Don’t miss Bruce Everett’s great piece, “…assuming the mantle”.

I’ll give you a teaser to make sure that you don’t.

I didn’t get it, and I haven’t got it for most of the time. I’m only just getting it – the faux-masculine shibboleths that I’m expected to observe, in order to be ‘one of the guys’.

Especially the degradation of women as rite of passage. [Read more…]

Brian Earp is unimpressed by the American Academy of Pediatrics ‘s (how do you make a possessive out of that, anyway?) revision of its policy on circumcision.

They now say that the probabilistic health benefits conferred by the procedure just slightly outweigh the known risks and harms. Not enough to come right out and positively recommend circumcision (as some media outlets are erroneously reporting), but just enough to suggest that whenever it is performed—for cultural or religious reasons, or sheer parental preference, as the case may be—it should be covered by government health insurance.

That turns out to be a very fine line to dance on. But fear not: the AAP policy committee comes equipped with tap shoes tightly-laced, and its self-appointed members have shown themselves to be hoofers of the nimblest kind. [Read more…]

The historian Tom Holland came close to saying Mohammed may not have existed at all in that Channel 4 documentary on Islam last week. Result: almost 550 complaints to both Ofcom and Channel 4. Also lots of outraged tweets. (Well that goes without saying at this point.)

The Islamic Education and Research Academy has published a lengthy paper denouncing the programme. But historians have rallied to Mr Holland’s defence. [Read more…]

Renee Hendricks has her facts wrong. She has a post on The Women Behind AtheismPlus, and she says there are three, and I’m one.

I’m going to try very hard to make this the last spiel I have on “Atheism Plus”. It’s hard simply because I hate seeing the community I’ve come to love be so divided and actually hampered by the creation of a group intent on co-opting not only the term “atheism” but also a logo (apparently the A+ logo on http://atheismplus.com is from a tee-shirt that has been available on Richard Dawkins site for over 4 years). What is more distressing and pertinent to women is that there are 3 women behind the “movement”: Jen McCreight, Ophelia Benson, and Rebecca Watson. [Read more…]

Another petition you can sign, this one recommended to me by Bruce Everett. It’s to put some heat on Alan “destroying the joint” Jones. Formally it’s to urge advertisers to get him to apologize, but really I think it’s to get him to take some heat. (I mean who cares if he apologizes, really? What good is that? But some heat might décourager les autres.

Via Lauryn Oates, a terrific article on the myth that the hijab protects women against sexual assault.

I was only 6 years old when my family was forced to flee the civil war in Afghanistan for Pakistan in the late 1980s. My sister, Neelo, who is five years older than me, was enrolled in a Saudi-funded Muslim Brotherhood-inspired public school for Afghan refugees. She, like many Muslim women, wore a simple headscarf.

I remember Neelo picking up her tiny bag, wrapping her scarf around her hair, and going to her first day of school. I also sadly remember her coming back from school that day and telling our parents: “The guards told me, ‘Either you are going to wear the full hijab or wear a chador [an Afghan burqa], or you can’t come to school.’” [Read more…]

The good news is, Rimsha has been granted bail. The bad news is, it’s about $10,500 or £6,200. The worse news is, would anyone keep her safe if she did make bail?

The BBC’s M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says Rimsha is the first person accused of blasphemy to have been granted bail by a trial court.

Blasphemy is not a bailable offence but her lawyers pleaded that she was a juvenile.

Blasphemy is not a bailable offence. Blasphemy is not a bailable offence. [Read more…]

There was huge (two people) demand for a picture of the book so I took a video still. What Kurdish readers will see:

Neil Denny of Little Atoms pointed out to me this piece on comedians using their fans to gang up on critics yesterday.

Being a public figure on the internet means having to deal with a barrage of abuse, which has been covered on this blog before, in my podcast interviews with Jonnie Marbles and Charlie Brooker.  It’s unpleasant and unnecessary, but people quickly become emboldened by the deindividuation that occurs when their identities are withheld, given that there’s no chance of getting a punch in the hooter.  Stewart Lee’s current show, Carpet Remnant World, involves a whittled down list of the most frothingly insane online critiques he could find on internet messageboards and social networking sites.  The “40,000 words of hate” can be viewed on his website.  They frequently seem unhinged, over-the-top and staggering in their lack of compassion and humanity – but such is the way with internet communication. [Read more…]

Just a small one, and utterly routine, but then that’s just it – it’s routine.

An ad I saw on tv last night, or half saw, because I was doing something else besides – probably playing “toss the squeaky hedgehog” with Cooper. Something about a thing for guys, a thing guys like, a guy type thing. A cable channel, or service, or something like that. Anyway the “don’t you wish you could join all this fun” part was guys watching a game on tv and doing the usual sporty chatter and laughter.

Line of dialogue:

He throws like my sister!

Jolly guyish laughter.

So. Young girls exposed to that get more twigs added to the stereotype that Girls Can’t Throw and Sport Is For Guys and Girls Trying To Do Sport Is Just Funny Always and Hahaha Girls Throwing Hahaha.

Boys and men exposed to that get their existing stereotypes to that effect further augmented and entrenched.

And it’s just routine. Hardly anyone will even notice (so the stereotype will do its work below the radar).