Why aren’t there more women atheists? According to Harris, because atheism lacks that estrogen vibe.
I also asked Harris at the event why the vast majority of atheists — and many of those who buy his books — are male, a topic which has prompted some to raise questions of sexism in the atheist community. Harris’ answer was both silly and then provocative.
It can only be attributed to my “overwhelming lack of sex appeal,” he said to huge laughter.
“I think it may have to do with my personal slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people..People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”
But…but…I seem to know an awful lot of atheist women — I would question the premise of the question, that the vast majority of atheists are male, and suggest instead that what we have instead is a great many loud male atheists who are oblivious to the women who are eager to participate in the movement, or were eager, before they discovered all the asshats who are apparently rendered oblivious by testosterone poisoning.
Critical thinking is not intrinsically male.
As the Cuttlefish explains, you could try looking around places like Freethoughtblogs and discover that there are a great many atheist women, and atheist men who don’t fit Harris’s model of atheists lacking in coherence or ‘nurturing’, that he misses when he goes looking for them in the mirror.
Or maybe we should consider Heina’s interpretation, that he’s deploring the lack of atheist-branded sex toys. Makes about as much sense.
PZ:
You chose a great weekend to get away. Shermer, Dawkins, and now Harris. A fucked up trifecta of assholery.
Really?
I’d love to see Harris come here and go a few rounds with many of the women that post at Pharyngula, or FtB in general. “Critical Posture” is a male thing huh? Fuck. I knew he was a raging Islamophobe, but I didn’t know he was an unrepentant sexist douchemaggott.
Nurture this
(… &$%#..)
fuk the internets
>You chose a great weekend to get away. Shermer, Dawkins, and now Harris. A fucked up trifecta of assholery
Don’t forget thunderf00t.
Oh yes, we’ve all forgotten about that dude thankfully. Mister Logic and Reason who hasn’t a clue about either when it comes to this topic.
Sam continues to disappoint… I wish I could say I’m surprised, but I am not. Dawkins and Harris seem to be competing to outdo the misogyny of the late Christopher Hitchens. I dare say that they have probably succeeded.
psycholist @4:
I didn’t include Thunderf00t largely bc I never viewed him as a big, respectable name in the atheist movement. Sure he had some popularity as a Vlogger, but I don’t think he was ever at the level of those three. Not to mention we’ve seen a recent surge in shittiness from Dawkins, Harris, and Shermer (hence the 3 open threads PZ has about them).
Make no mistake though, I think he’s a detriment to the movement, and I think the same of the other three fuckers.
Harris, the sensitive atheist-Buddhist who meditates, still can’t grasp that women are whole human individuals. He reduces us to a small set of cartoonish qualities.
Why is it that I can’t tell the difference between what guy atheists, Buddhists, Christian preachers or Islamic clerics believe when it comes to women’s capabilities or qualities? I mean, yeah, Harris is anti-mutilating girls and other religious-motivated violence against women, so he obviously deserves a gigantic cookie for that..but how exactly is he different from the religious groups who believe in “separate spheres” and that men are meant to be leaders and thinkers, and women are meant to be nurturing baby-making, penis homes?
PZ, you sure you didn’t rent that beard? :)
So, Sam Harris is saying that atheism is irrelevant to half of the human race? Way to promote your values, champ.
@Tony #6.
The SSA I was once a part of toyed with the idea of inviting him to speak about skepticism. There’s a good reason I no longer associate with that particular organization.
Tony @ 1
So who’s going to be the fourth horseman of the asspocalypse?
So, is Sam saying that men are more likely to accept criticism of their ideas than women are?
Meanwhile, back in reality…
I’m confused. I thought women were all over-emotional, argumentative, PMS-driven victimhood flouters who were destroying Sceptical Logicky Man-Rationalism™ with their emotional lady-brains.
umm. I meant flaunters not flouters, damnit
Indeed. Just look at Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins to illustrate this.
Daz @ 13:
You’re confusing Harris for Thunderf00t.
Harris simply thinks atheism is too much critical thinky for women and their pink, fluffy, nurturing, ladybrains.
Is it too much to ask to have leaders within the atheist movement who are actually capable of, I dunno, leadership?
Sven: Oh, there’s plenty of leadership. The kind of leadership that subjugates women, demonizes brown people, uses bluster and PR to dismiss facts in lieu of actual logic, and relies on imparting undue authority and requiring irrational levels of obedience to figures who are in control almost entirely due to a combination of luck and self-aggrandizement. It’s actually a very traditional form of leadership!
In any way. It’s stupid that the default is the idea that men are critical thinkers, but women can be, too! Nonsense. The nature of the system should lead everyone to expect that the most privileged culturally, economically, and politically will have various epistemic blocks; these positions are a cause of willful ignorance, false knowledge, and epistemic incompetence. The idea that I can dream of rising to the critical-thinking level of a…Sam Harris is laughable. There’s zero connection between “maleness” and critical thinking.
SC @19:
I’m sure you’re aiming a bit higher than that.
At least to Dawkins’ level :)
The funny thing is that he’d have almost — maybe — had a point if he’d been criticizing how society expects women to behave. It’s a little frustrating to see someone so close to saying something important only to have them repeat a sexist trope instead.
Oh…unfuckingbelievable. Takuni slolye sni huwimna iwaka. I’m with Chigau @ 3. Why not just say “Women. Yes, well, uteruses.” Harris a compleat assclam in smegmarmalade sauce.
SC:
To say the very least, given Harris’s inability to think critically on quite a few subjects.
Oh FFS. Did Harris offer an opinion on Larry Summers 2005 apologetics remarks about women in science?
I’d like to give Harris the benefit of the doubt, and ask him to reconsider his statement, substituting “science” for “atheism”, and ask him how that sounds, and ask him to reconsider his own opinion.
Did the next breath contain the words “shrill,” “castrating,” “harpy,” and “-nazi?”
roxchix @24:
You’re more generous than I am.
I won’t give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s an utter asshole. After I read his views on profiling Muslims in airports and realizing how deeply Islamophobic he is, I want nothing to do with him. The fact that he’s a sexist shitwit just adds to my disdain for him.
roxchix @ 24:
Women are underrepresented in STEM fields, so I don’t think that would work:
I can easily see him using that to justify the chilly climate women face in STEM fields.
As for giving him the benefit of the doubt? No. Too much of that has gone on already, while people like Dawkins continue to do active harm. Harris already holds reprehensible views, this is simply one more. You’d think the interviewer had asked how much of an asshole can you be?
They’re out there. I guess it depends on how you define “leader”.
I don’t consider things like TAM to actually be valuable to promoting atheism itself, and I don’t think a leader is someone who just writes a good book or two.
I think it’s the people that work every day to try and raise awareness of the underlying issues that are the “leaders” of this movement.
the people in the limelight?
sorry, don’t give a fuck.
I basically consider leaders to be people I choose to listen to because what they say makes sense most of the time.
I look back on the people that have influenced my thinking the most, and I find the people here on FTB to be those people.
not just the bloggers, but the commenters.
Jedibear @ 21: I was thinking the same thing. If he’d phrased it as a recognition of sexism in society then I’d be agreeing with him. But he turns into something intrinsic in women, which is just stupid.
That comes as much as a surprise as snow in January.
In Svalbard.
Arglebargle.
I…bleh. Sam Harris has always been the person for me that I’ve had the toughest time hearing about when he does/says shit like this. He was the first of the Four Horsemen I became aware of. I was kind of drawn to his sort of dry sense of humor. I remember watching a four person sort of debate between him and Michael Shermer and Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston. I remember laughing out loud at the expression of extravagant patience Harris would adopt whenever Chopra or Houston was talking. I wasn’t really expecting him to have anything intelligent to say on the subject if he was ever confronted directly with it but I was hoping he’d manage to avoid ever saying anything about it. Fuck.
Pete Shanks @8
Feel the quality, that’s none of your goat.
As for Harris … if being an atheist meant having to join some sort of club/group/whatever, and he was representative of the blokes in it, then yeah, what a surprise if women didn’t want to join. Nothing to do with his masterly ScepticBrane, which seems oddly deficient on any social issues where (correct me if I’m wrong) white straight dudes already have the upper hand. Everything to do with his being a sexist PoS, like two of the other Horses’ Arses.
OT Daz: love seeing your Molesworth avatar. Win. :)
Sam Harris is a hack on the same level as Stefan molyneaux and Ayn Rand. This guy has a philosophy degree and yet still wants to go at lengths talking about secular ethics when he should know better than most that ethics have been discussed without any religious influence before the religions of the east had any influence on western philosophy. And here he is spouting empty truisms about gender…. I guess his lack of self checking shouldn’t surprise me. What is it with these Internet gurus and their mysogyny?
The worst part of seeing the shit going on in your movement, is that I’m sure the exact same pattern will repeat here in a decade or so, once the religious lobby gets stronger. My own culture is drowning in machismo and gender essentialism, the kind that’s casually espoused by even the least religious.
Yeah… I’m not surprised by this, either…
Surprised that there are no comments on the original interview article. o_O
“I think it may have to do with my personal slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas.”
Coming from the ‘torture guy’, I think this is pretty rich!
F.O.
I have yet to see a coherent description of spirituality that doesn’t include religious, supernatural or isn’t an obvious holier than thou wankery.
(guess how classify Harris’ spirituality)
Siiiiiiiigh.
In the fight against irrationality and religious zealots you find it prudent to pick on Sam Harris. Good grief. How are we supposed to make any progress if you feel the need to attack Harris on the basis of that article. He’s one of the good guys, guys! If an honest an open defender of free speach can’t be allowed to make a few funny remarks and point out some of the wonderful differences between men and women, differences that make this short life on earth worth living, without basically being labeled a misogynist then we are indeed doomed. What’s next? You want to equalize the sodium/potassium gradient across the membrane as well?
ianmcs, are you suggesting that we don’t apply critical thinking to Sam Harris’s obviously poisonous ideas? Why not? If he were a religious fundie it would be OK with you?
Provide evidence that the remarks are funny, and were intended that way.
I think this comedy skit sums up the whole situation
no… In the fight against clueless misogynists Sam Harris chose to make himself a target. And a really obvious one at that.
he just needs a gun!
HORROR.
(wtf?)
wonderful differences….
that basically, according to Sam, prevent half the population from being involved in critical thinking itself?
fuck you.
no. really.
fuck.
you.
you’re doing far more damage to “the cause” than you can possibly know.
See, that skit was funny. Can’t prove it, though… Wow, nice congregation you have here, PZ. And no, critical posture does not equal the ability to think critically. This board is starting to sound like the ultra-left Swedish feminists homepage. If you want to honor your Scandinavian heritage, that certainly shouldn’t be the standards you’re aiming for.
Harris claims that critical thinking is really boys stuff, and demonstrates his unassailable rational basis for this position by… trotting out long discredited gender essentialist bigotry, and in the process is oblivious enough to claim;
It seems he is not critical enough of bad ideas to spot that the argument that women aren’t attracted to rationaism because pink fluffy ladybrains is not only a spectacularly bad idea that fails dismally to conform to reality, but is also a longstanding toxic basis for gendered oppression.
I can’t say I am exactly impressed by Harris’ supposedly elite skeptical skills, which apparently are all the product of his gentleman parts.
see anyone laughing here?
you seem to be eager to prove that by example. please, do continue.
Ichthyic @ 44;
The only thing that beats a bad misogynist with a gun is… ;-P
one with a bigger gun?
Nope, not funny either. Nor accurate, just pathetic.
I’m looking forward to having IanMcgruffMCS expound on his thesis of how everyone is just a critical poser but him.
I’m sure it will involve diffusion gradients and be worthy of a timecube rating!
I interpreted Harris’ comments slightly differently. I thought he was trying to say that in general women prefer a “coherence-building” i.e. more constructive approach to atheism and therefore tend to find his more strident (and sometimes obnoxious) approach to atheism.
What this argument misses is that the reason we have fewer women identifying as atheists is not due to any deficiency in women, it is due to deficiencies in those who are often (mistakenly) identified as atheist leaders.
ianmcs @ 40;
If we are going to oppose religious fundamentalism and harmful beliefs effectively, then first we must clean our own house. As Ichthyic pointed out @ 44, Harris put himself in the firing line when he threw his lot in with the sexist bigots. His attitudes toward women are both irrational and oppressive, and if we don’t call him out on them then, far from being a community attempting to introduce a better and more reasoned way of approaching understanding reality, we are just another clannish online clique interested first and foremost in protecting its own sacred cows and mindlessly defending its leaders no matter how clueless and prejudiced they are.
Your standards for what constitutes a ‘good guy’ must be low indeed.
Ah, free speech absolutism; the last sanctuary of the scoundrel. Interesting how these oh-so wonderful (and conveniently poorly defined and mutable) differences between men and women that you appreciate so much always seem to function to marginalise and disenfranchise women, isn’t it? Why, it is almost as though that is the whole point behind the concept of rigid gender essentilaism. And what do we call the deliberate and considered effort to marginalise and oppress women? Oh look – we call it misogyny.
@ 46;
You do understand that this skit was lampooning outmoded misogynistic attitudes among men, and not actually targeting women, right? Also, oddly enough, I don’t find centuries of oppression of half the species, that still continues unabated in part due to the bigoted attitudes held by people like Harris, to be exactly hilarious. A little thing called empathy gets in the way. Perhaps you and Harris should try a little some day.
I think the smug, condescending term you are grasping for here is ‘echo chamber’. At least try to get the lexicon of the oblivious troll right.
Harris has proven himself to be inexhaustible when it comes to denouncing the great many forms of abuse committed by people who come from a different ethnic & social background than himself
The core of religious fundamentalism, the root of its evil is sectarian supremacism: a worldview summarizable as: “Hey! Look at how these barbaric foreign proles with their bizarre religious custom mistreat their wives and children! There’s No Way that intelligent, educated, enlightened people like Us could do something even remotely comparable: Now let’s all join hands and sing and dance in celebration of our inherent superiority!” simply swaps one form of tribalism with another.
And I should have added is the views and behaviour of Harris and other prominent atheists proably puts off a fair number of men as well.
