I had a blast at the Secular Student Alliance Southern California leadership summit. I don’t exactly feel like writing a big summary at the moment, but I wanted to rub it in that I saw a bunch of awesome speakers and just got out of a hot tub. I think this photo pretty much summarizes my happiness:
I heart everyone from the SSA.
After quite the initial adventure getting to the airport (fuck you, Seattle public transportation), I am now safely in Thousand Oaks, California. No, this isn’t just some random vacation funded by my ample graduate student budget – though it will be a lot of fun. I’m here for the Secular Student Alliance’s Southern California regional leadership summit.
I’m really looking forward to meeting all of the students and hearing the other speakers – Michael Shermer, Bobbie Kirkhart, Dan Barker, Sikivu Hutchinson, Darrel Ray, and many more! I’m also giving a talk, but since I was just looking for lolcat photos to add to my slides, I’m not sure I’m going to be as classy as everyone else.
And now that I’ve filled myself with fish tacos, I’m going to take a nap. I only got 2 hours of sleep last night, and I need my energy for all the godless debauchery that will occur over the next couple of days.
Jen’s Note: I posted Sharon and Lyz’s original article not only because I personally trust them as individuals, but because they are professional atheist organizers with tons of experience in dealing with groups and inclusivity. After watching the video from the panel and hearing the audio of Sean’s talk, I find no evidence that they purposefully misrepresented content. I do, however, feel that there was a bit of communication failure between most of the parties involved, which is why I wanted to post their clarification here.
The following is a guest post by Lyz Liddell and Sharon Moss. These are the views of individuals and do not represent the views of the Secular Student Alliance or the Humanist Community of Central Ohio.
Hoo. Boy.
Well, when we first wrote the article “When Gender Goes Pear-Shaped,” we hoped it would get at least a little attention. But we weren’t expecting the crazy amount of attention, comments, and – unfortunately – misunderstandings that came out of it.
So we wanted to clear up a few things about our intentions and our goals in writing the article.
Our intention in writing this article was to shed light on an issue our entire movement struggles with. With the number of blogs, panels, questions, and articles out there discussing how to make our movement more welcoming to women, we clearly have some serious room for improvement. The good news is that it seems basically everyone in our movement is on board with the idea of welcoming women. The trickier issue is dealing with those unconscious behaviors that can still make women feel uncomfortable – even though they are not intended to do so. It’s a conversation that we need to have and keep having. That’s what we – organizers with years of experience working with grassroots groups – were trying to address in our post.
We did NOT mean to make it sound as though any one person, organization, event or organizer was at fault or the focus of this article. Here’s where our intentions were blocked by our inexperience in blogging – despite our best intentions, it did come across as though we were attacking the SERAM, American Atheists, the organizers, Sean Faircloth, and others. That was *never* our intent, and we want to apologize for not making that clear. We still think that the SERAM was a great event – in fact, we want to see more events like it! (Sold out, 200 attendees from all over, over a third women and almost half at their first event – awesome!) Likewise, American Atheists not only has a history and continuing practice of women in leadership positions, it is doing great work to improve our movement’s diversity (have doubts? check out the speaker lineup for their national convention!), focusing on its niche as an activist organization, and providing support for local groups. While the issue we’re discussing affects the entire freethought movement, we don’t want anyone to come away thinking of AA, SERAM or Sean Faircloth as the bad guys.
There have been some accusations that we misrepresented what happened at the Sunday morning panel (read: that we were lying). The video of the talk was posted here. We encourage people to watch that video. It demonstrates both that the panel wasn’t a terrible sexist monster, but also clearly shows the parts of the panel that concerned us – most notably, the handling of the audience member’s question and its aftermath. We realize that our article made it sound like Sharon was the only person to follow the young woman – she wasn’t the only one, but she was the first (and she couldn’t very well see that others behind her also moved to help). The point we wanted to make was that she wasn’t an event organizer but still wanted to help; not that the event organizers didn’t help or didn’t want to. (Unfortunately, the video of Sean Faircloth’s talk is not up yet, but the SERAM organizers are planning to make it available soon.)
