It’s bash feminism week


TIME magazine, fresh from its triumph at electing the word “feminism” as the Worst Word in the World, has given the job of reporting on sexist shirts in the workplace to Katha Pollitt Amanda Marcotte Soraya Chemaly Cathy Young. Cathy Young of Reason magazine, Cathy Young who is Christina Hoff Sommers’s favorite colleague in feminism-bashing.

When I first heard about the outrage over a scientist from the Rosetta Mission, which landed the Philae space probe on a comet, wearing a “sexist” shirt for a press appearance, I racked my brain wondering what the offensive garment could have been. A T-shirt showing a spacecraft with a “My secret fort—no girls allowed” sign? An image of a female scientist with the text, “It’s nice that you got a Ph.D., now make me a sandwich”?

Right – if it’s not spelled out as literally and unmistakably as possible, then it’s not sexist at all. If it doesn’t say “no women allowed” then it’s not sexist. Hooray! Feminism has won and we can all move on – because people don’t put “no women allowed” signs on the doors any more, except in religious institutions. But guess what: actual signs saying “women get out” are not the only form of sexism there is. There are others.

This is true of so many things – of everything that social and political, in fact. A workplace where the men are always grabbing the women’s butts but there is no sign anywhere saying “women get out” – that is still a sexist workplace. There is such a thing as implication. I don’t believe that Cathy Young is genuinely so stupid that she doesn’t get that. I think she chooses to pretend she doesn’t get it.

Dr. Taylor’s shirt may not have been in great taste. But the outcry against it is the latest, most blatant example of feminism turning into its own caricature: a Sisterhood of the Perpetually Aggrieved, far more interested in shaming and bashing men for petty offenses than in celebrating female achievement.

No, that’s not true. The question of how to make STEM fields more attractive to women is not petty at all. One way not to make them more attractive to women is to ignore low-level sexism. Sure, it is low-level. That shirt is far from the worst kind of sexism or the worst thing anyone could have done. (Mind you, paired with “I didn’t say she was easy” it gets a bit worse.) But low-level sexism also matters, and when it’s amplified by being the face of an exciting event like this, then it matter more. It’s not petty.

[T]his particular brand of feminist ideology, which inevitably stigmatizes straight male sexuality, is at the center of the recent culture wars.

It doesn’t “stigmatize straight male sexuality” to say “not in the workplace.”

Sadly, the brouhaha over Dr. Taylor’s shirt overshadowed not only his accomplishments but those of his female teammates, including one of the project’s lead researchers, Kathrin Allweg of the University of Bern in Switzerland. More spotlight on Dr. Allweg, Dr. Grady, Dr. Alexander and the other remarkable women of the Rosetta Project would have been a true inspiration to girls thinking of a career in science. The message of ShirtStorm, meanwhile, is that aspiring female scientists can be undone by some sexy pictures on a shirt—and that women’s presence in science requires men to walk on eggshells, curb any goofy humor that may offend the sensitive, and be cowed into repentance for any misstep.

Thanks for ruining a cool feminist moment for us, bullies.

Thank you TIME magazine for joining the war on feminism.

Comments

  1. Uncle Ebeneezer says

    Cathy Young of Reason magazine, Cathy Young who is Christina Hoff Sommers’s favorite colleague in feminism-bashing.

    Reason?? Seriously? Time chooses a Libertarian (and I think we all know how they feel about minority issues) to report? Head–>desk

    On a related note, here is a fantastic comment that JL made in response to a troll over at LG&M. Obviously it could be expanded beyond STEM to just about every professional environment with only the details changing slightly:

    In my circles, a lot of the people complaining are women in STEM who spend a lot of time fighting for women in STEM and celebrating women in STEM. Though I would point out that STEM as it currently is, especially the physical sciences and their associated engineering disciplines, selects for women who are able and/or willing to shrug off a lot of crap, because the others left or never started.

    The problem isn’t just the shirt. The problem is that the shirt is one more paper cut in the death by a thousand paper cuts saying that women and other female-assigned people don’t really belong in STEM and those that are there are being generously allowed to be there by the dubious grace of the cis men as long as they don’t make a fuss.

    It’s a paper cut when boys in the specialty STEM program at your high school think that the program being close to 80% boys is a sign of its rigor (something I have seen from adults in other contexts too).

