subjected to that man’s smug mug yet again.

First of all, encountering him isn’t some super rare occurrence that I missed out on. Ray Comfort is not a hard man to find. If you want to run into him, just hit up the pier at Huntington Beach, CA on Saturday. He’s a Southern California fixture, not some retiring fellow who only makes rare appearances.

Secondly, while I know that some people get off on dealing with rabid ranting fundies, I don’t. Back when I wore a headscarf, I was often accosted by Christians. Every word they chose to use with me dripped of condescending assumptions: that my father beat me into submission, that I was forced to cover, that I didn’t know English, that I knew nothing of Jesus or the Bible. While it did afford me a bit of smug satisfaction to school them, I would have preferred to have been left alone. Post-deconversion, I was subjected to the same treatment if they happened to read my looks as “Muslim” or hear me speak of my Muslim past.

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As a student, I did counter-protest Brother Jed as well as the Big Christian Sign Guys (the same people who once protested a fundraiser for orphans that I attended, not even kidding). However, what I enjoyed about that was not dealing with fundies, it was representing the majority opinion of the UC Irvine student body (i.e. that sign-waving, bile-spewing fundies are horrible people) as well as showing others that atheists aren’t just some force of negativity in the world.

Last, but not least, the way most atheists talk about Ray Comfort betrays both how bad of a person he is and how skewed I sometimes find other atheists’ priorities to be.

In my estimation, Ray Comfort is a bad person, period. The first time I met him, he attended an Orange County Atheists meeting. At the time, I was still laying low as an atheist, so I sat at the table designated for those who did not want to be recorded for his website. He ended up paying for dinner (which annoyed me since I was broke at the time and had only ordered an iced tea in anticipation of having to pony up for the bill). The glow from his having fed us faded quickly as soon as I caught wind of his blog post on the matter, where he admits to having bought us food to shut us up. In my humble opinion, what was expressed was not the speech or attitude of a sincerely nice person.

Upon further research, I discovered his penchant for, ahem, creative editing, which knowledge later served me quite well. I attended Richard Dawkins’s talk at CalTech. Guess who was waiting, but without a ticket, along with the rest of the queue?

All the atheists in line were eager to engage with Ray Comfort. They, like many, thought it was a unique experience to have the chance to interact with the viral, hilarious Banana Man. I knew better and ran about the queue, calmly but firmly warning people them that he was in the habit of recording people and then selectively editing the video so that they look confused, contradictory, and otherwise wrong.

His response was to confront me with a holler of “You atheists make yourselves look stupid!” Suddenly, a video camera was pointing in my face and the Banana Man was accosting me with questions. I refused to be recorded but he continued his verbal assault. Our “conversation” mostly consisted of him rudely throwing non-sequiturs and insults at me, interrupting me, and insisting that I was a deluded fool. I’m inclined to think his butthurt over my spoiling his dishonest fun at the expense of atheists revealed his true nature: smug, self-righteous, and unkind to anyone who doesn’t play along with his tricks.

Later events corroborated this assessment. When he caught wind that the atheists of UC Irvine were ready with banana-shaped debunking bookmarks for his doctored copies of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, he preempted his set schedule and came to campus early, then spun the story as if it were one featuring a bunch of angry atheists attacking him.

I don’t care how many gift baskets he sends to PZ, how many atheist meals he bankrolls, or how “nice” a fellow other atheists insist that he is, Ray Comfort will always be an asshole to me, not that super duper hilarious guy from YouTube. He’s playing atheists and other pro-evolution folks quite skillfully with his faux-niceness, and most of us have fallen for it. It’s about time we stopped.

Once more, with feeling: Ray Comfort’s “niceness” is a tool wielded by a complete tool of a man who will craftily edit even the most eloquent pro-evolution argument into a portrait of a bumbling fool, meeting him is no big deal since he’s publicly available every weekend, and he is only buying you food so that you’ll shut the hell up.

What Feminism Definitely Doesn’t Look Like

May 1, 2013 Eli Heinaabuse, Domestic violence, gender, sexism7 Comments

I once wrote about what I call fauxminism, poking fun at “empowered” women who do little to nothing for (or even who actually hinder) other women’s choices and freedom.

That’s one thing. This is another thing, entirely.

Recently, I had the distinct displeasure of overhearing two men laugh it up over domestic abuse. As it really wasn’t my conversation and I was in far from the right situation to say anything, I was mostly silent as I listened. I learned that, to them, years of abuse at the hands of his wife rendered a man laughable, not pitiable.

The battle cry of the Men’s Rights Activist or any other breed of anti-feminist is the oft-mocked “but what about teh menz?” That particular question is posed whenever anyone dares to say anything uncritical about feminism. The frustration that many feminists feel regarding that particular derailment is, more often than not, misunderstood as a dismissal and/or trivialization of primarily male-related concerns. This leads to the belief that feminists are female supremacists (feminazis or even femi-stasi, sometimes) who want to oppress men or at least ignore men’s concerns. Taken further, the claim becomes that said problems are somehow caused by feminism.

Setting the misconstruing of feminist aims aside, let us admit a rather painful truth. To blame feminism for the mainstream gender status quo is to attribute way more ideological success to it than it has actually attained. Let us also set aside the fact that most feminists are against all oppressive gender norms and how many feminists are actively working against gender-based oppression of all kinds.