Uma Thurman with a katana of course!
Ichthyic @ 50;
When it comes to misogynists, if we can get them all together in one place, then I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
laurentweppe @ 57;
Sounds about right to me.
So…. I guess by posting this I’m just asking to be beat down by PZ’s crew again… but here goes…
PZ – I have to disagree with you, and while I like you and your work, I’m surprised you would post this particular argument against Harris. Here, Harris is providing a general explanation – a hypothesis – to attempt to cover – maybe – the larger sample of the population of female atheists that apparently don’t like Sam at the same rates as male atheists – but we can be 100% certain that Harris was not trying to offer an absolute theory to cover the entire polulation set. But you turned into an intelligent designer, looking for a god in the gaps – you somehow made the conclusion that if you can find exceptions to Sam’s hypothesis, he must be wrong. No, PZ. You’re simply gathering evidence that there is more to the rate difference.
Assuming the rate difference does in fact exist. I don’t know – I’m taking it on faith because it seems accurate, based on my experiences. I will proceed on the assumption that everyone can at least agree that the rate differential actually does exist.
The next layer of your error is to presume that your ideal world matches the population. Atheists are great, but they aren’t perfect. Actually, we live in a world that is scarred by a long history of sexism. Read my comments on your Dawkins post for more on that. Regardless of what you wan tthe world to be, the fact is that many women currently choose lifestyles that are not particularly scientific, both atheists and non-atheists. Atheist women might be more science-oriented on average compared to non-atheist women – I don’t know – and I don’t think that matters here. What does matter is the population we happen to have in the here and now – a disproportionate fraction of women are probably living lives that are less-assertive, less-scientific, and more geared toward the cultural norm, I don’t know we find women in the current society tend to speak faster and use more words than current men – but that fact suggest that whatever factors are at play, current women have a bias toward social networks, or however you want to put it. Choose your term, PZ-gang. Don’t beat me up for stating it. The cause isn’t important here.
So where does Sam’s assertion that his style is less conducive to women than men in all this? Well, the best “sample” Ihave is my wife and I. I like Sam – I love his style. But my wife, who is an atheist, really doesn’t like Sam – she likes Dawkins and Hitchens best. Why? First off, my wife just happens to have a condition that leaves her with abnormally high testosterone relative to other women. Aside from a few physiological problems that causes her, it lends itself to considering to what degree hormones affect personality. In some behavioral ways, my wife is unlike any other woman I dated, and she, I, and her doctor are pretty sure her particular hormone levels are responsible, at least in part, for a signficant part of this.
Why doesn’t she like Sam? Well, it isn’t his argumentativeness. She loves Hitchen’s and Dawkin’s argumentativeness – and she is the most argumentative woman I know. But she has a thing for nerdy old guys – her words. She also likes British accents – and guys who went to Oxford (UCLA? Please.). She’s also a writer and a huge fan of Stephen King, who passed on a piece of writing she felt I could hear, “Kill your darlings.” By that, King meant that writers will write a passage they think is just worded so great, but whose only purpose is to dress up the verbiage. Edit that crap out, King advises.
Well, I still don’t agree – and neither does Harris. Harris is a literary peacock – and I think his writing is the better for it. But I’m pretty sure that’s the biggest thing my wife doesn’t like about him. And he speaks the same way. Very polished. No stutters. Comapre that to Dawkins – and D comes off as an uneasy, quivering reed in comparison. My wife likes that apparent vulnerabilty. I won’t psychoanalyze her here further, but that’s enough to fit her in a whole world of current female stereotypes. My sense is that Harris’s hypothesis is accurate for my wife, though it isn’t quite his mere argumentativeness. It’s his polish – his peacockiness, combined with his relative youth – his arrogance – the style of his argument isnt as hesitatingly scientific (and, again, slightly vulnerable/open-minded) like Dawkins. Harris’s style is lyrical and strategic, calculated and so lacking in apparent spontanaeity. I think it’s fine. But many of those characteristics for Harris go against current female preference stereotypes. To cite just one example – the modern boy heartthrob isn’t the polished, peacocky cool kid – it’s the slightly qwerky nice guy that wins the girl in the end. These are the plots that tend to win at the box-office, and in the focus groups.
I’d go on with better examples, but if anyone wants to, I bet they can fill in the blanks, rather than berating The Voice of (PZ) Dissent, again. In fact, I think I’ll go change my profile name to that.
Not until you provide evidence for that fact. Anecdote =/= evidence. Everything past this point is speculation, and will be examined with extreme BS scrutiny.
The history of of those who dissent here is one of those dissenting often being some type of liberturd and/or bigot. Your last attempt at dissenting showed us you aren’t an impartial person. Think about that.
Women are socialized to be demure and avoid conflict. Our culture constantly reinforces the idea that women who instigate or engage in an argument are troubled.
There’s a name for this idea Harris is laughing off. This ignorance he’s perpetuating is textbook example of patriarchy. He’s just too privileged and self-centered to see it as a problem with prominent atheists.
Women generally aren’t rewarded for being a giant jackass in public the way you are, Sam. You’re playing life on easy mode and bragging about your score.
So, Harris says women don’t like criticism. How could he have missed the suffragette movement and the various feminist movements? I assume he is so self-involved that he can’t pull his head out of his ass.
And Jared Hansen, wtf is a scientific life? And connecting testosterone to scientific thought is incredibly unscientific. Do you really think neurophysiology can be reduced to being just about hormones? There are 100 chemicals alone that regulate hunger and satiation
ianmcs: But Harris is factually wrong. Women are fine critical thinkers, just as good as men. This is not a valid distinction.
Jared Hansen:
If only you were capable of taking that advice yourself.
ianmcs,
At least cut out this kind of bullshit.
Ironically, I’m starting to think it’s congenital.
In my experience, delusional content is proportional to the length of the internet comment. When a Kazinsky-length manifesto drops as a blog comment, I don’t even see it as a collection of words anymore.
@ Jared Hansen
If you’re going to keep posting here could you, at the very least, drop this fucking tiresome martyrdom bullshit? Seriously, just get the fuck out if you can’t say anything without preemptively dismissing any disagreement as beating you up/down, whatever.
@Jared Hansen
The question posed to Harris was this:
“I also asked Harris at the event why the vast majority of atheists — and many of those who buy his books — are male”
Note that it is in fact TWO questions, why the majority of atheists are male, and why many of those who buy Harris’ books are male.
Your entire defence of Harris presumes that the two questions are just one, the second one, and that his answer applied only to that question.
You examined only half the phenomenon, while claiming to consider the whole. As a peer reviewer I can reject your manuscript on that ground alone.
I.e. subjugating half the human race and putting them into a oh so seperate but oh so equal *wink wink* sphres.
FIFY
I never liked that fucker. Or to be more accurate, I liked him at the beginning of “The End Of Faith.” untill I got halfway through. Then I realised he was evil. :(
We need a name for the “I am going to get beat up for saying this…” tactic. It comes up so often, usually by some guy about to say something really stupid.
Doofus deflection gambit.
Jared
Women talk more than men, is that what you’re trying to say? I presume you haven’t looked up the research on that.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11762186
… and here’s the abstract of the paper discussed there. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5834/82.short
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2746840
I’ve given you a head start. You should be able to use Google Scholar to find more, or more recent, research.
What I was attempting last night, I think without much success,* was to challenge the “women are/can be every bit the critical thinkers men are” frame. It bothers me in the same way “good without God” and “atheists can be moral, too” do. These arguments implicitly accept the premise that men are the critical-thinking standard and religious people the moral standard, and I don’t accept it. It ignores the fact that being a man (white, from the global North, cis, rich,…), not in some essential way but as a social location, serves as an impediment to critical thinking in various key realms. This has to be recognized and overcome for critical thinking to happen.
Yes.
*(due to vodka, not estrogen)
@SC @76: These arguments implicitly accept the premise that men are the critical-thinking standard and religious people the moral standard, and I don’t accept it.
Yes. This is important. Power-based relations are inherently damaging to both parties (more to the oppressed, of course) and the goal of a solution is to transcend the process, not reestablish it in a somewhat different form. To put it another way, Harris’s logic itself is impaired by his prejudice.
“nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe”
oh fuck that stupidity. if Harris et al still believe this nonsense, they have been keeping themselves willfully ignorant of how critically thoughtful women can be. I pull no punches on my critiques in my writings about religion on my blog, club schadenfreude. And nurturing or “coherence building” doesn’t mean allowing some fool to keep their delusions.
I’d say that it works the other way around: Humans are hardwired to be conflict averse demure diplomats, and culture constantly reinforce the idea that men who successfully assert themselves bellicosely deserve to be rewarded.
I put an emphasis on “success” because the proponent of such social hierarchy do not want to see male plebeians constantly challenging the inherited status of the patricians’ sons and have a vested interest in introducing a self-justifying loophole: if a capable male commoner try to assert himself, the aristocracy and its enforcers will gang up on it and pretend that his failure to climb up the social ladder -in truth, evidence that the competition is rigged from the start- was the result of his own shortcomings, while the rare cases of people proving themselves to be either lucky, talented or muleheaded enough to reach the ranks of the ruling elites despite all the pitfalls put along the way will hypocritically presented as the perfect proof that we are living in a functioning meritocracy.
@60. Jared, first you fail by calling anyone who disagrees with you as PZ’s “crew” assuming that anyone who agrees with Dr. Myers is his sycophant. You won’t get “beat up”, but you will be shown as the twit who tries to claim that since people can show that he’s wrong, he must be right!
“we can be 100% certain that Harris was not trying to offer an absolute theory to cover the entire polulation set. ”
How can we be this certain? Hmmm?
we also get from you plenty of probably, maybe, pretty sure, etc. All baseless claims made to try to claim women have those fluffy ladybrains and it takes something “abnormal” with them to be interested in what you want to claim are manly things. It doesn’t take abnormality to be interested in things that *some* women aren’t.
“I’d go on with better examples, but if anyone wants to, I bet they can fill in the blanks, ” if you had these “better examples”, you should have used them since the ones you chose to use are rather sad. It seems that you are doing no more than throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it sticks e.g. well, if you were smart, you would find these better examples”. After a couple of decades of debating theists, it’s easy to spot these tactics.
sigh.
The statistics are remarkably easy to come by — even my feeble google-fu could do it.
According to the World Values Survey database, in the United States, 28.9% of males are nonreligious and 6% outright atheist. For females, 20.1% nonreligious and 1.2% atheist. So, that’s 5 times more self-declared atheists among men in the US. Doing a quick scan of the survey, it appears that there is no country surveyed where the percentage of female atheists is higher than the percentage of male atheists in that country.
FWIW: The country with the highest percentage of self-declared atheists is South Korea…so there goes the “western culture white guys” meme.
It’s an interesting question as to why there’s a consistent gender disparity. Contra Harris, I hardly think “lady bits, therefore religious” is an answer. However, I’m also inclined to dismiss “patriarchy” as a reason, because if that were the case, you should find near equivalence between men and women, yes? Women being expected to “stand by their man” and all that under a patriarchal system. But that’s not what’s happening.
Found here http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/11/sex-differences-in-global-atheism-part-n/#.VBRUYPldV8E. Which links to the source database here: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp
This may only make sense to The Tick fans, but I think of it as Arthuring. They have very similar battle cries.
Hey, Sam, I have noticed (’cause my own personal experiences pretty much define the entire world, don’tchaknow) that the majority of atheists I have met are white.
Care to speculate on what part of POC brains reject critical thought?
No?
Odd… I guess that kind of disparagement only gets a pass if it’s misogynist, not racist.
(Anyone defending Sam Harris’ post are free to answer this question as well. I wonder if that will happen either?)
It worries me that Harris earned a doctorate in neuroscience – doesn’t that require some study of endocrinology? Hasn’t US grad-school-level hormone study gotten at least to the point of differentiating estrogen from oxytocin?
And I would hope that (passing) a few classes in psychology would have gone into Harris’s degree – at least enough so that he could start his bubble-bursting superiority schtick from a position slightly less urban-legendic than, say, his fellow PhD James Dobson. In ranting about/against Muslims, at least Harris has the excuse of never having formally studied comparative religion and culture, but how can he possibly explain this blatant display of ignorance in a subject so close to his own scientific turf?
ianmcs @40:
Yes, it is prudent. We call out bad behavior and horrible views as we learn about them. Sam Harris spat out some horribly sexist gender essentialist bullshit and he deserves to be called out for that. He doesn’t get a free pass bc he criticizes religion and irrational beliefs. We’re interested in making the world a better place, and the reduction of harm due to religious beliefs is only one area to work on. I don’t want anything to do with atheists who may be fighting religious beliefs, but shit on women, LGBT people, or People of Color. That’s not progress. But I’m guessing you’re rolling around in a sea of unexamined privilege.
Also, do you criticize people who feel the need to attack religious bigots based on an article?
::scrolls past Jared the bigot’s comment::
Jared @60
So much fail.
It must be difficult to be that long winded and smug and still not say anything of interest. I commend you?
@Kevin Kehres.
Wrong.
I do find it humorous that you come here with a “wimminz don’t do atheism” attitude and manage to completely sidestep how attitudes like yours might be the problem.
@David Chapman #72
My experience mirrored yours to a tee.
After being sickened by his attempted justification of torture, I’ve avoided his stuff like poison. So I must admit, I hadn’t any idea Harris was a sexist turd prior to reading this post.
Did Jared, the voice of dissent really just base a bunch of his opinions @60 on unevidenced bullshit? Did he really just use he and his wife as a “sample size”? Geez, no wonder the fuck faced bigot likes Sam Harris. They’re cut from the same cloth.
ianmcs @40:
With all the good churches do feeding the hungry and founding hospitals, why does Harris feel the need to pick on them?
SC @76:
I think I see what you’re saying, but how should it be framed? Or *should* it be framed?
Stephen King, huh? He’s the one who coined that phrase usually attributed to Faulkner (but actually originating 100 years ago)?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/10/18/_kill_your_darlings_writing_advice_what_writer_really_said_to_murder_your.html
Kevin @81:
Did you click the link in the OP to Greta Christina’s post? It contains some statistics on atheism on a global level that you might find interesting.