    It’s a paper cut when you’re standing in the food truck line in college and the two profs behind you are having a conversation about how all these women and minorities are dragging down the quality of the student body.

    It’s a paper cut when there’s a traditional song at your tech school (which was thankfully on its way out when I was there) about how easy biology (women-dominated at the undergrad level) is, that includes a verse about how biology majors can just get As by sleeping with their male grad student TAs.

    It’s a paper cut when you run for a top student government office at your tech school and someone posters the whole campus with signs calling you ugly. The same joker puts up unflattering signs about the other candidates too, but not about their looks.

    It’s a paper cut when you’re discussing the various STEM major options with your mom – who came up during a time when women were even fewer in STEM and has a lot of internalized misogyny over it – and you bring up that one of them is 75% women, and she makes a face and says “Oh, yeah, you don’t want to major in THAT.” And you find yourself instinctively agreeing, even as you feel weird about doing so, because you’ve internalized the message too that more women in a particular science makes it less worthwhile.

    It’s a paper cut when you’re at your first STEM job out of college, where the technical staff is 92% men, and everyone keeps forgetting that you aren’t an intern, which they don’t do for the young male employees.

    It’s a paper cut when a client, a representative of a military science department, that your officemate is working with, starts hitting on you and joking to your officemate about how lucky he is to have been assigned a “pretty girl” as an officemate, until your slightly embarrassed-looking officemate steers him to a conference room.

    It’s a paper cut when you’re out of work and jobhunting, and you meet a pair of startup founders at the career fair that seem so interested in what you do, and they offer you an interview, and then the one that you go to interview with suggests that the interview be the two you having sex in his bed.

    It’s a paper cut when you answer the phone at work and people assume that you’re a secretary.

    It’s a paper cut when the professor that you TA for in graduate school, a nice man who is otherwise great to work with, thinks that your request that your students not default to “he” in their design project writeups and critiques is amusing, compares it to people spelling women as “wymyn”, etc, in the ’70s, and eventually says that he’s not going to tell the students about that but you can write an email yourself as long as he gets to check it to make sure that you won’t make any of the students feel bad.

    And it’s a self-inflicted paper cut when you see that you’re the only female-presenting person in the room and you instinctively feel proud of that and then you realize what you’re doing.

    And this shirt and the fucking discussions around it are a paper cut.

    It’s not that any one of these things is so horrible. Each by itself is pretty minor. It’s that they have a cumulative effect. And believe me, I know women and female-assigned genderqueer people who have had MUCH worse than this. My life in industry was pretty damn charmed in this regard, and my college life was better than a lot of people’s in this regard.

    But, I guess, you can keep telling women and female-assigned people that speaking up about problems only hurts their own cause and if they really want more women around they should just keep quiet.

  2. guest says

    ‘More spotlight on Dr. Allweg, Dr. Grady, Dr. Alexander and the other remarkable women of the Rosetta Project would have been a true inspiration to girls thinking of a career in science.’

    Yes, it would have. Why didn’t we do that? Maybe they should have worn gaudier shirts.

  3. Kevin Kehres says

    @2 guest….

    Naw, they probably weren’t good looking enough. But a little bit of cleavage and maybe some lipstick wouldn’t hurt, would it?

  4. guest says

    ‘And it’s a self-inflicted paper cut when you see that you’re the only female-presenting person in the room and you instinctively feel proud of that and then you realize what you’re doing.’

    Ohhhhh yes. I cringed at that.

  5. says

    Maybe they should have worn gaudier shirts.

    You can be sure that if a woman had been wearing a shirt covered with Tom of Finland artwork, someone would have told her it was inappropriate.

  6. says

    “Reason” is a tad bit of a a misnomer for the magazine Cathy Young writes for. Of course, “libertarian” is a tad bit of a misnomer the ideology attached to the magazine as well, so I can’t say I am surprised.

  7. tiko says

    This is really starting to piss me off now. What outcry is she talking about.The only outcry has been from their side in response to some people doing the written equivalent of an eyeroll when they saw the shirt.

    This is true of so many things – of everything that social and political, in fact. A workplace where the men are always grabbing the women’s butts but there is no sign anywhere saying “women get out” – that is still a sexist workplace. There is such a thing as implication. I don’t believe that Cathy Young is genuinely so stupid that she doesn’t get that. I think she chooses to pretend she doesn’t get it.