There also seems to be some confusion about our views on the Million Dollar Challenge (MDC) and the “female” v. “woman” language question. None of us were arguing against the point the MDC illustrates; it’s perfectly true that in our society, women tend to be the gatekeepers of sexual activity. Our concerns were with the manner in which it was presented: encouraging the men in the room to look around at the women in the room and identify specific women they were sexually attracted to, then proceeding with the hypothetical challenge. Likewise, neither of us have a problem with the use of either “female” or “woman” when discussing gender issues. Our concern was with the way the woman asking the question was treated at the event. We are trying to make the point that if you’re making fellow supporters of our movement that uncomfortable, then you’re doing something wrong.
One last misunderstanding has come to our attention. There were several instances where we alluded to problems in the general movement that were taken as though they had happened at the SERAM. We didn’t mean to imply that the audience at the SERAM was continuously staring at our chests; that didn’t happen at this event. BUT, there have been numerous other events where it has happened and continues to happen, and we wanted to raise the issue. We also didn’t intend to imply that there were instances of racism or anti-parentism at the SERAM. In our years of leading freethought groups, we have seen both of these behaviors at other events at different times, and mentioned them since they tie into the issue of making our movement more comfortable to newcomers. Again, our blogging inexperience interfered with the points we were trying to make.
You might be asking why we chose to focus on the SERAM so specifically if it wasn’t itself the problem. Well, we chose to focus on these instances, at this event, for two reasons. First, they were recent and relevant – they were specific examples of specific behaviors that we have observed, time after time, that can and often do make women uncomfortable. Second, because we had to focus on something. If we had just posted an article about how “sometimes there’s some stuff that makes women feel uncomfortable in our movement,” our post would have been ignored, or readers would have demanded to see the evidence. So we provided recent, relevant, specific examples that illustrated our main point: that we should work to make women in our movement feel more comfortable. If nothing else, we have succeeded in making enough noise that lots of people are talking about the issue – and that is our goal.
There will be no apology for making it clear that women often feel uncomfortable in our movement. If you are a woman in this movement and you find yourself comfortable, that’s great! But just because you are comfortable doesn’t mean that everyone is – and since our movement is growing SO rapidly, we need to pay attention to those who might not be as outgoing or outspoken – whether they be women, people of any age, less-educated people, racial minorities, LGBTQs, etc. These people are on our side, and we should make our movement a safe landing place for them.
For all the bad feelings that have come up out of this article, we want to emphasize that there has been some very constructive communication to go along with it. In particular, we have had great conversations with the SERAM event coordinators Scott Savage and Christie Swords; David Silverman of American Atheists; and Sean Faircloth at the Secular Coalition for America. Furthermore, we have received several messages from local group leaders telling us how glad they were that the issue was raised, or that they’re planning to use our tips for improvement with their own groups. (Those tips are toward the bottom of the original article, if you only read the first part, the comments, a summary, etc.) We have also been thanked by lots of women (and men, too) who have felt uncomfortable in our movement but were too afraid to raise their voices.
It’s been a rough ride. We’re doing the best we can to make our movement a bigger, better, stronger one. We hope you’ll forgive us our miscommunication and keep working with us to build a world where freethinkers of all types and kinds can flourish!
Yesterday I allowed Sharon Moss and Lyz Liddell to do a guest post on my blog. I rarely let people do guest posts, but I trust both of them immensely and have a great personal interest in making women feel more welcome in the atheist community, so their post seemed appropriate. They even waited a week before writing it, so they had plenty of time to think about their opinions and reduce a reactionary response. And while the comments have erupted into what I can safely call a clusterfuck, I’m here to stand by my decision to let that post go up.
I watched Sean’s video. I have my opinions about his whole talk, and specifically about the Million Dollar Challenge as an evolutionary biologist and a feminist. I also have some thoughts on the whole “female vs woman” terminology debate. I’ll likely expand on these later, because they’re important topics (and as a blogger I’m compelled to give my opinions) but I want to focus on a different set of objections in this post*.