HappyNat @87:
Whatever you do, don’t tell him he’s a patronizing, condescending asshole. He may start psychoanalyzing you based on your gravatar.
@ ianmcs
How are we supposed to make any progress if we don’t expect people to do better?
Tony! @95
Well, I am just a dog licking my own nose, but I think I’m pretty articulate and can stick to the subject at ha . . . SQUIRREL! *goes dashing off across the street*
Kevin Kehres,
This is of course dependent on the religion and country, but in my experience of Catholicism, women are the default church-goers who care about the religious upbringing of children, that their husbands at least occasionally attend mass and that the family is properly Catholic as compared to nosy neighbors.
That is directly linked to patriarchal hierarchy of Catholicism, and I believe it is certainly related to how many men versus women identify as Catholics.
SC (Salty Current), OM @ 76;
This point really needs to be made more often and with greater volume. The idea that *insert marginalised group* can be just as good at critical thinking as *insert privileged group* misses the point that this still patronises the disenfranchised and positions the socially privileged group as the gold standard or critical thought, when in point of fact the possession of privilege is an obstacle to seeing any issue clearly. Those rose-tinted privilege spectacles stop you seeing the world from the perspective of anyone else, and it takes work and dedication to deprogramme yourself when you have stewed in unearned privilege your whole life to the point where you don’t even perceive it any more than you constantly notice the air that you breathe.
In this way, privilege can be corrosive to the very people that possess it (though obviously no where near as harmful as it is to the marginalised). The term ‘privilege blindness’ is well chosen in this regard – if you are a cis/het middle class white bloke like yours truly, you have to remember every day that your perspective on the world has been fundamentally warped by your unearned privilege since day one, long before you were socially aware enough to grasp the implications of what it meant to be socially privileged. That – in some senses at least – damage never entirely goes away. You can never afford to uncritically trust your own judgement with regard to any topic even tangentially related to social justice, which covers just about everything. You always have to watch yourself to make sure that you aren’t allowing your privileged background to lead you by the nose into adopting oppressive and harmful positions, even if out of ignorance and laxity rather than malice.
Fortunately, there is an easy solution; you just need to listen. And by that I don’t mean sit there more or less quietly just long enough to spot the ideal moment to start man/white/het/sis/able-splaining, but actually sit down, shut up and pay attention to the people who don’t suffer from your privilege poisoning condition.
They are the ones who can tell you when you are going astray.
They are the one’s who can let you know when that joke was a really bad idea.
They are the people who will know instantly when your size ten privilege brand boots are stomping obliviously all over other people’s dignity and life experience.
And when they tell you there’s a problem, you don’t argue. You don’t assume that they must be mistaken, or malicious, or hysterical. You just amend your behaviour. And if you don’t understand why what you have done is harmful, and in the unlikely event that it hasn’t already been explained to you personally and the answers aren’t readily available if you make a minimum effort to educate yourself, then you ask for clarification after you stop doing the thing that is causing distress.
And don’t worry about the possibility of someone just giving you a hard time for giggles, because other people in that marginalised group will soon call them out for doing it, sicne they have no interest in handing the hardened bigots any free ammunition.
Of course, all this assumes your possession of two things – a genuine good faith desire to be a decent human being despite your privilege poisoning, and a sufficient store of humility to accept the near certainty that you will almost constantly be really, really wrong about all kinds of stuff and will need to adjust your attitude, behavior and perspective. A lot. And probably for the rest of your life.
I think this is the problem that Harris, Dawkins et al suffer from most of all – they have reached a point where they have acheived such a critical mass of privilege and uncritical praise form their followers that they just don’t do humble sincerely anymore at all. They simply cannot conceive of being wrong on such a consistent and systemic basis, and so would rather retreat into obnoxious pseudo-vulcanism and straw man massacres than deal with their own shortcomings.
As banks were allegedly too big to fail a few years ago, they think they are too influencial and too successful to be wrong, even though it is likely that, without the privilege they choose to pretend they don’t possess, they would never have gotten to where they are today at all.
Ha, as sure as day follows night Harris is doing what he always does when faced with criticism: complain that he has been misrepresented. Diddums.
Gregory Greenwood says @99:
I’ve bolded that bc Jared really, really needs to read this and take it to heart.
dereksmear @100:
I’m sure I’ll regret asking, but do you have a link?
It also doesn’t help that when women do engage in critical thinking and express ideas and opinions, then they are often ignored, mocked, or similar (and then the ideas frequently stolen and used by male co-workers for example where they are received with acclaim and applause).
So it’s not that we don’t or can’t think critically, but that we critically think sometimes as to whether it’s worth expressing the results of those thoughts to those who will not understand them, or will not listen to them.
@98 Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought:
That may be true for the Catholic countries in the survey…but the disparity was across the board. Even in countries like Japan and South Korea, where the dominant religions were not the Abrahamic ones.
Don’t know culturally if the Japanese mothers are expected to take their children to the Shinto temple…and gad am I letting my lack of knowledge on that subject show.
Anecdotally, I do know several of my male friends with children who went from being not-church-going to church-going in support of that whole “moral code for the kids” thing. But does that reflect in the statistics, which don’t ask whether someone goes to church, but whether they believe in god(s)? Dunno. I still think the answer is likely to be difficult to pin down to a single cause. Multifactorial is more likely.
Iyéska @24
“Women are underrepresented in STEM fields, so I don’t think that would work”
Actually, that is exactly the point of comparison I was drawing. Summers was asked why women are underrepresented at the higher levels of STEM (professorships, leadership roles, etc), and his answer was that it was because women were less well suited to it. He didn’t’ consider that it was any sort of institutional bias or selective pressure against women in those roles. That is the exactly the same mistake Sam Harris is making, asked why there aren’t more women atheists (or translated, why the questioner doesn’t see more women atheists), Sam Harris answers that they just must not be well suited for it (or for his style of atheism). Likewise with Summer, Harris isn’t considering in that answer that maybe the visibility or awareness of more female atheists is due more to institutional bias or selective awareness.
Kevin,
Sure, it’s a combination of factors. I’m just pointing out the case of patriarchy having influence.
@88 vaiyt:
“Attitudes like mine”? Excuse me? What “attitude” have I displayed?
I merely express the mildest of opinions that one would expect in a patriarchal society that the woman’s opinions would be subsumed into that of the man’s. That’s what “patriarchy” does as a prime expectation. She doesn’t get to choose. Her little lady brain being too frilly for such things. As in:
“Never mind that, dear, god doesn’t exist.”
“OK, dear whatever you say. Want a sammich?”
You’ll have to do a hell of a lot better than merely declaring me “wrong”. You want to cite studies, research of any kind with regard to the issue? Or is it just your word we’re supposed to take, because when you say someone’s “wrong”, then they’re WRONG.
Harris’ bigotry and misogyny are BIG problems in the fight against irrationality and religious zealotry. To the moderate theistic and secular-but-nominally-religious-out-of-cultural-habit groups who would otherwise be the most receptive among theists to the atheistic message, that behavior from someone perceived as a major spokesman and leader for the atheist movement discredits the entire movement. It confirms in their mind the religious extemists’ charge that atheism is just as bigoted and misogynist as religion. Already Dawkins and Harris are being profiled in mainstream media outlets with the theme being look how extreme and bigoted and misogynistic these atheists are, just like the religious fundamentalists. They are just another flavour of zealot.
The long term harm to the fight against irrationality and religious zealotry this causes is incalculable.
The only answer is to call them out within the movement, immediately.
He who wants the world to follow must first out his own house in order.
No, that is not in fact what a patriarchal society does, at least not one that is competent. What it does is condition the women from birth to echo the party line, such that when they are adults they will appear to choose it of their own volition and initiative. This is a far more effective means of social control that having them individually subsume with individual men, who may well be individually unreliable.
And your opinion was not expressed “mildly”. It was expressed with the worse kind of passive-aggressive pseudo-polite rudeness. The kind where one says outrageously insulting things in “polite” language, and then when people react with fully justifiable anger, one pretends to be surprised that one’s “mild” words elicited such a response.
Sam Harris is also the guy who argued that (on balance) guns are beneficial to women in situations of domestic violence. Maybe fewer women buy his books because they read stuff like that and think “Aha, this guy is an idiot.” Men, who statistically have less motivation/opportunity to analyze the dynamics of domestic violence, are perhaps less likely to pick up on this helpful clue that one should not waste time on his books.
What the hell is this shit that I’m noticing among this subset of mostly-male, mostly-libertarian atheists?
Social ineptitude? Oblivion? Egocentrism? Being antisocial whiners with an entitlement complex?
It’s like they walk around with a cloud around their heads.
No. >.>
Azkyroth @112, maybe not ineptitude in their little bro bunch, but clearly they’re inept enough that Buzzfeed has noticed and made an article out of it.
Kevin Kehres @ #81:
Note, however, that your source specifically states those numbers are the raw data. That means that the numbers you are listing are likely unweighted, and therefore can only be used to describe the nature of the sample interviewed. Without using data weights you can’t assume that the numbers translate to the whole nation (e.g., if the sample contains more men than women relative to the actual men/women ratio of a nation, your numbers will be skewed).
acetylcholine, you’re excusing their misogyny and mean-spiritedness, by writing it down to ineptness.
Inept is doing it once, maybe twice. Bigoted is Mel Gibson, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Fred Phelps, and so on. Why should we believe the Great Chief of the Vulcan High Council is inept, when he repeatedly and gleefully hauls out offensive and sexist shit? Why not believe what you’re hearing, that they really believe the things they constantly and remorselessly produce?
Are we religionists, to endlessly search for ways to show that the Holy One wasn’t really a sexist, homophobic, genocidal asshole, despite his constant espousal of exactly those things? Are these men Oracles, that we should need priests to interpret their infallibility for us?
FFS.
I’ve decided the Four Horsemen of the Misogynist Atheist Apocalypse will be Dawkins, Shermer, Grothe, and Harris. And Hitchens can be the Holy Ghost of Misogyny or something like that.
@Kevin Kehres
I misread your post. You’re still wrong on the patriarchy bit, though, because you made two basic mistakes.
Being a declared atheist isn’t just a matter of opinion.
The average woman is surrounded by a whole society, not just One Man. Even so, you forgot the possibility said man is, himself, hostile to her joining the atheist movement as an equal.
Anybody have any idea what’s going on with the webpage at the Discovery Magazine website? ( Linked to by Kevin Kehres a# 81 )
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/11/sex-differences-in-global-atheism-part-n/#.VBRUYPldV8E
The text refers to graphs, apparently, but they do not come up on my computer, and “raw data” is presented, but it looks like only half the information is there, as if the table has been cut in half to make it fit!?! The designation ‘Male’ appears misplaced, and they seem to have left out the out the ‘Female’ data altogether. It’s thoroughly annoying. If there’s something I need to click on or if I’m somehow misinterpreting this thing I’d be grateful if someone could enlighten me.
Going by the remarks of the author of the article, it would seem that the findings presented clash with those of Gallup cited by Greta Christina, ( see Prof. Myers original post for link) since the latter state that internationally there’s almost no gender difference involved in atheism, whilst the author of the Discovery article, Razib Khan, says:
– my italics – which would seem to be mathematically incompatible with the Gallup result.
ianmcs @ 40:
Funny? Oh, yes, women who just can’t do thinky at all, and only limited thinky if they are in a proper womb-like atmosphere. Yeah, hilarious. Har, har, har.
CaitieCat @115
You don’t think bigotry is a particular subtype of short-sighted, puffed-up, fact-impaired, limited-worldview inanity?
[OT]
acetylcholine,
What is the relation between social ineptitude and “short-sighted, puffed-up, fact-impaired, limited-worldview inanity”?
Beatrice,
The latter is a sort of souped-up, militant version of the former.
You didn’t say inane; you said inept. Inept is incompetent, unable, and is an excuse. Inane is a critique, and an entirely different prospect. If it helps you to avoid having to scroll up, I’ll quote, since I’m now at my computer:
– you @ 113
So if you want to shift the goalposts, maybe it’d be better to do so at a place where you can actually edit your history, or maybe in conversation, or something, instead of having your inanity ineptly displayed as it is here.
See what I did there? And how those words are different?
Look, part of the problem is framing.
If we frame these fools as inept in some way we take away at least some of whatever power they might have. It sucks the wind out of their sails.
No, it’s the same crap as “he’s a product of his time”. It’s an excuse, a way of saying they’re not really the malign, horribly-behaving people they constantly show themselves to be, “they’re just inept, poor things”.
No. Not ineptitude. Malignant trolling.
Sorry, my 125 was to acetylcholine @ 124.
acetylcholine:
No and no. We would all benefit if you figured out how to think prior to posting. There is obviously no social problem with these particular people, they function and thrive in a social atmosphere. They write books, they are immersed in social media, they lecture and give talks.
Your immediate impulse to punch down is noted, and you might want to stop that shit, right now.
acetylcholine:
No, it is not.
In your brief history here, you have shown up in threads to advocate retaliation and humiliation of some sort, then take off, never coming back to thread to deal with any responses. It seems your desire to retaliate and humiliate is still with you.
Inept. Right. Would this be a cousin to socially awkward? So, you’re absolutely fine in framing a lie, a distortion, which would have serious splash damage, because…why? Is it just that you’re unable to think past a stupid retaliation scheme? Don’t understand pushback while punching up? What?
acetylcholine @111:
What you’re noticing is sexism and misogyny. Neither of those is anything like social ineptitude, oblivion, egocentrism or being antisocial whiners with an entitlement complex. Sexism and misogyny are not personality traits. They’re actively harmful beliefs that far too many people hold. Worse still, people like Dawkins, Shermer, and Harris have a public platform with which to share their sexist views with the world, and a lot of people listen to and believe them. I think you minimize the impact of their words by comparing them to personality traits.
I will somewhat agree with your last sentence if it’s amended to mean the cloud around their head is a privilege bubble.
acetylcholine
How about you give a well reasoned argument for why it is?