    How can anybody not get it.Nobody lost their shit over that one shirt*.People mildly commented on the shirt being part of a bigger problem,that lot’s of little things that don’t seem much build up and build up.Nobody can be that stupid , they are deliberately not getting it.

    *Well actually plenty of people have lost their shit over the shirt but not on this side.Dawkins ,Sommers, Young and the rest of that crowd over the rift really need to get some self awareness.

  8. rorschach says

    Dawkins ,Sommers, Young and the rest of that crowd over the rift really need to get some self awareness.

    Dawkins and Blackford followed Matt Taylor on twitter.

  9. says

    Oh well I followed Matt Taylor on Twitter too.

    But Blackford has been shouting about “call-out culture” and “antisex” and even “Elevatorgate” for days, and saying he “supports” Matt Taylor – by which he does not mean he supports Matt Taylor’s apologizing.

  10. rorschach says

    Oh well I followed Matt Taylor on Twitter too.

    Why?

    And yes, Russell’s rants have been off the scale, even by his standards LOL. I just thought it was such a pathetic transparent symbolic gesture by Dawkins and Blackford, to follow the guy as a show of support against the evil feminazi agenda.

  11. Jacob Schmidt says

    “[T]his particular brand of feminist ideology, which inevitably stigmatizes straight male sexuality, is at the center of the recent culture wars.”

    I find that it always anti feminists with insulting and degrading ideas of “straight male sexuality. “

  12. Blondin says

    The message of ShirtStorm, meanwhile, is that aspiring female scientists can be undone by some sexy pictures on a shirt—and that women’s presence in science requires men to walk on eggshells, curb any goofy humor that may offend the sensitive, and be cowed into repentance for any misstep.

    No, I think the message of ShirtStorm is: “When you see something you think might be causing women to feel unwelcome in a particular environment keep your fucking mouth shut about it!”

    The only outrage I saw was in the vitriolic and irrational response to the initial comments about the shirt. In a sane world the response would have been: “Oops, I hadn’t thought of that. I won’t do that again.” This tendency to react to criticism with level 11 hostility strikes me as vehement defensiveness or dissonance reduction by those who subconsciously feel “guilty as charged”.

  13. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    a pathetic transparent symbolic gesture by Dawkins and Blackford

    AKA pretty much everything they’ve said/done for the past 3 years.

  14. iknklast says

    An addition to #1:

    It’s a paper cut when a male non-scientist turns to another male non-scientist for validation of the scientific work of a female scientist.

    (One hell of a huge paper cut, that. Happens all too often, too. My body and brain are raw and bleeding from paper cuts of that particular sort)

  15. freemage says

    Yeah, it’s bizarre the way the anti-feminists are still obsessing over the shirt, when the critics have all pretty much said, “Hey, good apology, thanks for that, Mr. Taylor, and good job on the science stuff,” and moved on.

    And of course, the original critiques were about as harsh as, “Guys, don’t do that.” So I suppose comparing it to Elevatorgate makes some sense, after all, just not in the way the antis think it does.

  16. johnthedrunkard says

    It is so easy for these to go all wide-eyed and confoozed about the fuss… Because after all, it was ‘only’ a tasteless shirt. But it is the ‘meta-reaction’ that really counts. The uncoiling misogynist rage that was rumbling along below the surface.

    REASON? Really? Just because Ayn Rand disclaimed belief in any god except herself, does not make Objectivism or Libertarianism any real part of any atheist ‘movement.’ Penn Jillette’s faith-based denial of second-hand smoke’s risks, or global warming, or addiction/alcoholism, is as good a demonstration as one could need.

  17. Blanche Quizno says

    “Why not? I like following scientists, and he seems interesting apart from the recent unpleasantness. Plus he apologized.”

    This is a fine reason, all by itself.

    Plus, one doesn’t only “follow” one’s friends, you know. It’s important to keep an eye on a lot of people, and not only when they are friends. If you know what I mean.

  18. says

    Plus, one doesn’t only “follow” one’s friends, you know. It’s important to keep an eye on a lot of people, and not only when they are friends. If you know what I mean.

    One way to monitor someone on Twitter without adding to their follower count is to add them to one of your own curated tweep lists without following them. Then you can check their timeline out when and only when you’re in the mood, so that they don’t pollute your general feed.

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