All voices must be heard, not just the ones supporting popular opinion.
Sharon and Lyz felt uncomfortable and unwelcome thanks to certain things that happened at the conference. That was how they personally felt. While I understand concerns that purposeful misrepresentation happened – something I do not support – I know Sharon and Lyz had nothing of the sort in mind. Others may just have been personally fine with the comments, and thus saw it as a misrepresentation. But if we want to make groups more welcoming, we have to worry about the people we’re upsetting, not the people who already agree with us.
Frankly, the reaction to that post disappoints me more than whatever happened at the conference. It really illustrates how most of the secular community has no clue how to react tactfully to criticisms about diversity. To start on a positive note, what should be done when a woman says they were made uncomfortable by a situation?
Sharon and Lyz have had correspondence with the Alabama state director of American Atheists, and apparently he is doing many of the things on my “good” list and resulting in very productive conversations. I have also been talking to Sean Faircloth. While his initial reaction frankly fell into issue #3 below, he has been very polite and interested in feedback and discussion since then, which I really appreciate and respect.
On the flip side, it doesn’t help to:
If a student who attended a Secular Student Alliance conference was deeply offended by what they considered a sexist statement in a talk, I’d take their concerns seriously, no matter how much I personally disagreed with them, because I want this movement to be welcoming. And if you can’t understand that, then you are part of the problem.
To the conference organizers and (unfortunately) few commenters who actually managed to behave tactfully in this whole situation, thank you and keep up the good work. Your concerns are going to make this movement more accepting in the years to come. To everyone else? While I don’t agree with it 100%, it would still help if you watched (or re-watched) Phil Plait’s Don’t Be A Dick talk. Just sayin’.
*I am going to consider any comments in this thread that debate the Million Dollar Challenge or “female vs woman” topics thread derailing, and both sides of the debate will be swiftly deleted. You have been warned.
My blood pressure has gone down a bit now that I’ve had a chance to sleep, but I want to address one point before I’m stuck in lab pipetting all day. Some commenters, even those who claim to generally agree with me, seem to think that I’m “irrational” and “overreact” to “little” sexist problems, which only proves I have a “chip on my shoulder.”
Let me try to explain what it’s like, in a context you may relate to better:
Imagine you have a science blog. You spend all of your time critiquing and poking fun at anti-science ideas, and your followers love those posts. But you’re also an atheist, and occasionally you blog about that too. First you make little posts about religion that have nothing to do with science – and while a couple people may get upset or use already refuted arguments, you’re able to reply to them and explain the situation patiently.
This goes on for quite some time, and more and more people start emailing you saying that while they didn’t understand in the beginning, they now totally get where you’re coming from – and some even agree with you! It’s rewarding to know that your patience paid off, especially when that patience isn’t always found at blogs explicitly devoted to atheism, which sometimes eviscerate and belittle any pro-religion argument.
But then one day you decide to write a post about the intersection of science and religion. Now many of your readers feel personally hurt. But to make matters worse, your blog post suddenly becomes very popular – now you have hundreds of people commenting on your blog, using the same old tropes that have been debated and debunked a million times before.
And since there’s just not enough time in the day to respond to every comment (you do have a job, after all), you may make a general post about how all of their arguments are the same old crap. Maybe “same old crap” isn’t the best phrase to use, because it incites them more. They start saying you just have a vendetta against religious people, and obviously have no rational responses to their arguments, otherwise you would have spent all day replying to them.
But really, you’re just human. You’re frustrated that you’ve spent years slowly educating people about a topic, but when you turn the spotlight on your own group, you realize you have so much work to do. And really, many atheist bloggers say you’re not strident enough – if people get this upset by you, what would happen if they visited an exclusively atheist blog? You have many friends – also bloggers or important people in science – saying they totally agree or sympathize with your post, but they don’t publicly say so for fear of also facing the wrath of these people. You feel alone in what you consider an important battle, facing an endlessly respawning horde.