Sexism, misogyny, tribalism and Dunning-Kruger.
jedibear #21 wrote:
True. I’ve found that one of the more popular topics among groups of women at atheist conventions is our relief at finally being in a group of women who aren’t pushing hard on the “we are more nurturing and positive and noncritical” meme — usually used as a means of shutting us up on criticizing religion. As Ryan Cunningham points out in #63, “Women are socialized to be demure and avoid conflict. Our culture constantly reinforces the idea that women who instigate or engage in an argument are troubled.” Whether our entire culture reinforces this idea or only a segment of the Spiritual Woman crowd, I can personally attest to its presence.
If only that had been Harris’ point.
PZ Myers #73 wrote:
In most situations people say something like that because they seem to be trying to head off criticism, encouraging the crowd to reassure them that no, don’t worry, we won’t do that and thus go easier on them. When they say it on Pharyngula, though, they don’t seem to want or expect us to go easier. It usually sounds like either Poisoning the Well or Wishful Thinking (“Hah, I knew it!”)
But you want a clever term. How about “Preemptive Martyr?” It could be Preemptive Martyr Syndrome, but the acronym might be problematic.
I took iancs #40 for satire. But then I don’t know iancs.
I just noticed that Seven of Mine #67 said the same general thing regarding the ‘tactic.’ Maybe that’s where I got the idea.
these leaders are sure a bunch of self important fools.
They are obviously superior in the things that matter like having the correct genetic make up which gives them this important insight in the true nature of things. We should all agree and give them the deference they deserve by following them and accepting their superiority and granting them their privileges.
I am so glad that PZ points these fellows out for us other wise we might never know
VIVA! La Status Quo !
uncle frogy
Jared Hansen’s little song and dance about how we’re going to be soooo meaaaaaan to him is delightfully ironic in a thread about men’s supposed superior appreciation of criticism.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Ariaflame (#103)
Right. How would Harris explain Elevatorgate? “Guys, don’t do that” was about the mildest criticism in the history of ever, and look what happened to Watson over that. The orthodoxy that says women don’t like or do criticism is enforced rather violently.
Sometimes criticism from women is welcomed if it helps enforce kyriarchal norms, like with Fox News’ female political commentators or feMRAs. But not always. Those women are always finding out how fragile their pedestals are.
acetylcholine @111:
They appear to be capable of being perfectly socially ept (probably not a word. Don’t care) with people who matter to them. It’s getting obvious which people aren’t in that category.
When a person behaves decently towards some people and not towards others, and there’s a difference between the people in the first category and the people in the second, one has to consider that the difference might have something to do with how the person treats them. One does not, however, get to make the excuse that the person doesn’t know how to behave. The person knows how to behave, and sometimes doesn’t bother.
Kevin Kehres (#107)
Except you’re begging the question that patriarchy operates in one particular way. And that since you don’t see evidence of that one thing, patriarchy is not a factor here. Your expectations are too simplistic.
Consider instead that patriarchy operates in many different, overlapping ways, such as placing the burden of instilling moral values into their children primarily onto women. Since this is a monumental task, a woman might feel a stronger need for an institution that claims to provide moral guidance and/or a community of like-minded people who can help her succeed.
Consider also that dissent in women is fiercely suppressed, even if a woman is dissenting over the exact same thing as a man. Combine that with the previous point about the burden of instilling morals, and try to think what happens when a mother or future mother¹ says she has no need for religion. Suddenly she’s not just dissenting but is threatening the moral wellbeing of her children or future children.
…………..
¹ And every woman under 45 or so is assumed to be a future mother, regardless of her stated intentions.
(content note: violence against women)
Further to A Noyd’s 137, there was a comment I saw today or yesterday that illustrated the different expectations of the patriarchy around women and men, I think it was in the Lounge. Basically, the radio host (Brian Fischer, noted bigot) said that Ray Rice’s then-fiancee was at fault for the incident of violence between them because she was sinfully cohabitating outside of marriage.
Get that? For her to live with him was a sin, to be punished by being battered unconscious. For him to live with her was not a sin, and his reward for being unsinful was to get to batter her unconscious.
Is it possible, in your world Kevin Kehres, that there might be room for the idea that religiosity pressures men and women in different ways, and that women are a lot more likely to know about men’s difficulties than the other way around, and which side of that knowledge divide you’re arguing from?
I can’t help but be reminded of how fundamentalist churches keep conversion ecstasy going by creating a “other” to disdain, fear and be in constant struggle with. It makes the mediocre feel special. It makes them feel like they belong to something important and that they are important. With fundamentalists, the forces of evil are always nipping at the heels of the faithful and the heroic faithful are always standing against them. That “them”, though supernatural in origin is always represented in reality by progressive people who challenge their beliefs. They are desperate to slow or reverse the trend of rights for women and other minorities. They also see those advances as bad for society and will use all kinds of misinformation, misconceptions and convoluted reasoning to argue that it is. They have adored charismatic leaders who have inflated opinions of themselves. They are plagued with sexual abuse scandals.
I may be way off, but… I think that may be part of what’s going on.
Maybe we’re seeing a group behavior that I previously thought was unique to religious groups in communities of atheists and skeptics.
Damn, people.
We splatter on people like Pompei for misrepresenting and twisting ideas. And then we do it right back.
I don’t like Harris much. I think it’s obvious that this wasn’t stated in the best or clearest way. But he didn’t say women didn’t or couldn’t think critically. He referred to a “critical posture” that women tend to dislike more often than men.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I have known a fair number of women who could put me and anyone else around in a playpen in terms of the ability to think critically and with apparent ease who at the same time found people who were being “critical” repugnant. The critical they were referring to in those cases had nothing to do with thinking, it was… damn… I don’t know what to call it.
And no, whatever a “critical posture” may be, I’m not saying women can’t handle it. Based onwhat I think it to be, I’ve seen women decimateit more times than I could count. And no, I’m not saying women never adopted because it’s an exclusively male domain. I’ve seen women exercise it as well.
But in any case a “critical posture” is neither a necessity to nor an indicator of actual “critical thinking.” But I do find it interesting (or something) that an issue is being made about critical thinking and contagion in a discussion related to words that aren’t being thought through critically.
This isn’t going to serve the actual andimportant issues. Ever.
A dilettante theory of how patriarchy would lead to more self-identified male athiests might be, say, that because a sizeable part of people who identify as athiests have some sort of scientific training, and because patriarchy seems certainly to be responsible for less woman being scientists (something that I’d imagine is, happily, changing these days), there will be less woman identifying as athiests. Which isn’t to say that one must have “Science!” tatooed on their forehead to be an athiest, but that, for whatever reason, a sizeable enough portion of athiests do have that tatoo. Well… a dilettante contribution…
I never knew the i before e rule didn’t apply to “atheist”. That’s what happens without microsoft word spell check…
acetylcholine #111
It’s this one, all the way.
Tony! The Queer Shoop wrote:
No, what he did was far lazier than that. He used himself and his wife as his sample, then projected his opinions of Dawkins’, Harris’ and Hitchens’ writings onto his wife, and declared that evidence, so the “sample size” is really just himself. He says that he finds Harris’ writings flowery, and simply declares that this must be why his wife doesn’t like him, without considering or even asking if his wife may have an entirely different reason.
IMO, it already has one:
logical fallacy: Appeal to pity
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-pity.html
I’m sure someone will come up with something catchier though.
Knowknot-
He may have not outright said it, but he implied the ever loving fuck out of it or why do you think he added:
Fuck that sexist stereotypical nonsense.
+1 for Tick reference!
…but yeah, too obscure.
pityplay?
still awaiting my free analysis based on my shark avatar.
I think the author is referring to the graphs in the article previous to that one.
as to the raw data? yeah, looks like he neglected to figure the table would get clipped for space.
…no… I take that back. he refers to the “4th plot”
yeah, no 4th plot in either article.
*shrug*
I think he may have written the article for a different medium originally.
suggest writing him for the full thing. sounds interesting.
A name for starting out a comment with an appeal to pity could be “cross-hauling.” As in, they’re hauling about their own crosses in the hopes of getting nailed to them.
@ knowknot
He defined “critical posture” himself as “criticizing bad ideas”. What would you call that other than a reference to critical thinking? Either way, the minute he starts using terms like “intrinsically male” and “estrogen vibe”, he’s spewing sexist horseshit.
a few sentences later:
…and then goes on to even scare quote “critical thinking”
look, if you’re confused about what critical thinking is, to the point where you’re putting it in scare quotes?
maybe you should think twice about speaking to others “misrepresentation of ideas”?
oddly, my first mental image of this was something to do with long-haul trucking, but actually, that’s not bad.
could be a poe, yeah, but with the stuff I have seen posted around the issue of feminism in the last few days, it fit right in.
if it was indeed a poe, aplogies to Ian for not catching it, but really? time and place dude; too soon to be making fun of something so bloody outrageous as what Harris said.
I’m typically a fan of Harris. Unfortunately he’s an ass-hat an uncomfortable proportion of the time, and I think this comment about women is a pretty typical example. He’s not being malicious, and I don’t think his comments reflect a misogynistic attitude. I think he just hasn’t given much thought, if any, to gender issues in the atheist movement.
Which, obviously, seems pretty f**ked up.
It seems like we ought to be able to expect better from someone so prominent. Harris doesn’t need to focus on gender issues, but he should at least be aware of them.
knowknot @140:
I’m really, really shocked to see this from you.
He said:
He’s saying there is Quality X that men and women have, but that men have a greater degree of than women. He said this with NO evidence. He takes it as a given that this “critical posture” (which I take to be critical thinking) is present in men to greater degrees than in women. What is his basis for this? Where is his evidence? He provides none. He pulls this out of his ass to justify the interviewers question “why are more atheists male”, which is itself, another unevidenced assertion.
I’m really shocked that you can’t see the problem with this.
PZ, #73,
Cross leaping.
People are always ready to leap up on the cross. More than a few take a hammer an nails with with them. Some are even pre-leapt. Some fancy a bit if cross time as some badge if honour. Some, even famous dons, seem very keen to treat being on the cross as proof they’re right. Especially if they put themselves there.
I find it deeply, deeply interesting that more than a few people who appear very interested in denying the existence and effects of systemic oppression, even to the extent of claiming that analysis and recognition of systemic oppression is patronising (itself a mechanism of oppression on occasion), are demonstrably rather keen on claiming to be oppressed as a factor in their being correct. It’s a spectacularly interesting attitude.
Louis
If you are nailing yourself to a cross, you need someone else to drive the last nail.
That’s why they’re here.
LastNailer
LN
socially ept (probably not a word)
“Adept” is the opposite of “inept” FYI
Marcus @161:
Spoilsport!
I rather liked ‘ept’.
looky
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/05/ept-ane-ert.html
Chigau,
I like it! Correction: I love it!
Although I reckon a few of these folks could manage the last nail themselves through sheer force of less than fulsomely honest interlocution.
Is it possible to wield a hammer and nails with your tongue?
Louis
tyle (#157)
First, nobody gives a crap if he’s being intentionally malicious or not. We care about the effects of what he’s saying, and giving him the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions won’t do anything to change that. Second, I’ll bet you think misogyny means something like outright, explicitly professed hatred of women. Try this definition instead.
another kinky fetish you wanted to share with the class, Louis?
;)
142. gakxz1
Unless you somehow pronounce “atheist” in two syllables, I don’t see how the i-before-e rule-or-non-rule could come into play.
Knowknot:
Yes, he did. He went on to say that women are more comfy in a womb-like atmosphere. Honestly, it was pretty high on the skeevy condescension scale. It’s bad enough he thinks this is true, much worse that he said it in an interview, where all manner of people comfy in their sexism will snap it up and shout “Hey, my bias? Confirmed! Take that, wimmin!”
Jared, who briefly appeared in this thread, was in another thread, all excited over a purported study showing that menstruation (magical hormones!) modulated a woman’s intellect. There are a lot of Jareds out there, what do think they’re going to do with Harris’s observation?
weilding hammers?
Does anyone else read oglaf?
WARNING
not suitable for work and just about everything else
http://oglaf.com/battledress/
Tony! #162 wrote:
It made you gruntled.
Well, Harris was already off my Squidmas card list thanks to his irrepressible paranoia about teh Moozlums and subsequent support for racial profiling and torture; it’s no great surprise to now see that he’s as sexist an asshat as other former atheoskeptical Names.
Sili, #167
For ~15 minutes while typing that comment, a part of me was happy enough with “atheist… well, i before e”. After submitting and staring at what I had casually let loose onto the interwebs, the other part of me finaly chimmed up with “… ‘athiest’ looks wrong”. Ironicaly, in the back of my mind was a QI episode where Stephen Fry berates everyone present for not understanding how “i before e except after c” shouldn’t really be a “rule”.
@168 Iyéska
Iyéska –
I can’t find a reference for that. I need it; I have a use for it. I have a little fire to start.
I had to train myself into spelling “atheist” correctly due to the drilling of the i before e rule by, every time I wrote it wrong, saying “No, I’m not saying I’m athier than everyone else”. (athier, athiest) Somehow that makes sense in my mind, that I can almost hear the distinction in my head if I’m spelling it wrong and therefore like the -ier -iest adjective rather than the a-theist version.
Oh no no people! See, Harris isn’t saying that women can’t do critical thinking, nor is he sayng that women are dainty emotional flowers who hate the rough and tumble of critical debate. No he’s saying that MEN are empathy deficient hypercritical douchewozzles who can’t be trusted to assemble into social groups greater than two without clawing each other’s rhetorical eyes out!
you say tomato…
I never had a problem with words like “atheist” and “weird”. It is probably the whole “i before e” thing, since English is not my first language and I learned it through a different method.
I was always trained that it was ‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’ (over course after I grew up-last year :)-I realized that many words violate this “rule”).
[ To Knownot ]
I’m with Knownot on this — if I understand Knownot correctly.
No, he didn’t.
Sure Harris is sexist; it’s the way that he’s being sexist that is being mistaken and discussed sloppily in some comments here. Harris is saying that women are biologically disinclined to talk about things like atheism, apparently ( and mysteriously ) because it doesn’t have a “nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe.” Essentially aggressive creeds such as atheism are too hardcore confrontational for their natural inclinations, in other words.
