I have a lot of links this month, so I tried to organized them into themes.

Sexual violence & #MeToo

#MeToo is not all there is, and here’s why I’m not sharing my story – When activists like me criticize #MeToo, we’re not just hipsters trying to say, “we were fighting sexual violence before it was cool”.  We’re trying to say that #MeToo was a step forward in terms of reaching a greater number of people, but in some ways a step back in the level of discourse.  This is absolutely to be expected; whenever an important message reaches a new audience, it takes a step back to help people to catch up.  In the public conversation, people keep on asking if #MeToo has gone too far, and my answer is that it hasn’t gone nearly far enough.  This article talks about some things that #MeToo is missing.

Keep Your Acephobia Out of #MeToo, Jaclyn Friedman – Jaclyn Friedman, coauthor of Yes Means Yes, wrote an article about something she felt has been missing from #MeToo: a discussion of survivor’s sex lives, and how sex can be used to heal trauma.  It’s true, this has been missing from the #MeToo conversation, but that doesn’t mean it’s missing everywhere.  For some survivors, the narrative about sexual healing is so dominant as to be oppressive, especially for survivors who are ace.  The sexual healing narrative must be paired with alternative narratives, where survivors do not have sex, and are not dehumanized for it.

When Boys Are Victims of Sexual Assault – This article has several first-person accounts of sexual assault from boys and young men.  It seems that the experience interacts with masculinity in strange ways for many of them.

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Is Black Panther Alt-Right? (video) – Apparently several people in the alt-right are arguing that the fictional nation of Wakanda is an alt-right paradise.  Shaun deconstructs this in an entertaining way.  Note: I’ve not watched the movie.

The Ace Flag: A History and Celebration – This is mine, I’m plugging my own article.  It’s a little history of the purple-white-gray-black ace flag.  I was around when it was created.

Lawrence Krauss’s History of Sexual Harassment – Rebecca Watson talks about the Buzzfeed article that revealed Lawrence Krauss’ history of sexual harassment.  My reaction to the Buzzfeed article was, “Didn’t we already know that?”  I had recalled from the distant past that there were accusations, and all the skeptical orgs knew about it too.  But Krauss faced no consequences until recently.  Typical.

What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special (video) – After all that talk about difficult video games, and whether they should include “easy modes”, it seems that some game developers have come up with an effective approach to offer players freedom to play how they want to play, while also maintaining a coherent vision of how the game should be played. The key is to offer options, but to clearly communicate (either explicitly or implicitly) the intended way to play. Also, rather than calling it an “easy mode” it’s best to call it something less judgmental, such as “assist mode”.

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Bi Any Means Podcast: Atheism and Asexuality with Emily Karp – I was excited to listen to this episode!  I was interviewed on Bi Any Means a few years ago on the same topic, but this interview should be more up to date.  As they discuss in the episode, atheist communities have become more cognizant and accepting of asexuality, but unsurprisingly, it very much depends on which communities you interact with.

Sapiosexuals: The Science of People Who Are Turned on by Brains – Rebecca Watson criticizes sapiosexuality and a recent study about it.  I also have a very negative reaction to sapiosexuality, and my main association is with men in skepticism who are low-key complaining that there aren’t enough intelligent women around.  On the other hand, sapiosexuality also has some connections with ace communities, and I realized that there are other angles to it–which is not to say that this eliminates my criticism of it.

I agree with Watson that the study she describes is garbage.  Asking people if they’re attracted to intelligence is not useful methodology.  Unfortunately, Watson’s suggested methodology of using electrodes and fMRIs is also problematic.  See there’s this infamous study of bisexuality, and long story short, objective measures of attraction have issues.  I propose instead that we give people a bunch of fake dating profiles and ask them who they would be interested in.

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A smaller link roundup this month because I wasn’t really paying attention over break.  But here are a few things.