Replace “science” with “atheism” and “atheism” with “feminism,” and you have me.
So yes. When I read comments on posts about feminism or sexism, sometimes I lose my cool – because a cause that seems very important to me now seems hopeless. Because tropes like “you’re being irrational,” “you have no sense of humor,” “you’re overreacting,” “most people didn’t have a problem with it,” “why don’t you worry about things that matter,” and “you have an agenda” have been historically used to silence women’s voices from political issues like voting and birth control, to pointing out sexism on blogs and twitter. Hearing them is like hearing someone assert “But I didn’t evolve from a monkey!” for the billionth time.
It’s hard to remind myself that many of you don’t realize that those are tropes and that they’re so triggering to a feminist. I know I need to be more patient sometimes, but I’m human. Maybe you still won’t agree with me about what I consider sexism or my views on feminism, but hopefully you’ll understand why I get so upset when I realize my uphill battle is more like scaling Mt. Everest without climbing gear.
From here*:
I love Jen McCreight–I’m a regular reader of her blog and a follower of hers on Twitter. As far as atheism/skepticism goes, I think she is generally spot on and very clever. Truly, I am a fan. But she has what I call the “feminist chip” on her shoulder, big time. I don’t doubt her contentions (or those of her guest posters) about sexism in the atheist community and elsewhere. The site “fatuglyorslutty.com” shows how rampant and awful it is in the online gaming community. So, I sympathize, and yes, men need to behave much better. I believe that when people like Ms. McCreight & her guest posters get into a twist over silly, irrelevant linguistic semantics of language (and that’s how this incident sounds to me after reading both accounts), that kind of ridiculous, butterfly-wings sensitivity detracts from more serious and legitimate concerns and problems that women face. It makes men like me take them less seriously on this issue, and surely that is the last thing that they want.
tl;dr I love Jen when she makes fun of religion, but I hate it when she makes ME uncomfortable!
If I wanted to lower my blood pressure, I would stick to criticizing religion. Circle jerks are much more pleasant. At least all the trolls that come out whenever I dare to whisper “sexism” or “feminism” really just prove my point – even in posts I don’t write!
As for the guest post itself, I’m not commenting on it further until I get to watch the talk in question.
*That post is so full of fail it makes my head spin. Having a vagina doesn’t automatically make you immune from being sexist, and disregarding others opinions makes you part of the problem. If you were the lone woman on the panel, no wonder it went so fucking poorly.
Guest Post by Sharon Moss, President of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio with Lyz Liddell, Director of Campus Organizing at the Secular Student Alliance
These are the views of individuals and do not represent the views of the Secular Student Alliance or the Humanist Community of Central Ohio.
If the freethought community doesn’t have a problem with sexism, why did I just spend 20 minutes in the bathroom consoling a woman who was publicly insulted when she asked the panel a question about sexism in freethought communities? Note to dudes, it doesn’t matter if it is sexism or biology, if you’re making people who come to your group uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong. — Facebook status, Sharon Moss, 1/30/11
I’m not one to post snarky facebook status updates. I generally view snarky facebook statuses as the realm of the powerless. And, damn, did I feel powerless.
Last weekend Lyz and I were at American Atheists’ Southeast Regional Atheist Meet in Huntsville, Alabama. This is the first regional conference America Atheists organized and the over the two prior days, it sold out with 200 atheists from as far away as North Carolina and Ohio. At a rough visual estimate, probably 30% of the attendees were women. When David Silverman polled the audience on Sunday afternoon, for about half of those in attendance, this was their first atheist conference of any kind. Clearly, American Atheists is on to something.
Sunday morning’s first session was an “Attendees’ Choice” panel discussion, featuring five local group leaders. Attendees were asked to submit written questions ahead of time, and the most frequently asked questions were asked of this panel.
A panel of five guys and one woman discussed what an atheist group should do to attract more women. The all-too-common problem came up of a woman showing up to a meeting and every dude there hitting on her. First, the panelists grabbed a theme that had been floating around all weekend: that men hitting on women is just biological (therefore excusable), making it sound like a woman in that kind of situation should just STFU and get over it.