This is fairly repellent, ugly propaganda against women; but a very different thing from saying that women are intellectually less capable; and I don’t see how the bit Rowan quoted implies the ever-living fuck out of this, either. If commentators here persist in ascribing views to Harris that he can prove he didn’t state, it just leaves the creep space to slither out from the path of righteous condemnation.
Ophelia Benson gets things similarly twisted when she claims in Butterflies and Wheels:
….whereas she makes it clear in her next sentence that she knows perfectly well Harris is talking about women disliking aggressively critical argument, because of all the estrogen, not their being crap at it. But she’s dead right to be outraged, and so is everyone, because Harris is putting across a sexist argument that’s dangerous because it’s insidious, it’s subversive. He’s the sort of fucker who tries to get under the radar; a smooth operator. Of course in places like Pharyngula and B & W subversiveness gets him nowhere; people react by construing him as saying something even more offensive than he did. But we are not his target demographic. I would be surprised if anyone can come up with a quote where Harris really does say that women can’t do sophisticated thinking, not like the guys can. His market is a more sophisticated one; he’d sound ludicrous coming out with that to his audience. He’s the thinking man’s sexist creep. ( I weigh my words carefully….)
Politico’s Page 3 boy?
I have just realised that thinking of The Four Horsemen as more Four Sancho Panza makes more sense.
@158 Tony! The Queer Shoop
OK… Maybe this is a question of interpretation of the term “critical posture.”
I am aware of three possible meanings that have any sort of currency.
– The least academic and, I think, the most common, is related essentially to “attitude,” “sensitivity,” “generally aggressive preparedness,” or something similar. When this approach is taken, those on the other side of the conversation may feel that they are being faced with defensiveness, that their statements are being interpreted as a point of argument a priori, that the interchange is similar to sparring, that there’s more emphasis on disagreement than understanding, etc.
– Less strictly academic (AFAIK) is related to something like “preparedness,” and seems to mean simply that a specific interchange or set of interchanges (the sets being defined by circumstance, sources, etc.) is understood as may contain information or opinions that will or should be approached via an openly critical process.
– The most academic (AFAIK) and least used (AFAIK) is in in terms of “method,” and may include what specific factors are the focus of a critical process, what presuppositions are taken, etc. In my exceedingly non-academic life I have heard this meaning used in discussions involving Marx and Foucault and ethnology, all for reasons above my pay grade AND due to limited exposure.
My sense (which comes from within my own personal head) is that context indicates that Harris was using the first sense, andim any case I think it would be unlikely for him to have been using either of the other two inthis setting.
I can also say that in my experience I have generally found men to be more prone to fall into or pursue approaches related to the first sense for reasons specific to their quality, and that I have seen no tendency for either sex to have any greater tendencies or abilities with relation to the latter two.
As I said, I think other aspects and generalizations in the full statement are readily questionable, including misplaced and clumsy humor and incomplete scrutiny of possible interpretations. (But on those counts I’m a dead man, so…)
But what I’ve read and heard of Harris has given me no other indication of the alleged beliefs about women. The exact opposite, if anything. I am more than willing to discover myself to be wrong. But I am more than unwilling to happily imbibe in the casting of undue vitriol, even towards unsympathetic targets. Both of these, for the furtherance of the good, and for the good of anyone casting. And all of that even if I am wrong in the end. And even if I am often wrong. I am no better than I am.
Tony @ 162:
May I say that I have always found your comments particularly ane?
knowknot:
Perhaps I don’t have the correct understanding of what he means by “critical posture”. I’ll look into that.
However, I think your criticism of commenters in this thread is still a bit off given what Harris was responding to. Remember that the questioner asked him two questions:
1-why are the vast majority of atheists male?
2-why are the vast majority of atheists that purchase his books male?
Does that answer apply to both questions or only one? If the latter, which one? Also, where is his evidence that his assertions are true?
Rereading his response, I’m starting to think I was wrong to view “critical posture” as I did. He seems to be talking about his tone, or as you say in your #182
Part of what’s problematic-I think-is that Harris doesn’t break his answers into two parts. He starts with a response to why men are drawn to his books more than women-the “critical posture”, or tone that he takes in his books, he believes is more appealing to men than women. Where’s the proof of this? Why is he asserting this without any evidence?
But then he quickly shifts to answering the second question about the the vast majority of atheists being male. He doesn’t even take the time to ask if it’s valid question. It isn’t. It presupposes that there *are* more male atheists than female atheists, without supplying evidence. He takes that and runs with it and asserts that atheism (the atheist variable) lacks this stereotypically feminine quality-“nurturing coherence building estrogen vibe”. He thinks that for atheism to appeal to women, that quality needs to be present, as if that gender essentialist bullshit is essential to women being drawn to atheism. Once again, though, he offers no evidence of his beliefs. Are that gender essentialist crap something that actually draws women to atheism (or any subject)? Why are that quality associated with women and not men? Why does Harris not look around in the various forums online and see the women who are atheists? If atheism lacks the “nurturing coherence building estrogen vibe”, and that’s necessary for women to be atheists, then shouldn’t there be *no* female atheists?
Also, what the hell is “nurturing coherence building estrogen vibe” and how does that apply to not believing in gods?
How does he know that the “critical posture” is intrinsically male to “some degree”?
Harris is swimming in sexist beliefs and he hasn’t taken the time to examine if them. If he had-honestly-he might see they aren’t true.
ledasmom @183:
I’m…ha ha ha…I’m going to thank…ha ha ha…you once I…tee hee…ha ha…stop laughing.
Really though, thanks.
I’m still laughing right now.
That was good!
OK.
@knowknot
Women have been telling the world for years now why we’re not as excited to participate in atheism, at least as part of a movement. Harris managed to ignore all those reasons in favor of some idiotic gender-essentialist just-so story that breaks down the second one realizes that feminism has been critical posture turned up to eleven since it came into existence.
I think the thing about guys like this that really drives people away to include women is their insufferable fucking smugness, in the end it is all about them!
what a waste of time I would rather still be listening to the fucking bishop’s message to the flock as these creeps. Except for the none belief and ordinary cloths it is the same personality on display!
uncle frogy
knowknot @186:
Does the shortness of your comment indicate you don’t want to continue the conversation? It doesn’t tell me much, so I’m kinda sitting here scratching my head.
Spelling rules!
One thing that escapes most people, including school teachers, is that spelling is about both the written and the sounded word.
The i before e rule is actually not a rule at all. The complete rule is “When the sound is ‘ee’, we write i before e except after ‘c’.” Suddenly, the list of exceptions crumbles. “Weird” is no longer a problem because the simple ‘ee’ sound has disappeared into a diphthong, and atheist was never a problem because there are 2 separate sounds for the e and the i in the first place rather than a single ‘ee’ sound.
mildlymagnificent @190:
Firstly, I, for one, would like to say I’ve missed you around here.
Second-thanks for that. I never knew about the ‘ee’ sound. That does make the exceptions list crumble. Cool.
@189 Tony!
– I got nothing but love for you. And I am the sort of (whatever…) that will pursue understanding until all the alcohol and all the food is in bellies and long gone. Or everyone has just run away screaming.
– But this is one of those issues that has reached a point at which I am not skilled, clear-headed nor* clever enough to make sense without much stumbling. And I am not being modest. And I am not engaging in self deprecation with intent or otherwise.
– If we had beers, and maybe multiple days, we’d likely get through it to some end.
– So I’m not “agreeing to disagree” or any other condescending crap, I’m just out of juice.
– Respect, blessings and thanks for asking.
* I just had to look up “neither without nor,” and my first takeaway was “hey… great band name.”
Oh crap I’m tired.
I meant “nor without neither.” The other one sucks, euphonically, metrically and al dente.
knowknot:
Ok. :)
I respect your decision.
It’s not the estrogen that makes us less likely to criticise. It’s because we’ve seen what happens to other women who have tried. It doesn’t stop all of us of course, but it’s that one extra hoop to jump through that the men don’t have to deal with. Along with the many many other hoops.
– You know what I want (and this is at least tengential, for me anyway)?
– I want a group of women to go on at severe length about how women talk to women, as a topic in an of itself.
– Then, I want the same in terms of how it differs from how men talk to men. Because, unlike the turnaround, I’m pretty sure women hear, at a minimum due to having to endure.
– And if anyone suggests, even in jest, that I watch Sex in the City, I will kill myself.
Watch Sex in the City 2.
::ducks::
A. Noyd., #187,
Fe? Min? Ism?
Nope sorry. Never heard of it. Is it some new dance craze? I’ve thrown a few critical postures in my time I can tell you.
Louis
Knownot,
No no no. You don’t kill yourself! You kill everyone else. That is the only proportionate response to Sex In The City….
….which I didn’t really enjoy. Honest. And watch the whole series alternately giggling and eye rolling and having fantastic conversations with my wife about. Never happened. And I’m not ashamed to admit it never happened. Never. Got it?
Louis
@197 Tony!
It has ducks?
Gross.
@200 galin banev
Thank you sweetie. Sleep tight.
Wow!
Much Inaccuracy!
Do not want!
Such projection!
Need popcorn!
@199 Louis
It is amazing, the depths of bravery and good humor in times of trial our loved ones inspire in us (if the need for such were, in fact, to arrive).
Knownot,
I should also point out that it was in no way I who alerted her to this funny new show about some women in NYC. That also never happened.
She made me watch it. Like that scene out of Clockwork Orange. I wanted to watch cars crashing and men hitting things. Big, muscly, sweaty men. Doing man things. With their shirts off. To each other. Manly. Because I am a man.
Just so we’re clear.
Louis
knowknot (#201)
If only. I once watched a bro mallard try to get it on with a lady mallard. He was taking his sweet time, stomping all over her back and chewing on her head to keep her in place. Right as he finally popped out his erection, she threw him off, turned around, and gave him a nice big chomp on the wang.
@205 Louis
I am clear. Also stinky and unshaven. Dude.
@206 A. Noyd
An angry feminist duck, no doubt.
And maybe the basis for a nice cloaca and dagger story.
(what?)
Sorry I had to post this here, but since that sex freak Greta Christina (she has some really ‘nice’ books about how to be a sex pervert if you’re interested in that kind of thing) had me banned for supposedly being sexist just for suggesting that her comment on Sam Harris’ sexism(!) was silly to the extreme. Anyway, here it goes, I’d be happy if you could forward this to her(don’t worry this post mentions you as well):
[Yeah, I can see why Greta blocked you. Bye. –pzm]
A. Noyd @206
::cheers lady mallard::
“Sex freak”? “Sex pervert”?
“Are we the baddies?”
(I’ll just leave this here.)
Seriously, it’s just too fucking easy.
Louis
Any monitors about? Can we get AgeOfReasonXXI’s¹ post deleted? It’s what the obsessed, abusive fuck deserves for trying to use PZ to force Greta to listen to him.
………….
¹ What’s that law again where someone with “reason” or “skeptic” in their ‘nym is utterly devoid of either?
@knowknot
*groan*
@208 AgeOfReasonXXI
Nice to see you finally made it out of the 7th grade. Your vocabulary is really improving, and you’re getting a firm hand on satire, building to your climax (and I mean literal satire this time). And “sexism hysteria” is an especially amusing play on words; glad to see you’re pursuing your interest in etymology.
@212 A. Noyd
Sorry. The filters aren’t working. Time to sleep.
A. Noyd,
Alert sent
@galin banev
Nice insults. Where did you copy-paste those from?
@AgeOfReasonXXI
We can see plain as day why Greta doesn’t want your sort in her space. We don’t want you either.
I see AgeOfReasonXXI shows again why anybody using reason, intelligent, skeptical, and a few other words in their ‘nyms are nothing but idiotlogical blowhards. Applause for providing prima facie evidence for this hypothesis.
I think, Nerd, that if he reduced his number of targets and paid attention to accuracy of fire – in this instance to clarity of expression – he might make more impact on the world’s thinking.
Then again, perhaps not.
I am very reluctant to change my posting name. It’s my actual name after all and I’d have to remember something else which is just a massive pain in the arse to be honest. Granted, remembering things with my arse is not the most appropriate choice, but them’s the breaks. But I digress.
Perhaps I should become “Rational Louis, the Intelligent, Sceptical, Reason Loving Egalitarian”
Hmmm
Louis
Is it just me or does the fact that this shitstain thinks that not having sex in highschool is an issue speak volumes about him? And that’s not even considering aaaaall the other crap. Someone needs a shrink indeed…
Oh, and just in case you have any lingering doubts, you are a sexist, AgeOfReason, and your failure to grasp why makes your nym hilarious.
By the way, isn’t the age of reason something like age 8 or so? Is that when you peaked? Because that would explain so much….
Did Jared Hansen leave a dump in this thread as well?
His rant on Greta’s blog: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2014/09/12/sam-harris-is-just-factually-wrong-globally-atheism-has-no-gender-split/
comment #67 has some really fucking weird stuff in it.
You just can’t make this sort of stuff up…
Not just the number of targets is spread too wide, the ammunition too. I know a lot of idiots take the shotgun approach to bigotry, but it tends to be more laughable than hurtful. I mean, can’t he even pick a consistent mental disease to stick on Greta, instead of armchair-diagnosing her with a different one in each sentence?
Someone who uses female body parts as an insult gibbering about sexism. Now that’s comedy and tragedy.
Anyway. Sam Harris basically said there arent enough pretty pink bows in atheism to attract women. Or you can insert whatever socially constructed gender myth you want.
Jared’s comment over there is just an overly long, boring argument for inaction, with a dash of strawmanning.
Is “Troll Shepherd” the insult of the day? Does one get breadsticks with that? And couldn’t it be “trollherd”? Cowherds and goatherds exist, after all. “Troll Shepherd” is inelegant.
I would ask what happened to AgeOfReasons I through XX, but instead I’m just going to assume they exploded from the pent-up pressure of their own ire.
Stuck in the 18th century said:
My FSM: It’s finally happened, folks! The zombie apocalypse has taken down every server on the internet except FTB!
