I’m sad now. Jen has a video of Greta Christina talking about atheism and sexuality, and for several days I’ve been trying to get it to work…and no matter what I do, it won’t play. Greta is great, though, so it’s almost certainly an excellent talk…maybe it will work for you.
Jen also has the results (and more) of a survey of her readers, with the somewhat sorta kinda surprising result that even as a young feminist atheist writer, 75% of her audience are male. We need to encourage more women to participate and lead the atheist movement — speak up if you have suggestions how to increase women’s involvement. And telling us to be nicer and softer and gentler, as if women are somehow more delicate and need more coddling, is only going to make Elizabeth Cady Stanton spin in her grave. I’ve noticed that atheist women are quite good at roaring ferociously themselves.
Obviously you should show off for them a bit PZ. ;)
Could that be because people who roar ferociously are more noticeable?
I know a few nice, gentle atheists. You probably won’t be able to turn them into ferocious roarers, no matter what you do, so you may as well just leave them where they are.
Yay! I put the video on Pharyngula, and now it finally works for me!
Hmmm I always mean to read her blog more but I don’t. To bad, that would have been one more female for her poll. Oh well.
I wonder what the demographics here are like in comparison?
It’s fine that there are gentle atheists, and I’m not saying they need to be more ferocious.
I was trying to short-circuit the most common argument about the lack of women in prominent positions in atheism: that women need more softness. They don’t.
I’d argue that they need more recognition, and that the pretense that they need more doileys and handholding is a fairly standard way of shushing them up and putting them in a deferential role.
(littlejohn)
As a guy who’s been married 28 years, I know exactly how to get more women interested.
Two words: Atheist shoes.
Two words: Atheist shoes.
Wow, sexist humor is SO ORIGINAL.
Oh, we atheist women can roar alright! I gave a talk recently at NDSU on my experiences growing up in Mormonism and then leaving. A Mormon bishop was in attendance and during the discussion tried to claim that excommunication was not punishment. I lost it. I yelled. I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember slapping the table!
Don’t forget the matching accessories, like Kninja Knitting Kneedles…
As I said elsewhere, my guess is predominantly white, lower middle class, university educated 20-40 somethings with a male to female ratio of 3-1.
I don’t think there are as many sexual advantages for women to say they are atheists. For a man, staking a claim in defiance of God and society can turn heads. For women, it’s just bitchy. Sad, but true.
I couldn’t care less about how many atheist women there are. It matters to me as much as how many atheists there are that are 5’5”. I’m not about to let some silly gender roles keep me from treating people as individuals, not “blacks” or “whites,” or “males” or “females”.
“Atheist shoes” … lol
I’m a woman who’d prefer a new laptop to new shoes but I make the same sort of comments myself. What would an atheist shoe look like though? …
On a serious note, I find my level of confidence differs depending on who I’m with – out and proud with friends, seriously in the closet with religious family members. Perhaps some women find it difficult because of their spouse, their family, their community, etc. Before you jump on me, I’m not suggesting that women are delicate and need coddling, but I am saying that not all of us are as brave or as vocal as perhaps we should be. But the vocal trailblazers encourage and enable the rest of us.
A Vicar’s Daughter
One of the problem with women speaking up are the misogynists who work so hard to shout them down.
Though neither are atheists, anyone who can’t see the misogyny behind attacks on Hillary Clinton or (despite how deeply and ferociously I disagree with her on most issues) Sarah Palin clearly isn’t looking.
It takes a very thick skin to get past that, especially when it comes from people who are supposed to be on your side (it’s sickening how many “liberals” are able to embrace misogyny). It’s already raised its ugly head in this thread, and as I’m writing this, there have only been 11 comments.
Greta is a great speaker, writer, and commentator. Plus, she’ll “friend” you on Facebook if you ask.
She posts something interesting there just about everyday.
I recommend the video highly, I watched the whole thing and will watch it again this week and take some notes.
Regular visits to Greta Christina’s blog are also highly recommended. She has an interesting and enlightening perspective on sexuality.
She is definitely one of the most rational thinkers I have experienced and has an entertaining speaking and writing style.
I tend to think women’s positions are more tenuous and vulnerable. That’s certainly the reason I keep my mouth shut. For instance at work there are a couple more outspoken people (male) who will simply say what they think on that issue. I would never do that. Like I need another level of discrimination to add myself to.
I got my best gal reading skepchick and she enjoys your site as well.
“I don’t think there are as many sexual advantages for women to say they are atheists. For a man, staking a claim in defiance of God and society can turn heads. For women, it’s just bitchy. Sad, but true.”
I’m not sure the effects of patriarchy and misogyny are neatly explained by sexual advantage. But I would agree that women face greater discrimination for challenging the status quo. Then again women face greater discrimination in general.
cfmilner:
I’m guessing no soles.
*cheeky grin*
@19
Well played!
It works for me!
Being an atheist woman from a Middle Eastern culture (fun!) my whole being is based on how “virtuous” or “whore-y” I am. I usually find it hilarious, but it took building a skin of armor around me and asking my family to do the same. Which they did.
This video is great so far!!
