Michael Shermer is displeased with me. It’s about this thing from last August.

And speaking of videos…I didn’t watch all of that one on The Point the other day, and yesterday a Facebook friend, Mavaddat, pointed out a later segment when they talked about Y no women. Michael Shermer explained:

It’s who wants to stand up and talk about it, go on shows about it, go to conferences and speak about it, who’s intellectually active about it, you know, it’s more of a guy thing.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam.

 I quoted him in the column I wrote for Free Inquiry the same month. He’s replied to the column today. [Read more…]

AJ Milne waxes poetical.

I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they won’t play this new bleep comment

It’s not that it’s buzz or beep beep dangerously insightful

Honestly, it’s more dingingly pointlessly banal ‘n abusive

You can’t say honk on this blog

Or shot or twang or blargh

You can’t even call the proprietress a silly sound effect

Even if you say doing so gives you a huge, stiff boing

So I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they daren’t well scatching mark it approved

I bet you those ch’chinging old losers

Will just shrug and delete the load of horse raspberry

Renee Hendricks has been commenting here. She’s also been discussing her commenting with her pals on Twitter.

Welcome to the cool kids’ table in junior high school.

Sunil D’Monte alerted me to this blood-curdlingly horrible article on FGM by a sociologist, Lisa Wade, who wants more “balance” in the discussion of the grand old tradition of carving up the genitalia of very young girls.

While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.”  While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.” [Read more…]

Guilty!

The verdict, against Nechemya Weberman, was a significant victory for Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, whose office has been criticized for not acting aggressively enough against sexual abusers in the borough’s large and politically connected Hasidic community. And the case offered a rare window into how the Satmar community enforces its sexual values, particularly for young girls, with so-called modesty committees chastising girls for wearing revealing clothing or using cellphones, and parents pressured to pay high fees to religious counselors to treat those girls.

He was convicted on 59 counts. [Read more…]

Manboobz offers a good thing by way of a break from bad things. We all get sick of bad things. The good thing is

comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” – MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men – not afraid to call themselves feminists – to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”

Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.

Here’s how she explains it:

Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun – as we all should be.  And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me.  Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.

Yeh. I remember when I used to be able to post non-misogyny-related things and just chat away about them. It seems like another world.