Crip Dyke @ 227:
My brain feels rather slighted now.
AgeOfReasonXXI @ 208:
Protip: When someone hangs up on you that often, they don’t actually want to hear you talk.
To put it another way, the restraining order doesn’t mean “Try harder”.
To put it even more basically: No means no.
If you don’t know that, what does that say about you as a feminist?
If you do know that, what does that say about you continuing to try for attention?
galin banev:
AgeOfReasonXXI:
I see someone has issued a new script. Protip, guys: it’s more impressive if your work is original.
No you’re not, and no you didn’t.
Yeah, that’s all you did.
If there was one thing I wish I could get through the heads of trolls, it’s this: Your opinions are nowhere near as important as you think they are.
Also, not having gotten laid in high school is nowhere near as shameful as being ragingly and obviously insecure about one’s own sexuality. That’s all that I can possibly read into the “I’m totally sex positive and have lots of sex, oh yes, you better believe it, but the way YOU do it is like totally sex-perverted” posture on display here.
AgeOfReasonXXI
No need to read anything further from you you shaming shitstain.
galin banev @200:
It’s clear you don’t know how to argue.
Do you even know what an ‘argument’ is? Because you sure aren’t engaging in one. You don’t even touch on the substance of PZ’s posts. It’s funny that you’re calling us embarrassments when you can’t even bother to address the arguments of the people you dismiss.
Rey Fox @231:
While I know what you meant here, this is stated very ineloquently. The problem with him is that he’s shaming someone for their sexual choices, and is a raging sexist taintstain.
(I was insecure about my own sexuality for a while, yet I was nothing like this shartface)
Anyone remember Sam Harris’ “Brights”?
A quick googling of “Galin Banev” (who very appropriately has “ban” in his name), shows that apparently AgeOfReasonXXI has stolen his facebook profile photo.
wonderful differences between men and women, differences that make this short life on earth worth living
What ianmcs is pushing here is the view that we should accept sexism because it makes him feel “wonderful”; his (and apparently Harris’) separate-spheres fetish is so central to their worldview that debunking it would make live actually not worth living.
Anyone who has debated theists is no doubt familiar with the religious version of this argument: people would be devastated without their faith so you mustn’t raise questions about whether or not it is actually true. Happy is better than true, so STFU.
Of course, ianmcs’ motives here are much more venal. It’s not about giving the poor or disadvantaged or grieving hope; it’s about the illusion needed to sustain their romantic-sexual vive-le-difference fetish.
Galin Banev and AgeOfReasonXXI are the same person. Banned for sock-puppetry and general head-up-assedness.
If you take out “ban” and unscramble “galinev” you get leaving.
Holy wow.
Proof that there is a god after all! Just kidding. But that is amazing. I’m reading Word Freaks right now, which is about scrabble players. They do a lot of anagramming like that, are you a scrabble player, knowknot?
I had a feeling they were the same person. Sheesh. PZ, any chance you want to head over to the abortion thread?
neverjaunty
We all know that god put women on earth with the sole purpose of pleasing straight dudes…
Oh! More shocking revelations!
If we take the double “x” as an accidental, unwanted duplication (how sexist!) and unscarmble, we get “forgoes xenia,” (xenia being the effect male parentage has on hybrid seed in a female parent)…
Supremacist (or something) as well! And so cleverly disguised!
(My middle names are Conspiracy Theory.)
For the unintiated: /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s /s
Giliell @242:
I thought god put women on earth to serve as penis homes.
Tony
I just worded that a bit more nicely.
It speaks volumes about the gender specific shaming tatics of misogynist arsehats like the now banned sock-puppeting troll Galin Banev/AgeOfReasonXXI that xe sought to shame Greta as a ‘sex pervert’ but went after PZ on the basis that not havings sex while in high school is supposedly some unforgiveable character flaw in a man. So, having too much sex or the ‘wrong’ kind of sex is ‘shameful’ in a woman in the world according to Galin Banev/AgeOfReasonXXI, whereas in a man what is to be judged and ridiculed is a failure to have sex early and/or often enough. It all plays back into the way misogynists like to try to shove women into the tired and prejudiced ‘madonna/whore’ false dichotomy, while seeking to control male behaviour by placing toxic and non-functional concepts of masculinity as the only real factor defining the notional ‘worth’ of any penis-haver.
Would it be possible for the Galin Banevs of the world to reverse the order of these tactics, and shame a woman for not having sex early or often enough, and a man for having the ‘wrong’ kind or too much? Yes, and indeed ‘prude shaming’ of women is almost as common place as ‘slut shaming’, but judging a man for having the ‘wrong’ type of sex is rare outside the standard homophobic attitudes that commonly sit alongside misogynistic bigotry, and the idea that a man could have too much straight sex is rarely heard from this kind of oblivious bigoted nitwit. That would risk treading on unearned male privilege afterall, and that is the last thing they want
These idiots always tip their hand sooner rather than later, even though the rampant Dunning Kruger syndrome common to pretty much all of them leads them to imagine that they are so much more intelligent than mere mortals.
One more obnoxious arsehole splattered all over the thread by the mighty banhammer, and xe won’t be missed. Just be careful not to get any bigot on your boots.
@244 Tony!
Um… does that make everything other than “mission textbook”… camping?
… I guess that goes with the perspective being sarcasmated.
@245 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Actually, another way to say it is [redacted] which is still shocking and amusing, while still being inoffensive to women.
Did anyone catch this response from Sam Harris?
@SamHarrisOrg · 5h
Alright, fans of pointless controversy, you win. My next blog post will address my alleged sexism and misogyny. #EstrogenVibe
Pointless controversy, yep. Drama queens we are.
Then this:
@SamHarrisOrg · 21m
I have a draft of my response to my feminist detractors. Just going to run it by my wife, my mother, and Martha, my copy editor.
@248 theoreticalgrrrl
yes. so, waiting.
See, if his wife and mom and lady copy editor agree with him, that totally settles it. They are real women, not unnatural feminazi gargoyle/harpy/she-beast Medusas who know nothing about feminine nature. and need to be schooled/slain by our brave hero Ulysses/Sam Harris.
@250 theoreticalgrrrl
Or he trusts them. Or one of them is a professional. Or one of them is a woman.
Or maybe they’re all drugged and in chains and brainwashed and he knows he’ll get a self stimulating response from them.
Whatever. That helped.
Presumably without showing them WHAT they’re objecting to.
theoreticalgrrrl @248:
I wonder if his next blog post will contain evidence in support of his sexist opinions. Or will it be loaded to the gills with just-so bullshit.
@240 yazikus
Sorry for the delay.
I used to be… my mother loved Scrabble. One of my daughters played for a while, then saw a squirrel. I’m just drawn to what words do to us, and what we do to them… all the colors, textures and forms. Garden variety stuff.
We played a little religiously though… used a standard dictionary rather than the Scrabble version. Figured that words played for points without meanings was… kinda blasphemous, or something.
Hey. I know. We could kill him before he responds.
@knowknot,
No, let’s not,
I remember Sam Harris retweeted an article a couple of years ago that said (if I remember correctly) “Larry Summers has the last laugh against feminists at Harvard,” It was something about “gender” vs. “equity” feminism, and how the former are wrong about everything. So I’m not very hopeful about Harris’ response.
so… being married means you’re not a misogynist.
if this is supposed to be a poke at feminists… uh, well done?
what HAS he been smoking lately?
knowknot (#251)
It’s the same thing a white guy does after he gets called on his racism. He reports the opinion of his “black friend” to shut down all his critics. As long as one or two people of color don’t agree that he’s racist, then, according to him, no PoC is justified in calling him racist. It’s an inherently racist defense, though, because he’s appointing himself the judge of which opinions held by PoC on racism are legitimate and privileging the ones convenient to him. If he wasn’t racist, he’d realize it was his duty to listen to more than just the convenient opinions.
Harris is doing this with sexism and women.
OK. Sorry. I’m out.
Probably went out and found a Malibu Stacey to run it by too. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl!”
I sure hope nobody is excusing his views because of the medium they were delivered in either. As in “Dawkins just sucks at Twitter”, or “Harris was just going off-the-cuff in a Q&A.” It’s been demonstrated many times that these are distillations of what they really believe. Harris’ blog post on the subject promises to be the same crap, only a hundred times more pompous and tedious.
@PZ Meyers, #65
Hi PZ. This comment is me killing my darlings. My previous comments were long because brevity breeds misunderstandings. Across the spectrum of reader-outcomes, ambiguity fosters some very long-term misconceptions – which is also the problem created by snap-judgments and reductionist interpretations, which are a dime a dozen in your commenters, unfortunately. I would rather try to write one (or two) long-form comments that are as articulate and explanatory as I have time/patience to write – and risk people not reading them – than write 20 snarky, tit-for-tat comments whose greatest contribution is to simply announce my allegiance to the group-think. That is what most of the comments here are doing – yet you single mine out for, apparently, being too long? Overly wordy? I think that’s sad. It’s too bad the posts and comments here aren’t exhibiting a little more clean-up of misconceptions, rather than reinforcing them.
See, that’s the problem – Harris didn’t say women aren’t fine critical thinkers. He didn’t say there is a disparity on the critical thinking scale between women and men. What Harris said was:
emphasis mine
Your commenters suggested I read “Delusions of Gender” to fix my errors. So I started that book the next day. Unfortunately, while making good points about the overuse of the “women and men are intrinsically different” over the centuries, it fails to address at all (so far) twin studies that quantify genetic/innate influences on identity, of which gender is one. One example of that writer’s failure, like commenters here, to consider and address what evidence would suggest they are wrong, rather than all the evidence that “proves” them right – studies where priming or gender-asymmetrical forms of motivation (like paying participants $2 to try to get men to perform as well on emotional tests as women) are able to zero-out the apparent differences in men and women. Manipulating environment to show that men and women can perform the same does indicate that men and women have similar maximum-capabilities – but it doesn’t explain why men and women prefer to engage their faculties differently, when strategic nudges are absent.
It isn’t as if men are doing nothing worthwhile when they are paying less-attention to emotional queues – to infer that, simply because environment can be carefully designed to induce it, doesn’t explain why it should be necessary – and blaming the disparity on culture is just religious-thinking. Why not zero-in on study participants that have grown up in highly liberal, pro-feminist environments? Do you see any motivational/preference differences in such men and women? I think you will – and that’s what twin-studies confirm, and it’s what our knowledge of the side-effects of artificial injections of hormones that differ between men and women suggests.
Sexism exists, and I am not promoting the idea that women should stay out of science. What I am saying is that when some feminists start to criticize the preferences of women and even other feminists, they are treading on thin ice. When social engineering starts to feel the need to make corrections to even freely chosen individual preferences – you have crossed over into the apparatus of oppression, even if you mean well. More caution – not snarky judgmentalism – is warranted.
@Seven of Mine, formerly piegasm, #69
@PZ Meyers, #73:
@Sastra, #132
@Ichthyic, #145 (“Appeal to Pity” – lol. Fucking anti-brilliant. How pathetically entertaining. What a conundrum you people provide for others to twist our brains around how you can possibly be so smug and so wrong, all at once!
This whole “martyrdom” and “appeal-to-pity” meme was the thing that really just pissed me off, people. Note that the appeal-to-pity link Ichthyic presented states its structure as:
1. P is presented, with the intent to create pity.
2. Therefore claim C is true.
If anyone thinks I failed to try to present a case, and that my so-called appeal-to-pity was a substitute for evidence, I pity you.
As for martyrdom, please allow me to explain this ONE thing. Consider three cases of so-called martyrdom:
1. religious martyr – a heretic is burned at the stake. A defining feature of the martyr in this case is to more or less “damn” the martyrer’s – the act and attitude of being martyred is defined by a sentiment of giving up on – or choosing to separate oneself from (even if through death) those that would martyr them.
2. social martyr – a woman is mad at a group that enabled her now ex-boyfriend to cheat on her. As she scowls at the group, she says, “Fuck all of you. I don’t want to speak to or even see any of you. You are dead to me, you pieces of shit.” She turns and walks away. The most salient part of her martyrdom is her lack of desire to foster any further bonds with these people, at least right now. Right now, the group might mock her as a martyr. But if she came back and forgave them or apologized later, and simply conveyed to them why she was hurt, it would be strange for anyone to continue to call her a martyr. Again, the key to martyrdom is in some way a desire to give up on the group doing the martyring. In fact, there may as well be another logical fallacy characterized by people calling someone else a martyr – then engaging in the actions that enforce that martyrdom – as somehow substituting for rational evidence in their favor, and justifying their bad behavior. Imagine how nonsensical it would be for a 1650’s priest to mock a burning, scorning witch as, “Oh, you’re just being a martyr!” Of course she is. You’re making her into one! So what!?!?!
3. A petulant child gets upset that her parents won’t let her bring her doll to the waterpark. The child throws a tantrum and pounces into bed, declaring that she refuses to go to the waterpark. “No, you guys go. I’m staying here!” The child is seeking a separation, is giving-up on any chance of reconciliation (at least for now), and is choosing to have pain inflicted on herself (no waterpark fun) as her final leverage on her parents, so as to try to punish the parents in whatever way remaining to her. Martyrdom is always a relative (or absolute, when through death) last resort – a final means of punishing others. The parent says, “Awwww – you’re such a cute little martyr!” In this case, the usage of “martyr” is satirical – used to simultaneously call out the structure of a martyrous attitude, while also commenting on the lack of this particular martyr having any grander social purpose beyond a transparent self-interest. Point: if you’re going to mock a person for ostensibly being a martyr, it only really makes sense if their motives subjectively lack any cultural meaning – otherwise you’re commenting on your own bad behavior, not theirs – martyrs have been some of our most important social reformers through out the centuries – on both sides of the modern political aisle.
Many writers have used an argument preface like this: “It angers many [name some group], but the fact is [blah],” which is functionally identical to the class I used, “I realize it will anger some of you, but hear me out – and withhold judgment until I’ve completed the case.”
And that, my friends, is the much more common meaning being used – especially when they follow their preface with a rationally presented case – whether or not you end up agreeing with them or not.