I don’t think there are as many sexual advantages for women to say they are atheists. For a man, staking a claim in defiance of God and society can turn heads. For women, it’s just bitchy. Sad, but true
i don’t know, staking a claim in defiance of god could just mean that we have come to a rational and intelligent decision on our own and are unafraid to be vocal about it.
calling women bitchy because they are thinkers is just bitchy, frankosaurus. ;)
My fervent hope is that atheist women will reject out-dated patriarchal hang ups about sexuality, and thus put out more.
That’s my hope anyway.
frankosaurus @10:
I’m female, atheist, white, middle-middle-class (to upper, depending on what your criteria are for each class — I prefer calling it “professional class” rather than “middle class”. I’m also verging on 60.
why do you say lower middle class? (for some reason, that sounds like a slam to me)
I just don’t post much here because other people are either wittier, more knowledgeable, and/or more articulate than I am.
#11 is totes colorblind like Colbert.
@ Becca
hmmm… I don’t know what lower middle class means either.
I’m white, female,I suspect I’m from the working class not the middle class (under 50k household… in fact frequently under 30k due to split-ups and seasonal layoffs), not sure on the whole sexual orientation thing, still in my 20’s, have a BA but dropped out of grad school. I probably am an outlier for Pharyngula.
*feels a little lonely*
I have a corporate job now though so let’s call me middle class :D
@26, Ol’Greg
I think almost all Pharyngulites are outliers in some way or another.
@26, Ol’Greg
I think almost all Pharyngulites are outliers in some way or another.
I assume you mean “behind some of the attacks” not behind the act of attacking them in general….
I assume you’re not confused about the fact that he was describing the perception such women face in broader society rather than his own views.
I’m a closeted lier :P
We’re here; we’re everywhere including churches sometimes, as I’ve discovered. Some people* just need to stop harharring at each other and listen sometimes.
Or I shall smack you with my reticule.
We’re not meek and shy and quiet; we just get bored trying to outshout the dickaphones, and IME find it more interesting to have conversations with each other—in fact, that’s how I met Greta Christina way back when.
*I have caught our host here being careful to do that, to listen, in person, without being condescending. Most impressive.
I realize you’re joking (though I suppose it’s only a matter of time before one or more of three certain Sciencebloggers pounces on this) but there’s kind of a grain of truth here, though I would say a better way of conceptualizing it is “atheistic women, in rejecting the religious precepts than underpin much of traditional patriarchal attitudes and hang-ups about sexuality, are more likely to agree with the message that ‘you [generally speaking] are beautiful and sex is fun.'”
I think part of the problem with being a woman atheist as to do with all the negative attributes attached to being an atheist, that of being unmoral, promiscuous, strident, mean, militant, etc…
I think the social world in which most women exist in is quite different than that of men.
This is of course just a guess as I am a man.
because of course the only reason we’re liberals is because we want the government to take care of us by taking away the money of the rich, who aren’t us. So of course we’re kinda poor; but not too poor, since if we were, we’d not have the aforementioned college education, or enough time to hang out on a blog.
see how that works?
They would be sensible. They would dome in all shapes and sizes. They would come in all colours. They would not be restrictive. And of course, what subbie said.
Gee – maybe i should check to see if maybe Keen shoes…. NAH!
DEMO: Male, White, Mid 50s, upper-middle (I think, I don’t keep track), actively attempt to be an outlier.
I also agree completely with Becca’s last comment at 24, but I am obviously not as intelligent as she.
JC
I suspect that there are a few Sciencebloggers that I’d be delighted to be pounced upon by. (In for a penny, in for a pound.)
For those using Safari and having problems getting the video to play, you can try the following:
Click on the Vimeo in the bottom right of embedded video, to go to the video actually on the Vimeo site. Below the text on the right is a link offering the use of the “HTML5 player”. Click on this. Now you’ll be able to watch the video without using Flash (and hence without pegging your CPU usage to 100%)
PZ, if you’re still having trouble playing the video, you can download it from here. It should play in any media player (and a good bit less glitchy than in flash, at that).
… speak up if you have suggestions how to increase women’s involvement.
Hey, if I knew enough to stimulate “women’s involvement”, would I have this much time to read ‘n’ blather on blogs?
Well now, atheist spaces being not all that different from other human spaces, save for the non-believer bit, I’d venture to guess that they face the same problems about being in inclusive of women that society at large does. Therefore, you need not look for specific reasons for lack of women (or lack of vocal women) in atheist spaces; the solution is easily generalized from every other space ever.
In looking specifically at internet spaces, you’ll notice that many places that draw a lot of women fall into two categories — either they have topics that are strictly construed as feminine (parenting, knitting, etc.), so that aside from drawing women, most men stay away for fear of losing their cock or something, or they are very heavily moderated (blogs such as Shapely Prose or Shakesville), so that they are safer spaces than most women ever find either in real life or on the internet.
If there is anything specific about atheism that drives women away or doesn’t include them, it may be that they have more to loose, as they are already a socially disadvantaged class. Refer to my first point a little, I guess. Other than that, perhaps that — at least in the US where most religious folk are some kind of Christian — religion is sometimes coded a little feminine and that it gives women who buy in a socially acceptable outlet for their energy and talents. Taking that away can leave some women without an outlet at all, and that is threatening.
