The new coolest part of my job…

…is that I get invited to participate in stuff like this:

For those of you who somehow managed to miss it on the other FTBlogs, yesterday a group of us, along with Rebecca Watson of Skepchick, convened online to host the first (and, judging by the response from the other folks, not the last) Google+ hangout forum. We were discussing, among other things, sexual harassment at skepty/athie conferences like The Amazing Meeting, and specifically the piss-poor way in which DJ Grothe of JREF was handling the issue.

It practically goes without saying that I enjoyed the shit out of myself.

I said it jokingly, but I was serious in my self-appraisal as someone who was more or less a dispassionate third-party observer. I don’t really have a dog in this fight – I wasn’t ever planning on going to TAM, and it had nothing to do with any kind of sexual harassment policy. It just doesn’t really interest me a great deal – the stuff that I care about doesn’t really fall under TAM’s umbrella, and unless the JREF decides to suddenly adopt a radically different mission in life, I don’t see that changing. This isn’t a criticism – TAM should keep doing what has apparently been a very successful event – it just means that I don’t really care either way if TAM succeeds. I’ve therefore intentionally stayed out of the discussion, because I don’t really have that much to contribute besides saying “I agree with Stephanie Zvan” until my vocal chords are hoarse.

That being said, I did have two main points that I wished to contribute to the discussion around this issue: [Read more…]

The darkness before dawn

It is more or less inevitable that, in any discussion of turmoil within a social movement, there will be those who archly perch atop some combination of a high horse and a fence, raining down tongue-clucking pronouncements about how the mere existence of dissent is the reason why they will never get involved. I suppose if one was being charitable, one could interpret this as an impulse to avoid conflict. After all, not everyone wants to jump into the midst of a fight, and I can certainly sympathize with that impulse. Some people simply want to exist and be at peace without having to ‘pick a side’ between factions that should be united in purpose.

Of course, the question becomes why those who wish to avoid conflict so ostentatiously announce themselves to be above it rather than just butting out the way they claim to want to do. Standing up on a soapbox and doing the whole ‘plague on both your houses’ lecture is not a statement of non-involvement; it’s a statement of philosophical purity and superiority. “I would never lower myself to so crass a level as to care about something and fight for it. How vulgar!” It is the same spirit of false equivalence we are so often ‘treated’ to from faitheists who would hush Gnu atheists for being ‘too strident’ and ‘attacking’ religious folks instead of engaging in a sort of faux-ecumenical hand-holding exercise where we hold our noses and pretend each other’s shit doesn’t stink. [Read more…]

“It’s my movement too”; the white whine of atheism

*Trigger warning for misogyny.

*UPDATE 2014/02/14 – I was contacted by one of the subjects of this piece, asking me to take it down because “the internet takes things out of context”. Ordinarily that kind of weaksauce pleading doesn’t cut it with me, but I can make the argument in this post without using his name, and he has to use his name to get jobs and such. I have deleted it from the body of the text and from the comments. It is still present in the screencap of the tweet though, because seriously fuck that guy.

Sometimes the world does your job for you.

A tweet calling Rebecca Watson an 'uppity cunt'

So one of the most fun aspects of male privilege is that I can look at stupid bullshit like this and laugh. First of all, Ian A*** isn’t a member of CFI Amherst, he’s just a douchebro with a big mouth. But hey, that’s one of the hallmarks of douchebroism – a ludicrously inflated sense of self-importance. Because I’m a guy, I get to look at words like ‘cunt’ in purely anthropological terms and pick apart the various types of ignorance and privilege that would lead someone to make that word choice. Of course, Mr. A*** immediately disavowed any sexism in his tweet: see, there are a lot of things he could have meant by ‘cunt’. He might have been calling her an old old wooden ship from the civil war era! Words can mean anything! I guess he’s relying on the assumption that we’re all as stupid as he is. [Read more…]

Something… weird happened last week

Anyone who is at least passingly familiar with the political landscape of the United States right now knows that the Republican Party has declared open season on women’s reproductive rights. From the much-derided all-male hearing on women’s contraception (and the resulting Limbaugh clusterfuck) to the very serious breaches of both personal autonomy and medical ethics happening in various states, there seems to be a concerted effort to roll back women’s access to health care. Add to that the fact that the government was nearly shut down because Republicans refused to allow any federal funding to go to Planned Parenthood, their reluctance to recertify the Violence Against Women Act, and the picture becomes pretty clear: Republicans have decided that American women are on their own.

Of course we have our own version of the Republicans forming the government here in Canada. As I noted shortly after the election, the Republican North Party is actually a stiched-together and very uneasy coalition of actual legitimate fiscal conservatives and the backwoods knee-jerk reactionaries that exist in every country to some degree, and said this: [Read more…]

First things first

One of the great truths about religion, at least contemporary religion in North America, is that it has largely shed the fundamentalism of its past and has evolved (perhaps a poor choice of words) into a much more tolerant and forward-thinking practice. Gone are the days of slavish adherence to obscure and backward dogmatic beliefs that were the hallmark of a time when such things were necessary to hold society together. Everyone knows that, aside from a few fringe groups, religious institutions are really more about building fellowship and fostering community service than anything else.