Where do oppressive gender norms for men originate?

There is no question that oppressive gender norms for women existed prior to feminism. Indeed, feminism arose in response to said norms, so to argue otherwise would be more than somewhat disingenuous. In this case, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander: gender norms for men existed prior to feminism. Additionally, so did the effects that gender norms for women had, and continue to have, on men.

Now, let us consider the matter of female-on-male domestic violence. The men I heard making a mockery of a fellow man’s abuse at the hands of his wife were not feminists. I do not say this in judgment of them or their beliefs, I say this with the knowledge that they mock and oppose feminism and say misogynistic things with alarming frequency and audacity.

This is why the allegation that feminism is to blame for female-on-male abuse, or at least its trivialization, is not only untrue but also utterly infuriating. Sexists enforce the gender binary for women — and for men. In their minds, women are weak and inferior to men, therefore abuse by a woman upon a man can’t be serious. That is why they can howl with laughter so shamelessly without a second thought as to the harm being done to a fellow human being.

Similarly, when it comes to women, the “you go girl” attitude towards female abuse of men isn’t exactly a gender-radical, feminist one. In fact, it fits quite neatly into traditional narratives with regards to inter-gender relations. To wit: “He must be cheating on her!”, “she can’t really hurt him,” and so on, ad nauseum.

Although I know I will be accused of doing so within the next 72 hours (if not sooner) because I am not afraid to say that I am a feminist, endorsing female-driven abuse of men isn’t what feminism looks like. Two man espousing an utterly cavalier attitude towards domestic abuse isn’t what feminism looks like. My hands shaking in anger at two men’s cavalier attitude towards domestic violence so hard that I can barely type this?

That’s what feminism fucking looks like.

EDIT (5/5/13): See comment from hierophant as to why I’ve removed a link.

Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: On Meeting Audacity with Audacity

April 23, 2013 Eli HeinaCall to action, sexual harassment7 Comments

Note: I am aware that harassment crosses all kinds of gender lines. I have known men who are harassed by women in the workplace and am sickened that their charges are not taken seriously. Below, I am speaking from my personal experience as a woman who gets harassed by men. Though I fully acknowledge they exist and do my best to speak up when I can against those who trivialize their plight, I cannot speak for those men who are harassed by women.

One of the more active ways to cause change is to make actions so costly to those who perpetuate them that the harms outweigh the benefits for them. As most people are not monsters, simply creatures of both habit and opportunity, they will not continue doing something that is more trouble than it’s worth to them.

Enter the Hollaback! movement and similar movement to end street harassment. Their aims are, for the most part, to enforce laws already on the books prohibiting sexual assault: for the police to take such charges seriously and prosecute those whose actions make the daily lives of girls and women so much more difficult. The efforts made have been successful both in terms of leading to more convictions and in changing the culture around street harassment. Where many girls and women have walked in fear and shame, they have begun to more confidently assert their right to walk in the world without feeling unsafe.

As a dweller mostly of suburban spaces myself, I never accepted the status quo in cities, that I was to somehow expect and accept harassment. Before I had even once walked around as an unveiled young woman in a city, I was a supporter of Hollaback. At no point, then, had I ever been used to the idea that I should always feel unsafe in my daily life. Not for me was the silent complicity taught to me by both my peculiar upbringing and by society as a whole, oh no: I fought back. I taught those street harassers what was what — that I was not a piece of meat to torment for their sick amusement, that women have the right to live our lives in peace, that their petty exercise of power did not render me powerless.

Then, as so often happens, I realized that I had a blind spot, one far more applicable to my suburban lifestyle: men at work.

I’m not talking about the stereotypical leering construction workers, although they can and do fall under this category. I speak of men who, under the auspices of employment, use their paid time to harass women. It occurred to me that I could easily raise the social cost of being a jerkface to women while at work. While men on the street have all the right to say what they want to a woman as long as they do nothing physical, employees are usually obligated by their employment to be professional. Why not enforce those obligations?

This might seem harsh to some. Is it really fair to cause a man to be professionally disciplined or even to lose his job because of some unprofessional conduct? Given the sheer audacity of using paid employment time to sexually harass women in crass fashion, I would say so. Personally, it bothers me that I have unemployed, underemployed, and nervously-employed friends while disgusting jerks get to feel so confident in their employment that they harass me when I’m a customer. Economic times being what they are, there is likely a queue of at least half a dozen eager and smiling job applicants lined up behind every complacently-employed harasser. If they feel brave enough to harass me while on the clock, I can be brave enough to report just how well they are representing their employers to the appropriate authorities.

This revelation did not occur to me in an academic or online context, but after a specific incident. I’d suddenly had enough of being treated like a piece of meat by people paid for the time that they were spending harassing me. I began affecting them in a way that they understand: in the wallets. I’ve taken to meeting their audacity with my own and hitting them exactly where it hurts.

I express this not to pressure less bold or privileged women into action, but in the hopes of waking up others capable of such action who have drowsed away on the matter for all too long. It is not okay for someone who is acting in a professional context to treat you so unprofessionally, and unlike in the case of street harassment, you have recourse that likely won’t affect you much at all beyond the negligible amount of time it takes to write down a name, find a manager, and have a conversation.

Let’s make it harder for harassers to get paid time to do their dirty deeds.

Heinous Dealings

Here to disrupt your narrative.