Pharyngulating Hitchens

Publishers Weekly is having a meaningless poll to pick the best book of 2011. I think the choice in this list is kind of obvious — everyone else can chime in with your preferences.

Vote for the best book of 2011

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens 34.67%

Other: 17.59%

After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh 16.08%

Bossypants by Tina Fey 9.05%

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett 8.54%

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock 5.03%

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides 4.52%

There but for the by Ali Smith 2.01%

Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie 1.51%

One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina 1.01%

Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson 0%

I’m not proud of the state of Minnesota

Although it is nice of this video to highlight the local bigots for us.

You can tell the producers of the video really, really care about communities outside of Minneapolis/St Paul by the way they care about getting the details right…like how to spell “Willmar”. (It’s a local thing: Minnesota is a state divided into the one big metropolitan area and the rural so-called ‘outstate’ region, which often feels neglected and put upon by the big city. And it’s not spelled “Wilmer”.)

Vote NO on the wretched Minnesota marriage amendment.

(via Joe. My. God.)

What have the students been up to this week?

It’s another update on the bloggin’ students in my Neuroscience course, and what they’ve been thinking about.

They all welcome visits and comments!

(Also on FtB)

Oh, those wacky Catholics

It’s happening in Minnesota again. The church is peddling nonsense, and people are believing it. Catholic congregants are finding corpses hidden inside the church. Oh, wait…not corpses. Crackers.

In recent weeks, parishioners at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Hastings have approached their pastor, Rev. Jim Perkl, “heartbroken and with tears in their eyes,” he says.

The cause of such sadness? The discovery of communion hosts found between the pages of about 30 hymnals in the pews. Catholics believe the communion wafer becomes the actual body of Jesus once it’s consecrated during mass.

Thank you, priestly abusers, for once again finding a way to wring pain out of your parishioners lives, all over little pieces of bread. This behavior is childish and ridiculous.

Although it’s unknown whether these wafers were consecrated, the incident has led Perkl and the Twin Cities Archdiocese to wonder: Is the church doing enough to emphasize the sacredness of the host?

The church is doing too much. It’s not sacred, it’s a CRACKER.

What? It’s not just Catholic priests?

The Penn State football scandal is just sickening. One of the coaching staff, Jerry Sandusky, has a long history of sexually abusing children, and the rest of the staff were apparently baffled about what to do. You report the incidents to the police, you dummies.

A Penn State graduate assistant coach shows up at the football locker room unexpectedly, and hears slapping noises from the shower. Here’s what the report said:

“As the graduate assistant put the sneakers in his locker, he looked into the shower. He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky.”

The assistant fled in fear and confusion. Much the same way a janitor fled after allegedly witnessing Sandusky engaged in a sexual act in the showers with a “young boy” — Victim 8, later described in the report as being “between the ages of 11 and 13.”

Now it’s blowing up into a major scandal involving more than just the child rapist because all these clueless guys had evidence of child rape going on, and couldn’t figure out that this was both a crime and an offense against human decency, and that it demanded immediate strong action. Action more than just talking among themselves.

I’m getting the impression that this is what happens when you’ve got an off-balance, all-male culture (and I suspect that an all-female culture would also be off-balance and pathological in other ways). Both the Catholic priesthood and football coaching are male preserves, which serves to both attract individuals with odd proclivities and generates a kind of sexual tribalism that allows them to close ranks unthinkingly to protect their own.

Now I’m wondering even more about the military. I think the women who have struggled to crack into that field have a few stories about their refractory nature, too.

Being a woman on the internet

It’s like an avalanche. I’ve heard women speaking out about the online abuse they receive for years, but suddenly, it’s as if it has media traction, and more and more women are coming out to denounce the anti-woman hate speech that seems to be common currency on the internet. Laurie Penny, Helen Lewis Hasteley, Kate Smurthwaite, and now a profile of multiple female online writers all tell the same story: there’s a misogyny epidemic on the net. Ophelia Benson, who gets her share of the abuse too, highlights their stories.

I’m a guy who also gets a fair number of abusive emails — I even have a hobby of posting some of them now and then on the web — but there’s a qualitative difference to what I see. I get death threats regularly, but they’re usually of the form “you should get [violent fate] for [hating god, violating crackers, being liberal]”; I don’t get threats of the form, “[Man], I need to [crude sexual assault] you”. As a man, I can get threats for speaking against some cherished dogma, which I can sort of halfway understand, but I don’t get the threats for just being of my sex and speaking out, period.

I also don’t get much in the way of sexual threats, except for one telling class of insults: the ones that accuse me of being a woman. Vox Day is one of the milder practitioners of this habit: he refers to me as “Pharyngurl”, because after all, it’s demeaning to just reference me as a woman. I’ve had other, nastier messages where I’ve been called a “bitch” and threatened with anal rape, for instance; it’s as if they are first metaphorically translating me into a female so they can then really degrade me thoroughly.

So I get a faint echo of the female experience, and it’s utterly repulsive. As we’re beginning to see as more and more women speak out, the wretchedness is being more thoroughly exposed.

What’s also dismaying is that I once would have thought that people of my ideological stripe, you know, those all-inclusive egalitarian liberals and the rational, objective atheists, wouldn’t be guilty of such anti-woman attitudes. The other guys are the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing thugs, right? But no — read about Caroline Farrow, a more conservative Catholic blogger — she gets five sexually threatening emails a day! And of course the atheist community in general has experienced some turmoil in the last few months over the revelation that there are openly misogynistic creatures in our ranks.

It’s dismaying. I don’t know what to do, other than to personally reject the attitudes of the people who treat women as lesser beings. I also hope the media doesn’t let attention to this problem flag. I’m sure it’s all going to be major topic at the Women in Secularism conference in May, and I hope journalists are paying attention — there will be some powerful stories coming out of that event. They shouldn’t miss it. As is often the case, an important first step in correcting an injustice is to first shine a light on it.

One other datum: over the years, I’ve had an actual decline in threats. Part of it is because the one event that prompted the most hateful letters, the cracker desecration, has receded into the past. But I think a contributing factor has also been my willingness to post the crazy email, so everyone can point and laugh at it (ridicule really does work), and because I’ve been open about my willingness to expose patent death threats with full source information. The unfortunate side-effect is that my inbox has gotten slightly less weird, the good side is that it’s also gotten slightly less hostile. When women publicize the fact that scum-sucking bottom feeders write the kind of crap they get, it’s going to make the scum-sucking bottom feeders more cautious.

Why I am an atheist – Leslie Klug

I am an atheist because the god stories I was raised with (Protestant Christianity) were so contrived. The story of Christ having to live here as a man, be persecuted for his philosophy, tortured and killed, then resurrected and returning to heaven just so we, his creation, could go to heaven is ridiculous.

If there is a god and he’d have periodic communication with humanity explaining the rules for entry into heaven, I’d go along with it. Asking me to believe a multi-thousands of years old collection of books which claim there is a god is just not going to do it for me. On top of it, this book collection (Bible) tells stories which are supernatural (talking snakes, great flood, parting of the sea) which go against the “rules” of the natural world which this god was supposed to have created.

It would take me multiple pages to describe all the scientific evidence against a creator and I am not even a scientist. I don’t get comfort from stories. I get comfort from facts.

Leslie Klug
United States