Of course, like all religious “truths”, that’s complete bullshit:

The Vatican has ordered a crackdown on a group of American nuns that it considers too radical. It says the group is undermining Roman Catholic teaching on homosexuality and is promoting “feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith”. The Leadership Conference, which is based in Maryland, represents about 57,000 nuns and offers a wide range of services, from leadership training for women’s religious orders to advocacy on social justice issues.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the nuns’ organisation faced a “grave” doctrinal crisis. It said issues of “crucial importance” to the church, such as abortion and euthanasia, had been ignored. Vatican officials also castigated the group for making some public statements that “disagree with or challenge positions taken by the bishops”, who are the church’s “authentic teachers of faith and morals.” [Read more…]

Racism? Let them eat cake!

Sometimes stuff comes up in the news and I just don’t bother going after it. There are low-hanging news stories that are so silly or frivolous that I can’t think of anything worthwhile to say about them. Sometimes I file them away for a rainy day when I don’t have a lot of time or energy, or on the off chance that I’ll be able to link to it later in a more substantive piece. So when I read about Sweden’s “racist cake” incident, I figured it was worth taking a pass:

Sweden’s culture minister is facing calls to step down after she was photographed cutting a cake shaped in the form of a naked black woman. The incident involving Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth happened at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. According to Radio Sweden, the museum said the cake was supposed to highlight the issue of female circumcision. But the Association for African Swedes said it was a crude racist caricature and called for Ms Liljeroth to resign.

A few people asked me to respond, but I thought it was a waste of time. After all, it’s a very silly story about an art installation that, as is often the case, was provocative and not in the greatest ‘taste’ (sorry for the pun). Avant garde art is, by definition, ahead of public opinion and designed to shock to prove a point. The involvement of the Swedish culture minister was a regrettable move on her part, but what would you do if asked to cut into a living cake at an art gallery? Staunchly refuse and launch into a tirade against the artist? It was the result of really shitty staff work and a questionable piece of art.

But damn if that confection didn’t have staying power. I guess it’s true – chocolate just doesn’t come out! So here’s a brief issue-by-issue breakdown of my thoughts. [Read more…]

Sitting in a privilege ‘sweet spot’?

Over the past two years, I have spent a great deal talking about (and even more time learning about) the way that group privilege operates on our evaluations of people, of events, of ourselves. It’s almost like an evaluation of ‘room temperature’ – where we sit on various latitude lines will influence what we think of as ‘normal’, and whatever our perceptions, they are filtered by our ‘set point’. And while your neighbour is shivering and complaining about how ze’s freezing to death, you’re throwing on a t-shirt and left baffled as to how anyone can call 15 degrees ‘cold’.

Another thing I have noticed is the yawning diversity in people’s willingness to recognize their own privilege. Some are ready, even eager in some cases, to accept that their own judgments are the product of a particular perspective that may not be shared by other people. Many others, with frustrating frequency, look into the face of the existence of privilege with the stony, reluctant resolve that is usually reserved for sexual requests involving drop cloths and rubber hoses. Any and all possible excuses are found to escape rather than simply accept the possibility that the sails of their ‘rational’ argument might have a gaping hole that they just cannot see.

Now my experience here at FTB has been… let’s just say it surprised me. I thought that I would have a much rougher ride toward acceptance than I did. People seemed to be familiar with the concept of privilege, and willing to at least listen when the topic is discussed. I credit the feminist skeptics with breaking this ground and bringing the idea of male privilege into the mainstream. To my perhaps greater surprise, many readers have been the one schooling me when my own privilege pokes its head through. It is that latter phenomenon I want to explore today, because it’s been on my mind for a while.

The reason for my surprise at my reception isn’t because I blindly assume that nobody before me has ever thought about these topics before. I contrast my experience here with what I have seen in the world and in other spaces where privilege is raised as a topic. Without wanting to put too fine a point on it, I bought into the stereotype that the majority of my readers would be white males (and who knows, maybe y’all are). Like the hypothetical temperature example above, I rather assumed that, like in other spaces where the topic has arisen, I’d see significant pushback when discussing issues of race because people would see it as an attack rather than a neutral description of behaviour. It is notoriously difficult to see reason when your back is against a wall and you feel like someone’s gunning for you – especially when that gun is aimed at your race.

Thinking about that got me thinking about my own experiences where I’ve had to acknowledge how my own privilege has filtered my judgment. These days it’s no problem – I live in a world of privilege dissection, and recognizing that I’m not perfect is something that has become much easier as I’ve gotten older. If I work at it real hard though, I can still remember those many years ago (read: my early 20s, like 4 years ago maybe?) when I was so woefully blind and ignorant of the power that my being male carried, and still carries. I used to be almost as bad as the MRA set when it came to things like mansplaining and finding the “real reasons” for things*. Just because the people I was arguing with lived sexism and misogyny didn’t mean that I couldn’t just armchair philosoph my way into propping up the status quo, right?