Recovered Memories and Sexual Assault – It’s true that with persistent and coercive questioning, you can cause people to “recover” memories of traumatic events that didn’t actually happen.  On the other hand, it’s very common for memory of traumatic events to be impaired.  It’s also common for people to report sexual assault a long time after the fact–not because people repressed the memories and later recovered them, but because many people don’t initially conceptualize sexual assault as such, and because there are many obstacles to reporting.  If you hear an account of sexual assault a long time after the fact, and involves some confused memories, it is completely wrong to conclude that therefore these are an example of fabricated “recovered” memories.

Philippines Extends Martial Law in South for Another Year – The fight with Islamist militants is already over, but they’re still extending martial law.  WTF.  I’ve said this before, but the Philippine president Duterte is easily worse than Trump.  This is a guy who has favorably compared himself to Hitler, no joke.

Sicklit Literally Traumatized Me – Books about people with cancer don’t appeal to me.  But apparently this is more than just a matter of taste.  Miri says that this genre tends to sensationalize the suffering in a way that can be actively harmful to readers with cancer.

Unpacking Some of the Extreme Distress I Experienced Last Week – Some of you may have heard about the murder-suicide of Scott Smith, who was a podcaster for Recovering From Religion.  Well, here is an account from the cohost of the podcast.  I think this could be helpful if you knew Scott Smith, or if you just want to learn about trauma.

Cuphead: The Fake Outrage (video) – Anti-feminist gamergate-types have recently been outraged over people calling Cuphead (a video game) racist and ableist.  Except… nobody is saying that.  Amongst game critics, there has been discussion of the racist history behind the animation style used by Cuphead, and there has also been discussion about it’s high difficulty, and what that might mean for accessibility.  That really isn’t the same, and Shaun goes into depth about it.  I recommend Shaun’s YouTube channel if you need an antidote to anti-feminist and alt-right YouTubers.

Video game difficulty and accessibility is an interesting topic, maybe I will write about it in the future.

The Fine-Tuning Argument and Base Rate Fallacy – The author is not a physicist, but articulates very well some of the reasons why as a physicist I am very skeptical of fine-tuning arguments.  Predicting how the universe would look with different fundamental constants sounds like an incredibly difficult question!  And the more “fine-tuned” the universe is, the more difficult the question is.

BTW, the author mentions William Lane Craig’s claim that the gravitational constant is sensitive to a change of one part in 10^60.  I would not believe Craig’s claims without independent investigation.  I cannot stress this enough, William Lane Craig is an extremely unreliable source of information on math and physics, even on matters that are neutral with respect to his apologetic arguments.  Seriously, if you’re going to believe in God, you might be better off just believing in God rather than accepting Craig’s arguments, because then at least you will only be wrong about one thing.

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It’s my monthly feature where I share links I’ve collected over the past month, and offer brief commentary.

The Trans Reveal – I recently found this blog that reviews queer webcomics and of course I’m all over that.  This article discusses various ways that webcomics can reveal that a character is trans, and what the pitfalls of each approach are.

Exodus: Why Americans are Leaving Religion—and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back – This is an old article summarizing results from a survey of religiously unaffiliated USians.  What I found most interesting: 1) the main reason for their growth appears to be increased retention rates, 2) 58% of them say religion is bad for the world, and 18% say religion is personally important to them, 3) The people who say religion is bad for the world are more likely to be white, male, and have more education.

I found this article via Aged Reasoner–although the speculation in that post is mistaken, as I point out in the comments.

Why we really really really like repetition in music (video) – Vox talks about how we seem to find repetition inherently enjoyable in music, but not, say, stage plays.  Something that I have great difficulty understanding is how music worked before recordings existed.  It seems like music should have been more repetitive in those days, to make up for the fact that you couldn’t just repeat the recording as desired.

Vox incidentally mentions the speech to song illusion, which is the most compelling auditory illusion I have ever heard. Listen to this video, and then listen to it again. What has been heard cannot be unheard.

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