These aren’t an appeal to pity or the act of a martyr. They are an appeal to you to, please, hold your tongue and try listening. Try looking at where you and I agree, not shutting down your brain as fast as you see something where we disagree. As I said, so many of the responses took on a logical fallacy of their own – you decided to just attack the structure of my comments, not the underlying content.
So how about considering this:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/personal-attack.html
This (it’s okay for us to group-oppress dissent, but it isn’t okay for society):
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/special-pleading.html
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well.html – actually, is when unfavorable information is used to undermine whatever a person will say in the future. This would be more true if I said anything disparaging AND SPECIFIC about any of you, particularly if it was off-topic or out of context. But simply saying, “I am aware that you are going to disagree with me, but I’m going to say this, anyway,” is NOT something people do simply because they want you to feel sorry for them and their argument – it is something people say, for the sake of brevity, to try to tell you that they have at least some sense what SOME of your objections will be – and they are asking you to hold them back, and try to listen to the entire position, and preferably respond afterward only after considering carefully what objections go without saying, or were already undermined in the prefaced statements.
Think of a petulant child that throws a t The thesis I will show is that martyrdom is defined by the martyr seeking
@Amphiox, #70
I did, in fact, see that Sam Harris was asked 2 questions. I was avoiding evaluating the first one – the one where the reporter suggests something like, “most atheists are male, why is that, Sam?” because first, I found the fact that my wife is an atheist who REALLY dislikes Sam, yet is intelligent and loves a good argument, gave me at least anecdotal evidence to offer up on that topic, especially since I might be able to offer some clarity to what I think Sam really meant, and help disarm the clearly too-open-to-interpretation verbiage he used. Second, I just know that I don’t know enough about gender differentials among atheists to say anything useful on that front – and if no one should comment unless they are a (self-proclaimed?) expert, then everyone here should be lost in contemplation, not snarking ad nauseam.
@hexidecima, #80
Actually, that wasn’t what I was doing, at all.
does citing the difference between colors necessarily indicate that one color is better than another? If anyone does infer that, isn’t that saying something about them, rather than the person trying to show sources of difference?
I’m not writing a thesis paper here. It’s comments on someone else’s blog, and adding comments 2 years after the fact would be absurd. Try thinking about how other people are saying something that might be new and useful information, rather than zeroing in on all the ways they are wrong.
@ A. Noyd, #135
Actually, Sam didn’t say men are better at appreciating criticism – his comments were about how (in our society) men apparently tend to be at least somewhat more interested in argument – and having their opinions validated argumentatively, and watching someone else win an argument (in the case of atheists who read his books). Even if you were right about my preface (you aren’t), no one said men appreciate receiving criticism better than women – it’s probably just as unpalatable for both genders – as is being group-bullied. But the genders, in our society, might respond to criticism asymmetrically, on average. This is just more reading miscomprehension and poor critical thinking on your part. Too much echo chamber?
@karmacat, #64
No.
If you say so. And if there is systemic variation in those 100 chemicals induced by any direct or indirect, physiological, environmental, or social differences that are coupled to gender – even if those effects were an artifact of our current era – my argument beats yours. It isn’t I who have to stretch to make my case. It is, in fact, you.
You people seem to want to somehow convince yourselves that even trivially observable exogenous realities that affect (men and) women – like mood changes related to menopause – or the emotional side-effects observed in hormone therapy – simply do not – cannot – exist – or else you take the other position – that simply because priming and calculated, gender-asymmetric gaming of societal rewards – can overcome these exogenous influences on identity. But besides the impossibility of doing this successfully across society and over time, your attempts to do that would be just another kind of oppression – of individuals choosing what’s best for everyone, and imposing it on the group – even though other individuals don’t agree with you. My other comments on this and the Dawkin’s thread illustrate further what’s wrong with this, and why even if you claim objective reality backs your prescriptions, and even if you could erase the gender effects of history, you still wouldn’t eradicate dissent against your prescriptions. If for no other reason than some people (including liberated women) will see you for the self-righteous, group-think pricks you are. =)
@Tony! The Queer Shoop, #101.
Read it. I could have written that, myself. I’m not endorsing all the bastards in the past that have tried to use gender differences to justify the oppression of individuals in that oppressed group. Don’t believe me? Go re-read my posts. You all decided that if I’m speaking about the undeniability of at least SOME statistically measurable differences between the genders, then I must be supporting 1700’s – or 1990’s – orthodoxy. No, I’m not. You all decided that. Not me.
@Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD, #103.
Ariaflame, I’m realize that continues to happen – but it also happens to men. It’s happening to me, right here. Look how oppressed I am! (sarcasm). In the context of my other comments here and on the Dawkins thread, I would like you to consider that sexism will never stop being a viable explanation for individuals of either gender to use when they don’t get what they want. This phenomenon is best explained by Game Theory, not sexism. Do you think it’s impossible for women to co-opt the ideas of men (or other women)? Or Women to ride on the coattails of men (or other women)? Of course it is. And that really does happen. Even if you could somehow gather evidence that men do it to women or women do it to men more, which would actually be very difficult by itself – consider how difficult – probably even impossible – it would be to separate the sexism causal factors from the group-identity factors?
@knowknot , #140.
Absolutely! Well said! Thank you! With that, I can go to sleep.
@PZ Meyers, #65
(corrected italics in previous post – sorry I can’t delete the previous post…)
Hi PZ. This comment is me killing my darlings. My previous comments were long because brevity breeds misunderstandings. Across the spectrum of reader-outcomes, ambiguity fosters some very long-term misconceptions – which is also the problem created by snap-judgments and reductionist interpretations, which are a dime a dozen in your commenters, unfortunately. I would rather try to write one (or two) long-form comments that are as articulate and explanatory as I have time/patience to write – and risk people not reading them – than write 20 snarky, tit-for-tat comments whose greatest contribution is to simply announce my allegiance to the group-think. That is what most of the comments here are doing – yet you single mine out for, apparently, being too long? Overly wordy? I think that’s sad. It’s too bad the posts and comments here aren’t exhibiting a little more clean-up of misconceptions, rather than reinforcing them.
See, that’s the problem – Harris didn’t say women aren’t fine critical thinkers. He didn’t say there is a disparity on the critical thinking scale between women and men. What Harris said was:
emphasis mine
Your commenters suggested I read “Delusions of Gender” to fix my errors. So I started that book the next day. Unfortunately, while making good points about the overuse of the “women and men are intrinsically different” over the centuries, it fails to address at all (so far) twin studies that quantify genetic/innate influences on identity, of which gender is one. One example of that writer’s failure, like commenters here, to consider and address what evidence would suggest they are wrong, rather than all the evidence that “proves” them right – studies where priming or gender-asymmetrical forms of motivation (like paying participants $2 to try to get men to perform as well on emotional tests as women) are able to zero-out the apparent differences in men and women. Manipulating environment to show that men and women can perform the same does indicate that men and women have similar maximum-capabilities – but it doesn’t explain why men and women prefer to engage their faculties differently, when strategic nudges are absent.
It isn’t as if men are doing nothing worthwhile when they are paying less-attention to emotional queues – to infer that, simply because environment can be carefully designed to induce it, doesn’t explain why it should be necessary – and blaming the disparity on culture is just religious-thinking. Why not zero-in on study participants that have grown up in highly liberal, pro-feminist environments? Do you see any motivational/preference differences in such men and women? I think you will – and that’s what twin-studies confirm, and it’s what our knowledge of the side-effects of artificial injections of hormones that differ between men and women suggests.
Sexism exists, and I am not promoting the idea that women should stay out of science. What I am saying is that when some feminists start to criticize the preferences of women and even other feminists, they are treading on thin ice. When social engineering starts to feel the need to make corrections to even freely chosen individual preferences – you have crossed over into the apparatus of oppression, even if you mean well. More caution – not snarky judgmentalism – is warranted.
@Seven of Mine, formerly piegasm, #69
@PZ Meyers, #73:
@Sastra, #132
@Ichthyic, #145 (“Appeal to Pity” – lol. Fucking anti-brilliant. How pathetically entertaining. What a conundrum you people provide for others to twist our brains around how you can possibly be so smug and so wrong, all at once!
This whole “martyrdom” and “appeal-to-pity” meme was the thing that really just pissed me off, people. Note that the appeal-to-pity link Ichthyic presented states its structure as:
1. P is presented, with the intent to create pity.
2. Therefore claim C is true.
If anyone thinks I failed to try to present a case, and that my so-called appeal-to-pity was a substitute for evidence, I pity you.
As for martyrdom, please allow me to explain this ONE thing. Consider three cases of so-called martyrdom:
1. religious martyr – a heretic is burned at the stake. A defining feature of the martyr in this case is to more or less “damn” the martyrer’s – the act and attitude of being martyred is defined by a sentiment of giving up on – or choosing to separate oneself from (even if through death) those that would martyr them.
2. social martyr – a woman is mad at a group that enabled her now ex-boyfriend to cheat on her. As she scowls at the group, she says, “Fuck all of you. I don’t want to speak to or even see any of you. You are dead to me, you pieces of shit.” She turns and walks away. The most salient part of her martyrdom is her lack of desire to foster any further bonds with these people, at least right now. Right now, the group might mock her as a martyr. But if she came back and forgave them or apologized later, and simply conveyed to them why she was hurt, it would be strange for anyone to continue to call her a martyr. Again, the key to martyrdom is in some way a desire to give up on the group doing the martyring. In fact, there may as well be another logical fallacy characterized by people calling someone else a martyr – then engaging in the actions that enforce that martyrdom – as somehow substituting for rational evidence in their favor, and justifying their bad behavior. Imagine how nonsensical it would be for a 1650’s priest to mock a burning, scorning witch as, “Oh, you’re just being a martyr!” Of course she is. You’re making her into one! So what!?!?!
3. A petulant child gets upset that her parents won’t let her bring her doll to the waterpark. The child throws a tantrum and pounces into bed, declaring that she refuses to go to the waterpark. “No, you guys go. I’m staying here!” The child is seeking a separation, is giving-up on any chance of reconciliation (at least for now), and is choosing to have pain inflicted on herself (no waterpark fun) as her final leverage on her parents, so as to try to punish the parents in whatever way remaining to her. Martyrdom is always a relative (or absolute, when through death) last resort – a final means of punishing others. The parent says, “Awwww – you’re such a cute little martyr!” In this case, the usage of “martyr” is satirical – used to simultaneously call out the structure of a martyrous attitude, while also commenting on the lack of this particular martyr having any grander social purpose beyond a transparent self-interest. Point: if you’re going to mock a person for ostensibly being a martyr, it only really makes sense if their motives subjectively lack any cultural meaning – otherwise you’re commenting on your own bad behavior, not theirs – martyrs have been some of our most important social reformers through out the centuries – on both sides of the modern political aisle.
Many writers have used an argument preface like this: “It angers many [name some group], but the fact is [blah],” which is functionally identical to the class I used, “I realize it will anger some of you, but hear me out – and withhold judgment until I’ve completed the case.”
And that, my friends, is the much more common meaning being used – especially when they follow their preface with a rationally presented case – whether or not you end up agreeing with them or not.
These aren’t an appeal to pity or the act of a martyr. They are an appeal to you to, please, hold your tongue and try listening. Try looking at where you and I agree, not shutting down your brain as fast as you see something where we disagree. As I said, so many of the responses took on a logical fallacy of their own – you decided to just attack the structure of my comments, not the underlying content.
So how about considering this:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/personal-attack.html
This (it’s okay for us to group-oppress dissent, but it isn’t okay for society):
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/special-pleading.html
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well.html – actually, is when unfavorable information is used to undermine whatever a person will say in the future. This would be more true if I said anything disparaging AND SPECIFIC about any of you, particularly if it was off-topic or out of context. But simply saying, “I am aware that you are going to disagree with me, but I’m going to say this, anyway,” is NOT something people do simply because they want you to feel sorry for them and their argument – it is something people say, for the sake of brevity, to try to tell you that they have at least some sense what SOME of your objections will be – and they are asking you to hold them back, and try to listen to the entire position, and preferably respond afterward only after considering carefully what objections go without saying, or were already undermined in the prefaced statements.
Think of a petulant child that throws a t The thesis I will show is that martyrdom is defined by the martyr seeking
@Amphiox, #70
I did, in fact, see that Sam Harris was asked 2 questions. I was avoiding evaluating the first one – the one where the reporter suggests something like, “most atheists are male, why is that, Sam?” because first, I found the fact that my wife is an atheist who REALLY dislikes Sam, yet is intelligent and loves a good argument, gave me at least anecdotal evidence to offer up on that topic, especially since I might be able to offer some clarity to what I think Sam really meant, and help disarm the clearly too-open-to-interpretation verbiage he used. Second, I just know that I don’t know enough about gender differentials among atheists to say anything useful on that front – and if no one should comment unless they are a (self-proclaimed?) expert, then everyone here should be lost in contemplation, not snarking ad nauseam.
@hexidecima, #80
Actually, that wasn’t what I was doing, at all.
does citing the difference between colors necessarily indicate that one color is better than another? If anyone does infer that, isn’t that saying something about them, rather than the person trying to show sources of difference?
I’m not writing a thesis paper here. It’s comments on someone else’s blog, and adding comments 2 years after the fact would be absurd. Try thinking about how other people are saying something that might be new and useful information, rather than zeroing in on all the ways they are wrong.
@ A. Noyd, #135
Actually, Sam didn’t say men are better at appreciating criticism – his comments were about how (in our society) men apparently tend to be at least somewhat more interested in argument – and having their opinions validated argumentatively, and watching someone else win an argument (in the case of atheists who read his books). Even if you were right about my preface (you aren’t), no one said men appreciate receiving criticism better than women – it’s probably just as unpalatable for both genders – as is being group-bullied. But the genders, in our society, might respond to criticism asymmetrically, on average. This is just more reading miscomprehension and poor critical thinking on your part. Too much echo chamber?
@karmacat, #64
No.
