Bored@Baker rape guide

Inside Higher Ed reports on cyberbullying at university.

There are confession pages and websites, on Facebook and elsewhere. Universities have no way to block access to them.

Most posts are innocent confessions about crushes and pranks — or just hoaxes — but occasionally, students use the sites to launch anonymous attacks and start rumors. That’s what happened recently at Hopkins, where a confessions page on Facebook turned into “a hub for cyberbullying and controversial posts about race and sexual orientation,” according to the independent student newspaper The Johns Hopkins News-Letter. [Read more…]

Herding cats, birds, lions, sharks, and rabbits

The back and forth over American Atheists and the Conservative Political Action Conference continues today. There are people calling it a “witch hunt”…which is odd, because from what I’ve seen it’s mostly feminists who are annoyed by what they think looks like an effort to use abortion rights as a bargaining chip to attract conservatives to AA. (I don’t think that’s what it was, myself, but I get why it looked like that.) Not for the first time I note how ironic it is to use “witch hunt” as a term of abuse for feminist disagreement with something. It’s not normally women who do the witch hunting, and it’s not mostly men who are the victims of witch hunts. Maybe another phrase would be better.

Be that as it may, earlier today Chris Stedman disputed Dave Silverman on a couple of points, and Dave said he would amend his argument. (So, you see? Not a witch hunt. A productive discussion and disagreement. No witches put to the fire.)

Chris Stedman @ChrisDStedman

@MrAtheistPants And you implied on Twitter that there aren’t anti-gay atheists? I’ve actually encountered/heard from many anti-gay atheists. [Read more…]

Going for the numbers

Many people have been annoyed-to-furious with American Atheists and Dave Silverman over the past few days over their courtship of members of the batshit-rightwing community. AA was going to have a table at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but then CPAC changed its mind and gave AA its money back. Dave went to the conference anyway, and talked to lots of people there.

Raw Story reported on some of those conversations on Friday.

[Silverman] seems an unlikely proselytizer for this suit-and-bow-tie crowd, tearing into his subject with the wired energy of an old-school punk rock fan. But he claims it’s working.

“I came with the message that Christianity and conservatism are not inextricably linked,” he told me, “and that social conservatives are holding down the real conservatives — social conservatism isn’t real conservatism, it’s actually big government, it’s theocracy. I’m talking about gay rights, right to die, abortion rights –”

Hold on, I said, I think the Right to Life guys who have a booth here, and have had every year since CPAC started, would disagree that they’re not real conservatives.

“I will admit there is a secular argument against abortion,” said Silverman. “You can’t deny that it’s there, and it’s maybe not as clean cut as school prayer, right to die, and gay marriage.” [Read more…]

Lighter than air

A post about “sex positive feminism” at the New Statesman.

Time was when the very word “feminist” was transgressive. These day people rarely object to it. There’s a bitter irony to the fact that “but I’m a feminist” has become one of those phrases by which male dominance can be positively reinforced. “But I’m a feminist and I don’t mind objectification / unpaid work / sexual harassment / being called a cunt!” The implication is that we’ve come full circle. Feminism has worked through all of its issues and realised that the grown-ups were right all along. All that stuff we used to call oppression? We’re totes cool with it now.

It’s certainly not true that “these days people rarely object to” the word “feminism.” Hah! If only. And usually the people who make a big show of not minding sexual harassment or being called a cunt are not people who self-identify as feminists. But other than that, yes; there’s a real point there; not a new point, but a real one. There’s a surprisingly large amount of hipster sexism out there, of people who think it’s just so last century to pay any attention to things like sexist epithets or sexual harassment, who think the only right response to such concerns is “lighten up” or “shut the fuck up, cunt.”

The only book worth reading

Deeyah talks about her life, at Women News Network for International Women’s Day.

Her grandfather was a pillar of the Norwegian Muslim community, and very religious, a one-book guy. Her father went the opposite way.

For my grandfather, the only book worth reading was the Qur’an, but my father loved all kinds of books and music: cabinets bulged with vinyl LPs, bookshelves were crammed with works as diverse as histories of colonialism and the ancient civilizations of the Indus Valley, mythology, theatre and innumerable collections of Urdu poetry. [Read more…]

Culturally pressured

Kiran Opal has marked International Women’s Day by putting together accounts by 17 ex-Muslim women on her blog.

For those of us who have left Islam as a faith and as an identity, the pressure to stay silent is intense. For many ExMuslims, the price for speaking out about their skepticism, atheism, or agnosticism, is often very high. There is no one monolithic Muslim identity; there is nothing essentially, inherently “Muslim” about someone born into a Muslim family. Yet, for too many people, Islam has become a racialized identity. Many Muslims and non-Muslims see the Muslim identity as a race, not just a doctrine. Although ExMuslims, whether ‘out’ or ‘closeted’, do not identify as Muslim, others often insist on imposing this identity on us. [Read more…]

Born of necessity

Leymah Gbowee says in Al Jazeera “Let’s celebrate International Women’s Day by remembering women around the world working towards peace.”

I am an optimist; there is beauty despite the ugliness. The bravery and strength of our mothers, daughters and sisters give me hope. Even when they are the ones that have been raped, abused and battered, they take part in the process of rehabilitation and resolution – from a neighbourhood conflict to an outright war. I am in awe of the ability of women to keep communities and families together even in the midst of wars and crises. [Read more…]

Guest post: You can’t teach if you are not a learner

Originally a comment by Gordon Willis on Teach the children well.

I am a private teacher, teaching one-to-one. I teach both adults and children. Some of the children, invariably girls, come from Hong Kong or mainland China. They come aged 13 or 14 or 15, like English children to a boarding school, except that they come alone, because their parents can’t afford the fare for both themselves and their daughters. And they find digs and join a new school of completely foreign people, and they stay, and they learn, and they do not (apparently) suffer trauma and angst and complexes and lack-of-religion, even though their English is terrible (one young lady of 17 studying A-level music with me a couple of years ago told me that she preferred it here, though she hadn’t seen very much of her parents since she was 13, and her English is still pretty bad). Though they are very much alone they just get on with it. Culture, probably. They believe in what they are to do, and they do it. It’s amazing and admirable.

There are problems sometimes, of course. Part of being a teacher is to recognise problems and deal with them. The secret is to shut up and let the student just be. [Read more…]