I am sad to say that it wasn’t my female friends that eventually turned me around on the whole ‘feminism’ thing. As much as I would love to be able to claim that a persuasive, rational argument opened my eyes, it was in fact my exploration of race issues. Understanding white privilege was easy – I’d seen it a million times in others. Understanding my own colour privilege was a bit tougher, but because it aligned so  closely with the colour-based privilege I’d seen before it wasn’t too much of a stretch. Understanding that, by being a man, everything I knew might be draped in falsehood and misperception was a tough thing to accept. The consequences of such recognition meant that I was going to have to say “I’m wrong” a lot.

Of course, the upshot of actually learning to do that – to admit that I just didn’t get it – is that other things in my life got a whole lot better. I no longer feared losing arguments or exposing my own ignorance. After all, it was just another opportunity to learn – who wouldn’t love that? And yes, I would look weak in the eyes of people who equate strength with inflexibility, but was that really important? I realized that the path to truth is paved with stones of honesty, and that self-delusion is the worst kind.

All that to say this: I may have been situated in a ‘sweet spot’ for privilege recognition. Because I’ve seen privilege from both sides – being on the wrong side of white privilege, being on the ‘right’ side of male privilege (not to mention colour privilege, able-body privilege, cis gender privilege, first world privilege, insert your favourite here) – it is a trivial task for me to recognize and admit that there are things I don’t get simply by virtue of never being on the receiving end. It would be far more difficult for me to understand if I were white, and I dare say if I were… I dunno… a paraplegic trans lesbian living in Somalia or something. Being able to see ‘both sides’ puts me in an advantageous position to not only recognize privilege, but explain it to others.

Or maybe it’s easy for everyone and I’m just an asshole.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

*Seriously. Ask the people I went to grad school with. I used to ‘cheers’ friends at the bar with the opening line from Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit”. It even made it into my MSc thesis. I thought it was a really funny joke, and that the women in my program were just being uptight. If I could go back in time, I’d kick my own ass. For a lot of things.

Movie Friday: DIY

Here’s a chance for you to make your own Friday movie.

Gender Commercial Remixer

Just take any two commercials, and swap the audio from the ‘boys’ commercial with the video from the ‘girls’ commercial (or vice versa). Hit ‘mashup’ and enjoy!

And then cry, I guess. If you have kids, maybe show this to them so they know how stupid advertising executives think they are.

h/t Radical Bytes

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Show her the money!

Happy International Women’s Day!

In every field, at every level of education, men earn more than women. That’s the grim takeaway of this new report [PDF] from the U.S. Census Bureau, which assesses the value of a higher education in the United States—and illustrates the persistent pay gap between male and female employees who hold comparable degrees. In short, education is valuable, but it’s most lucrative if you’re male.

I have more patience than some others when it comes to stupid attitudes about sexism and feminism. Part of that is simple privilege: I can afford to not take those kinds of attitudes personally; however, some of  my zen is honestly come by. I’ve always called myself a feminist, but my understanding of that term didn’t really mature until I became involved in organized skepticism. I then came to understand feminism as a branch of skepticism – learning to unpack and, in a way, debunk claims about gender roles, sex characteristics, history, and a whole host of others. In fact, the level of overlap between feminism and anti-racism has helped enhance my understanding of both topics.

I can kind of understand the problem though, and it relates directly to that overlap. I care deeply about anti-racism for, at least in part, fundamentally selfish reasons. While I must always start this statement with the huge caveat that I have managed to escape the worst aspects of racism in my own life, racism still very much affects my day-to-day life. I have, therefore, a vested interest in seeing the world pay more critical attention to race and race issues. Because of this selfish motive, it is easy for me to empathize with women and recognize the multitude of similarities in the problems we face. However, it took me several years to come to this conclusion. [Read more…]

It’s a good day for the ladies

One of the most frustrating arguments I encounter when talking about feminism is the various double standards. Women are portrayed as the passive recipients of actions, and yet are the ones who must take responsibility for their marginalization (either by “grow(ing) a pair”, “get(ting) a sense of humour”, or not “dress(ing) like a total whore”). There is rarely the corrolary pressure put on men to moderate their (our) behaviour, at least not by non-feminists. Of course when feminists do say “hey guys, don’t do that”, they (we) get piled on for being a castration-hungry horde of groupthinkers who are just trying to get laid (if you’re a straight man) or who just need to get laid (if you’re not).

Not too long ago, I talked about an experience I had when I was doing undergrad orientation, where the women in my residence were taught a number of ways to safeguard themselves against date rape. Oddly (or, rather, not oddly at all), there were no accompanying instructions for the guys. Safeguarding people from date rape was a ‘victim-only’ responsibility. In that same post, I lauded a program that is seeking to shift the conversation away from that kind of blame-based advice and toward a “personal responsibility” *twitch* model. The idea seems to be picking up steam in some unlikely places. [Read more…]