Then the moderator asked the women in the audience, as if it were a rewording of the same question, whether they would feel harassed or flattered if they showed up to an event and a few guys started flirting with them. We women in the audience, pressured to respond to the question at hand but feeling duped because we knew it wasn’t the same thing, gave an honest response. Sure, a few guys flirting with us is sexy. BUT!!! (we all screamed in our heads, even though the panel never let us say it out loud) 20 guys our father’s age blatantly staring at and talking to our cleavage is a totally different situation! It’s not sexy, it’s gross and creepy.
It was extremely frustrating. So I wasn’t surprised when the young woman who finally stood up and started challenging the panel snapped. First, despite her having her hand raised for most of the discussion, the panel never even acknowledged her or invited her opinion (despite soliciting the opinion of several guys both on and off the panel. Finally, she just stood up and started shouting to make her voice heard. Her question focused on the language the panel had been using – “female” instead of “woman,” and pointed out that it made us sound like livestock rather than people.
But did the panel address the question, perhaps looking for the point at which the discussion took on the word “female” so universally? Did they take the opportunity to discuss how things like language can make a group uncomfortable for women, and what we could do to make it better? No! The woman asking the question was viciously torn apart and ridiculed for even bringing it up. First, a combination of panelists and audience members tried to defend themselves by saying that feminists won’t let men use the word “women” off-limits because it has “men” in it. Then a commotion of everyone talking at once, which was cut off by one panelist’s definitive comment: “What do you want us to say, ‘the weaker sex?”
She got upset (and who wouldn’t be?) and left the room. I – a member of the audience, not one of the event organizers – went after her. While there were a few odd calls from the audience for the panelist to apologize, the moderator sort of awkwardly pushed the discussion on to a new topic, with an embarrassed air of “Sorry for the disturbance.” No apology, no discussing a better way it could have been handled. Not even a joking “This is how *not* to be welcoming” comment. Just “nothing to see here, move along.”
This wasn’t an isolated incident. In fact, almost the entire conference had a bizarre quality to it when it came to gender issues. If I had to point to when it started, I think it would have to have been in Sean Faircloth’s Saturday talk. This talk began well enough: a strong feminist position, an excoriation of Victorian moralist Anthony Comstock, mention of several areas in which the law imposes on women’s rights. But then it got weirdly uncomfortable. First, came the proposal of a new motto: “What Would Don Draper Do?” (Don Draper is your role model, seriously?)
Sean’s transition hinted strongly that men also face gender discrimination, which had huge potential to be really interesting (wow, a chance to talk about our society’s constraining, conflicting roles for men! *insert Greta fangirl here*).
[Jen’s note: I’ve temporarily removed the section on the “Million Dollar Challenge” since there seems to be a lot of debate over whether it was depicted fairly. The Alabama Atheists are uploading the video of Sean’s talk to make this situation clear. While I wouldn’t let Sharon and Lyz do a guest post unless I trusted their judgement, I also don’t want to misrepresent Sean Faircloth, so I’m waiting until I’ve seen the video.]
From there, the conversation wandered into a weird discussion about how men’s biology drives them to frequently (if not constantly) pursue sex, and since it’s biology, no one should get upset at, judge, or think less of men for any skirt-chasing they might engage in. (Because we never intellectually overcome our animal instincts in other areas of our biology, right?) The attitude in the room shifted: suddenly women were the bad guys for saying no to men’s propositions because it denies the men’s innate biology. Most of the guys in the room loved it, but as a woman in the audience – it was really uncomfortable. It was demeaning, frustrating, and not what you want to say to attract more women into this movement. And the attitude stuck around.
All these people got presented with a totally skewed perspective on our movement’s views on gender equality and sexuality. The message was loud and clear: it’s totally ok for guys to be assholes. Women should just STFU when men treat them like sex objects. The appropriate way to solve the problem of gender imbalance is to ask a bunch of guys about it (oh, and the entire problem is just because women won’t let men have sex with them whenever they want to). The way to handle women’s input is to ridicule them.