If you say so. And if there is systemic variation in those 100 chemicals induced by any direct or indirect, physiological, environmental, or social differences that are coupled to gender – even if those effects were an artifact of our current era – my argument beats yours. It isn’t I who have to stretch to make my case. It is, in fact, you.
You people seem to want to somehow convince yourselves that even trivially observable exogenous realities that affect (men and) women – like mood changes related to menopause – or the emotional side-effects observed in hormone therapy – simply do not – cannot – exist – or else you take the other position – that simply because priming and calculated, gender-asymmetric gaming of societal rewards – can overcome these exogenous influences on identity. But besides the impossibility of doing this successfully across society and over time, your attempts to do that would be just another kind of oppression – of individuals choosing what’s best for everyone, and imposing it on the group – even though other individuals don’t agree with you. My other comments on this and the Dawkin’s thread illustrate further what’s wrong with this, and why even if you claim objective reality backs your prescriptions, and even if you could erase the gender effects of history, you still wouldn’t eradicate dissent against your prescriptions. If for no other reason than some people (including liberated women) will see you for the self-righteous, group-think pricks you are. =)
@Tony! The Queer Shoop, #101.
Read it. I could have written that, myself. I’m not endorsing all the bastards in the past that have tried to use gender differences to justify the oppression of individuals in that oppressed group. Don’t believe me? Go re-read my posts. You all decided that if I’m speaking about the undeniability of at least SOME statistically measurable differences between the genders, then I must be supporting 1700’s – or 1990’s – orthodoxy. No, I’m not. You all decided that. Not me.
@Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD, #103.
Ariaflame, I’m realize that continues to happen – but it also happens to men. It’s happening to me, right here. Look how oppressed I am! (sarcasm). In the context of my other comments here and on the Dawkins thread, I would like you to consider that sexism will never stop being a viable explanation for individuals of either gender to use when they don’t get what they want. This phenomenon is best explained by Game Theory, not sexism. Do you think it’s impossible for women to co-opt the ideas of men (or other women)? Or Women to ride on the coattails of men (or other women)? Of course it is. And that really does happen. Even if you could somehow gather evidence that men do it to women or women do it to men more, which would actually be very difficult by itself – consider how difficult – probably even impossible – it would be to separate the sexism causal factors from the group-identity factors?
@knowknot , #140.
Absolutely! Well said! Thank you! With that, I can go to sleep.
How the fuck is a twin study supposed to tell us anything about the effects of gender?
Twins are either monozygotic, in which case they are sharing the same genetic make up and largely, but not completely the same environment which is a sexist one, or they’re not in which case they may have different sex chromosomes in which case they are born into a sexist society where people AMAB and people AFAB are treated very differently (for which DO have good studies)
Yawn, double wall of bullshit from hero worshipper. Boring. And who cares about your sleep other than you and your ego?
@ Jared Hansen
No we don’t. Nobody is saying that they don’t or can’t exist. What we’re saying is that culture and socialization do exist and that you cannot control for them. If you can’t control for them, you can’t say whether these differences are the result of biology or socialization or some combination thereof. The minute you try to say that anything related to behavior is intrinsically male or female you are, of necessity, full of shit because you have failed Study Methodology 101 and neglected to control for confounding factors.
And the situation we have here is legions of women explaining exactly why they’re turned off by atheism/skepticism as a movement and then a bunch of pompous white dudes, instead of figuring out how to get rid of those deterrents and then checking the numbers again like they ought to and would if they a) knew fuck all about how to reason correctly and/or b) cared, just declare “ladybrains” and go about their merry way.
(reads Harris’ statement)
Hmm…. so a sentient eusocial species on, for instance , Alpha Centauri B would have to be religious rather than atheist?
— — — —
anteprepro @ 18,
Ironically the Iron Lady of Britain was into this kind of “leadership”.
Sam Harris, communicated through song.
That kind of “well, they must be biologically unsuited for it anyway” explanation didn’t fly when it was used for black people, why do these supposedly enlightened folks swallow it all again when it’s used for women?
Oh geez. What’s next? We find out Dan Dennett was behind the Jennifer Lawrence photo leak?
It pains me to see biologists, of all people, regurgitating gender essentialist crap, considering how their science is routinely misused to justify prejudice.
Jared Hansen has dodged this question on Greta’s blog – I wonder if he’ll avoid it here, too?
Given that the racial disparity in atheism is about as prevalent (if not more so) than the gender disparity, what is inherent about PoC that makes them less likely to be atheists?
And if it’s not inherent an inherent racial trait, why should we assume it’s an inherent gender trait?
To put it another way, read this:
Scan ok to you?
Just go back and do that to your entire post. After the fifth or so time you read (your own) words to the effect of “I’m not saying blacks can’t be anything they want to be, but those subtle difference between white brains and black brains helps explain their relative places in society,” maybe you’ll get it.
Jared Hansen, #263
Don’t try justifying your “So…. I guess by posting this I’m just asking to be beat down by PZ’s crew again… but here goes…” as anything other than a defense mechanism. You wrote your comment, read it over, felt a shiver of fear down your spine at the inevitable backlash it would receive, and then, to make yourself feel better, to defend yourself against that backlash, posted your opener. And, on comment boards, that happens *all* the time, there are so many comments starting with “Well please, pretty please, don’t beat me up for saying what I’m about to say, however [insert something terrible]”. Look, I’m no innocent here: it’s near imposible for me to post something I view as even slightly heterodox without hedging it somewhere with the equivalent of an apology.
But don’t try to justify it as anything other than cross-hauling.
Jared Hansen
You should try editing your comments. It could improve your writing.
and part of our group-think is not using gendered slurs.
*yawns in Jared Hansen‘s face*
Your baseless assertions are not convincing me about Harris’ intent (he writes to persuade those who don’t already agree with him, after all), but I’m more than happy to believe that you only value argument when it confirms your biases. Or you value this shitty imitation of argument you’ve been getting up to, anyway. You probably confuse “winning” and “being so terrible at arguing that people throw up their hands and leave you to wallow in your verbose, stubborn incompetence.”
vaiyt (#269)
You do know that a lot of these enlightened folks still use it for black people, right? They call it “human biodiversity” (HBD) now. PZ’s done some posts on it. Same shit, different era.
Jared Hansen #263
At this point, you may want to scroll through the comments on this very blog and take a rough gender-count.
(It’s part of this amazing new world-view I’ve come up with, which I realise is a bit radical but I’m hoping it’ll catch on. I call it “empiricism.”)
Inb4 “Pharyngula has a higher shrieking feminist harpy to properly demure and conflict-averse woman ratio than the general population.”
Seven of Mine @ 278,
I don’t know about you, but I think harpies are pretty damn cool, and I wouldn’t mind being called one. Raptors are cool, harpies are raptor-women, so there. In fact, I think I’ll go change my name right now.
Also, thanks to all of you for dealing with the various trolls. I read, I appreciate, and since I can’t say it better than you have, I don’t try.
Love this from Crommunist:
Jared:
Any intention of apologizing for the racist shit you directed to me you smug asshole?
And yes godz, there’s brevity and there’s 5 mile long Wall o’ texts.
theoreticalgrrrl @ 280
…and that is why Crommunist is awesome.
And I just saw that Anri did the same thing. Oh well.
With all the talk of “domestic violence” Feminist sites are filled with talk on the men’s propensity to violence, and yet a male atheist says that women are less inclined to atheism because they are less “combative” and it’s sexism. Seems to be a double standard, or logical inconsistency there.
Bill Contrary @ 286
Assuming for a second your (unsubstantiated) claim that “Feminist sites are filled with talk on the men’s propensity to violence,” I would point out that most feminist discourse highlights the fact that male violence is NOT a result of inherent characteristics of men, but rather a result of a socialization process which equates “manly” with “violent.” Sam Harris made the (again, unsubstantiated) claim that women are disinclined from “combative” atheism because of inherent characteristics of women, completely ignoring socialization.
Bill Contrary #286
I’m interested. Why did you put “domestic violence” in scare-quotes?
Also, there’s a whole range of behaviour between vociferous debate and beating the shit out of someone.
There’s a big difference between “Men are committing more domestic violence because they’re being socialized to act violent, let’s try changing that” and “Women are less represented in atheism because their lady hormones are incompatible with rational thinking, let’s do nothing”.
Bill Contrary @286:
You’re going to need to provide evidence that feminist sites claim that men have a propensity to violence before we can have a further conversation.
Here are some facts that I’m sure will bounce off your thickheaded cranium:
http://www.safehorizon.org/page/domestic-violence-statistics–facts-52.html
Oh, and btw, FUCK YOU for the quotes around domestic violence. As if that shit isn’t real. Fucking shitstain.
Bill Contrary @ 286;
Observing a trend within a group, seeking to identify the social and cultural factors that lead to it, and asking how they could be mitiigated is fundamentally different from observing a trend in a group and declaring it an immutable aspect of the biology of the membership of that group that need not be addressed since it can never be changed.
The former seeks to overturn harmful societal norms and the oppressive status quo, the latter reinforces it.
The day credible, mainstream feminist voices start declaring that gendered violence is simply the result of the on average higher testosterone levels found in most men relative to most women rendering men biologically incapable of refraining from violence against women, then you would have a point.
Bill Contrary @ 286
You should be ashamed of yourself for accusing others of logical inconsistency in a paragraph wherein you equivocate between physical violence and argumentativeness and pretend you’ve discovered a double standard.
“Critical thinking is not intrinsically male”
You are apparently completely oblivious to the difference between “critical thinking” and criticism. The dictionary defines critical thinking as “the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion”. Harris is speculating as to why a large majority of his readership is male. He thinks his combative style might be less appealing to women. He is in no way suggesting that females are less capable of critical thinking.
Six weeks late to apologize for your hero. But, your view, not ours. No evidence presented. Typical.
Pull n Pray @294:
His assumption that that’s true in the first place is problematic.
And why would he think that given the presence of many women in the atheoskeptisphere who employ a combative style?
Moreover, even if it’s true, he states this as if it’s a fact, but presents no evidence. If he wanted someone to believe what he’s saying, why doesn’t he cite the evidence that shows women don’t prefer combative styles of argumentation?
No, the man has a fuckton of biases and prejudices about women that inform his views and he refuses to acknowledge them, despite the many people who have pointed them out. Instead, he’d rather double down and refuse to accept that he, like everyone else, holds sexist views.
But that’s not surprising given that he also refuses to see that he hold racist views as well.
Sam Harris is a toxic, sexist, racist, asshole.
I was just thinking that what we really need at this point is Sam Harris Acolyte # 93498574987535435438797 to rephrase what Harris said because, clearly, that’s what the problem has been all along. And then, lo and behold, Pull n Pray shows up as if summoned by the thought! Thanks Pull n Pray! I’ll make every effort to be convinced by it this time, really I will. No promises, though.
Pull n Pray
Critical thinking involves criticism, you hairsplitting pissant. And again, the bullshit about “combative style might be less appealing to women”, even ignoring all implications about critical thinking, is still sexist as shit. It still is assuming, outright asserting, that women are all about the warm fuzzies and are snuggly and sensitive and never ever confrontational, or angry, or (heaven forbid) assertive. Still fucking sexist, you asshat. Fucking clueless apologists.
Here, completed it for you.
Harris did not say critical thinking is intrinsically male. Nor did he say most of his readers were male. He was asked why they were. Read the post again. He is quoted as saying “I think it may have to do with my personal slant as an author… This can sound very ANGRY to people… There’s something about that critical POSTURE that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women.” (caps mine). He’s talking about Hitchslaps and cockfighting, about posture and posturing. I don’t agree with him and the estrogen vibe statement is low and lame if it wasn’t tongue in cheek. Still, he did not say women are incapable of critical thinking. You all are strawmanning and poisoning the well. At worst, the estrogen vibe statement as a stand alone shows privilege and creepiness.
You are sounding like one of those folks who say “only look at what is in that particular paper”. I look at all sources, not just what SH wants to tell me, including all those times where he talks out of turn, and won’t apologize for. I get the feeling he believes in evo-psych, and he sees it as a given, rather than junk science.
Chimera @ 300
Precisely! He didn’t say they were incapable. Merely less capable. Due to hormones and shit. You get it. You really get it.
chimera:
No, he only implied it. Conveniently leaving out the part that contradicts your “just so” dribbling?
“People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. ”
That is where “women are fluffy, non-confrontationalists who don’t like anger” converges on “women don’t do critical thinking”.
Because criticizing ideas and handling criticism of your ideas is what critical thinking IS.
Learn to read for comprehension or fuck off.
I mean, if the nurturing is a hindrance to engaging in critical thinking, then clearly that would mean they’re less capable. But don’t let nuance or context adjust your beliefs, chimera. I know I’m not actually holding out hope for that.
I took “People just don’t like to have their ideas crticized” as referring to religious people, not women in particular. And fuck you too Anteprepro.
chimera:
What the hell?
When he asks “why are most of my readers male”, he’s assuming most of his readers are male. I question if that’s the case, and he provides no proof that it’s true.
No we’re not, and we’ve explained why. I’m getting a whiff of Harris apologetics from you here, so while I’d ask you go re-read this thread, I don’t think it would do any good.
BTW, I left you a comment in the Thunderdome a few weeks ago, hoping you’d clear up some of your criticisms of the commenteriat, because I disagree with a lot of the things you’ve said about us. You rarely elaborate so I’m left scratching my head thinking “WTF”.
chimera:
You took it that way, even though that makes no sense in context whatsoever.
Bravo.
Hi Tony,
I did re-read the thread. I usually do all my homework. Either that or I don’t show up for class at all which must be what happened in the Thunderdrome thread. Sorry. Anyway, I think you’ll find me here defending people who get criticized, it’s just something I do.
chimera
Why would you feel the need to defend sexism? SH is being criticized for being a sexist asshat. He can educate himself and stop saying stupid sexist shit at any time and we would all be very happy. Until that day comes, we will continue to criticize his sexist actions and words.
If you do that reflexively, it is trolling. Unless you evidence why you are defending them solidly, you can be dismissed. So, either step up your game, or quit your game.
Great, the “I’m just a humble Devil’s Advocate” M.O. is at work. That always results in good things!