A couple of good posts on how to not urinate on women.
Dana on How not to handle harassment.
Chris Clarke on Misogyny, the skeptics movement, and grand theft auto.
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
It’s funny that you should link to those two in the same post. I’ve long been impressed with both of their blogs, and I’m just realizing how similar they are – earthy, direct, personal, compassionate. Badlands.
Dana is the cooler, more awesome version of me.
And thanks, Ophelia!
Preview is your friend. That should clearly have been “Thanks Ophelia and SC.”
🙂
One of the reasons I grew up an atheist is because the adults around me were so adamant that there was no error, no learning from experience. Moral matters were all quite straighforward and we humans – actually, just we children, somehow the adults were better – were just inherently bad.
As a child, it’s hard to argue when your faults have suddenly been made so obvious but I could not go along with it either and I am temperamentally disinclined to repentance. It was a lose-lose situation.
Back to the present: I found the grand-theft auto article enlightening. These shifts in perspective/viewpoint really help to understand. I hadn’t thought of it this way.
And this is where I have a problem with the way you introduced an otherwise great link: “how not to urinate on women”.
I understand the humour of course. Urinating on someone is not something one does by accident or through error hence no need to be told how not to. No ignorance, just sin.
But it does make you sound like one of those old, self-certain, unforgiving, misanthropic priests.
Cue abuse…
Watching a similar victim-blaming episode going on elsewhere on the ‘net, because a games journalist reported how she was poorly treated at E3. Her follow-up post is just a little upsetting.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/06/so-what-if-im-a-woman-let-me-play-the-game/
Having had an excellent primer in spotting victim-blaming during the various blow-ups in the sceptic community over the last little while, it’s becoming a lot easier to spot this elsewhere. And both the misogyny and the poor response to people reporting it seem to be ubiquitous. Bleugh.
Enjoyed the above links, starting to get a clue as to productive ways to call people out on this behaviour.
Trikeabout, that Kotaku blogger’s follow-up is EXCELLENT.
On the demands that she name and shame:
That is beautiful.
Only to those who think complaining about sexual harassment is so similar to bullying child molestation victims, or gay people.
Oh, you poor martyr! Poor baby doesn’t get to go around comparing people to “old, self-certain, unforgiving, misanthropic priests” without criticism. So abused!
How?