But there’s an even bigger problem here. Situations like this drive wedges between otherwise natural allies in our movement. That young woman is on our side – she came to this event at the cost of her time and money to get involved – and she was driven away. So are thousands of women across the country – for no other reason than because this movement can’t seem to figure out how to treat them like equal humans.
Why don’t we see more women in our groups? Maybe because when Jen McCreight showed up to an atheist meeting, guys in the group stood around comparing her to her photos from Boobquake. Why don’t we see more young people? Maybe because when a new parent shows up to a group event, other members make rude comments to her face about how her child is disrupting the meeting. Why are we so overwhelmingly Caucasian? Maybe because a black person shows up and hears a bunch of racial jokes.
We need to have these conversations, but there’s no reason to drive away people who are *on our side* by having them in completely the wrong way.
American Atheists created a real opportunity for members of local groups to come together, share ideas, get leadership training, and go home ready to take over the world. For many issues– activism, law, supporting campus groups, the future of the atheist movement– they were incredibly successful. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I haven’t seen this kind of enthusiasm for the grassroots outside the college level. Ever. But there is always room for improvement. We lost a real opportunity for local leaders to share their experiences, successes and failures. Creating a more inclusive movement needs to be a priority at both the national and local levels.
From my own experience as the former president of Students for Freethought at Ohio State and as the current president of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio and from talking to other local leaders, the grassroots gets it. We want to be more inclusive and we’re taking the steps to get there.
Here’s what I’ve learned, both from my own experience and from talking to other local leaders. These suggestions aren’t just about being more accessible to anyone who isn’t a middle aged white man. Some of these are just good practices for running a group. Turns out running a more professional (wrong word) group brings in more people of all kinds.
Our movement is growing faster than ever, and we have more opportunities for growth and expansion than we have ever seen before. While hiccups like this can be frustrating, they’re also a great chance for us to make our groups, communities and movements even stronger. We encourage you to take a look at your group and see if there are ways you can reach out to women, younger adults, minorities, or other groups.
tl;dr Sexism is my fault because I don’t hide that I’m female. From here and here:
“STOP TAKING EVERYTHING PERSONALLY. If you don’t want people to make fun of your looks take your picture off your blog. No one would ever know you were a woman if you didn’t constantly try to draw attention to your vagina. Grow up.”
“Let’s see. You don’t want any comments about your breasts. One way to reduce the chance of that happening would be to have a picture that does not prominently feature your breasts.”
“You have a picture of yourself on the side. The title of your blog is “Blag Hag”. You have an icon of a girl beside your header. It’s not a fair comparison. “
“Ok so heres your problem. Reddit for the most part still has a large view that women dont exist on the internet. The second problem is that reddit also has the strange notion that when women present something or an image or information they some how try to tie in a picture of themselves…. I came here looking for a good article and right off the bat… Theres your photo… I didn’t have to click on an about you page or images. ITS RIGHT THERE trying to show something off. What is that, that your a woman? That you have a nice smile? What do you want me to think of how this is setup? Do I stop from the visual que to continue reading or do I get drawn to the pretty colors of the photo?”
“But what’s really bizarre is that your blog is deliberately gender branded (titled “Hag” and featuring a picture of a cutesy girl at the keyboard), yet you complain when people notice your gender. But hey, it gives you something to blame other that yourself when you fail at something right?”
“This won’t be popular, but you may want to reconsider complaining about sexist comments when immediately below your photo, you describe yourself (among others) as a pervert, and anyone who Googles you instantly finds “boobquake” attributed to you. You have every right to say what you want, but cannot be shocked when the idiots respond to a woman who brags about being a pervert. Probably confusing for the youngsters, making it more difficult to take you seriously.”
“There is a simple solution to be not treated this way. Dont put up your photo in your blog. Dont tell your gender. Is it really necessary? Or on a second thought the comments like “nice boobs” are the better option? And you know this fact too, thus this post makes you an attention whore. (Or simply stupid for pointing out the obvious) “
“Don’t post pics with tits hanging out and expect no reaction- NOT FUCKING ROCKET SCIENCE”
Wow, I forgot I needed to be totally neutered on the internet! Just how Hemant Mehta and PZ Myers don’t show pictures of themselves and obsessively remove any mentions of them being male. …Oh, wait.
Thanks for proving my point, guys!
Man, sometimes I revel in the power of feminism to bring out the trolls. How dare you criticize the in group!
What stereotypical response should I highlight next? Women claiming things aren’t sexist because they don’t think it’s sexist? Comments about me being fat? You can’t get rid of sexism so you should just shut up about it? Learn to take a joke? That I’m just an attention whore desperate for blog traffic*. The possibilities are endless!
*Did I mention I don’t give a damn how many people read my blog, and I’ve gained basically no regular readers via reddit? Weeeee!
Holy crap! My blog was nominated for the Best Religion Blog in the 2011 Weblog Awards! I didn’t even realize it until Hemant started smack talking me over twitter because Friendly Atheist was also nominated. I must defeat Hemant! Vote for me!
Though really, if Hemant won, I’d be happy too. I love his blog, and it would be awesome for an atheist blog to win the Religion category. It’s great that two are nominated.
Wait…that just means we’re going to split the atheist vote! Noooooo! Clever, Bloggies, very clever.
I know this is just going to dig my hole even deeper, but I’m a blogger, so speaking my mind is what I do.
A couple of months ago I made a passing comment that I don’t like the atheism subreddit that much because it comes off as very sexist. Sexist comments can pop up on reddit as a whole (sometimes heavily upvoted, to my dismay), but sexist comments on r/atheism affect me more. For one, I tend to hold atheists to a higher standard, so it saddens me when they act irrationally about gender.
But two, the comments are personal. Whenever I see that I got an uptick in traffic from reddit, I’m always afraid to go check the link. Because inevitably when someone links to my blog, many of the comments will be disparaging remarks about my gender or looks. Hell, even some of the positive comments are about my gender or looks, which are still annoying – can we please comment about the content, and not my boobs, please?
So I lurk around r/atheism, but I rarely comment and never post my own stuff because I don’t want to deal with the flack. It’s not worth the frustration usually. But today I did submit my post about atheism in high schools, because it’s so important that I wanted to make sure a wide audience saw it. Young people are the future, blah blah.
But it also set up an accidental experiment. What happens when a female submitter links to her own post, and a male submitter links to his post featuring the same story? That happened when JT Eberhard linked to his post on Atheism Resource a couple hours after I linked to mine.
Let’s compare! (at the time of writing this blog)
121 upvotes
24 downvotes
1 comment with contact information (by JT) (5.5%)
4 jokes about the content of atheist clubs (22.2%)
5 jokes about high schoolers (27.7%)
8 relevant remarks about high school atheist groups (44.4%)
110 upvotes
44 downvotes
2 comments about the appearance of women/banging them (3.3%)
19 comments basically saying how much I suck (32.2%)
22 comments (a lot of them mine) defending me against said comments (37.2%)
16 relevant remarks about high school atheist groups (27.1%)
So JT gets mostly relative posts or light-hearted humor, while I get disparaging comments and thread derailing thanks to people trying to reply. At least there are people replying (and the bad comments are getting downvoted), but it’s still frustrating. What woman would be encouraged to join this community or share posts when she has to deal with this shit all the time? And it is all the time – if you look at other Blag Hag posts people have submitted, there will always be at least some comments about my boobs, or how I have a deformed chipmunk face (I still don’t quite understand that one).
It gets old, but I don’t have a solution other than escaping to 2Xchromosomes (…which reddit mocks repeatedly). I just want to point out why r/atheism doesn’t make me feel exactly comfortable, instead of people thinking I’m just another “crazy feminist” who’s “hypersensitive” and “making up sexism that isn’t there.” I know the majority of people at r/atheism are fine, but the few rotten fruit are certainly ruining it for some of us.