I am fairly vocal among the community I socialise in, with family and with anyone who cares to ask. i regularly contribute to debate forums (only recently on here). However, I do have a lot of things going on in my life, establishing my career being the major one right now, and I simply do not have enough time to do everything. Perhaps that is one of the reasons? The women atheists I know in addition to myself, are so busy handling everything else in their life that making the significant effort that would be required for recognition takes too much time. I do what I can when I can to contribute. :)
Hey PZ, I think I have a scientific explanation for you…maybe it’s women’s decreased testosterone levels that keeps them from “roaring ferociously” about shit they don’t believe in like fucking idiots…putz
you didn’t watch the video, did you. Greta Christian isn’t “roaring ferociously about shit [she doesn’t] believe in”. Responding to a thread without knowing what the fuck you’re on about makes you look like a fucking idiot.
Greta Christina, even :-p
Bigdick23 @ 42, thanks for your input. If nothing else, at least you are aptly named.
There may be people from all walks, but this would be my guess. I’m fairly certain the need to display intellectualism declines as income levels go up. Probably other reasons too, but the best way to find out is to take a poll. Me, as a student, I probably qualify as below the poverty line.
I imagine some of the trouble has to do with the fact that women’s opinions tend to be taken less seriously than those of men and are more likely to be ignored or berated. A lot of the trans folk I know report that their opinions get far more respect when they are seen as male than female. This can make it much harder for women to take on positions that are at odds with social norms.
Report from a female atheist trying to participate: I just spent 15 minutes trying to draft an intelligent comment and was interrupted 3 times. I give up.
Becca @ 27:
I suppose the rest of you are, but I’m not.
Subbie@45, You know, probably the scariest thing about Priapism23 is the 23. I mean, not only does this imply that there are 22 others wandering around with similar handles, it implies that despite that, Priapism23 thought it was a cool enough handle that he kept trying until he found one that wasn’t taken.
I just have this sad vision of a 40 year old man in his mother’s basement
…
“Priapism10? Damn!”
…
“Priapism 17? Damn!”
…
Priapism 23? Whew!”
“you didn’t watch the video, did you. Greta Christian isn’t “roaring ferociously about shit [she doesn’t] believe in”. Responding to a thread without knowing what the fuck you’re on about makes you look like a fucking idiot.”
Are you that dense? I wan’t responding to the video you moron. I was responding to PZ’s wondering why more women weren’t visible in the atheist movement, because he known them to be able to “roar ferociously” too.
“Bigdick23 @ 42, thanks for your input. If nothing else, at least you are aptly named.”
Wow subbie, congratulations! You can google a word too! Yay!
I have solved this problem by keeping the temperature in the room I reside significantly below the temperature the other inhabitants of this apartment are able to handle. now, all communication happens over Instant Messenger unless I leave my cold, damp cave voluntarily :-p
which directly related to the video of an atheist woman roaring ferociously about atheism for 88 minutes. IOW, you’re fucking stupid. Atheist activism isn’t about talking about what you don’t believe in, it’s about finding and discussing alternatives for the sort of things religion likes to claim for itself: figuring out morality, justice, community, how to express emotional depth without using “spiritual” language, etc.
seriously, you sound like a religiobot when you accuse atheist activism of being simply “about shit you don’t believe in”.
“Hey PZ, I think I have a scientific explanation for you…maybe it’s women’s decreased testosterone levels that keeps them from “roaring ferociously” about shit they don’t believe in like fucking idiots…putz”
Are you female? Because that would be ironic! Rawr!!!
More respect and recognition of prominent female atheists. Female atheists need female atheist role-models. We have the Four Horsemen, now we need the Four Horsewomen.
At first, it will feel awkward for a lot of us, going out of our way to highlight as many females as males. It will seem sexist, ironically, but it’s worth it to fight for progress.
Oh, and don’t say “there aren’t enough female atheist role-models”. The solution for that is to create some, by giving more female atheists more recognition.
It seems to me that we already have several (well, many, but several come to mind) really good atheist women writers on the blog-o-sphere.
Do we need more? You bet. (More smart men, too.)
PZ: thanks for this.
@6: Puleez.
Atheist shoes? Aaargh.
I’m a woman, I love shoes, and I’m an atheist. I guess I’ve got the whole package here. Still, I am severely irked by the shoes “joke.”
Perhaps this is why vocal female atheists aren’t getting the recognition we all apparently think they deserve? Because you (I’m assuming you are a man, but it doesn’t matter what sex you are, it’s your 19th century attitude that stinks) devalue the intellect and contribution of women to the discussion with the ol’ shoe saw. I’m insulted on behalf of your wife. For shame.
But, but, his wife has lots of shoes! And he told her that joke and she laughed at it! So you are totally wrong!!!eleventy!!!
Whore of All the Earth #8, that was an excellent talk! What the Mormon church did to you psychologically was horribly abusive and yet, in a twist of fate, it allowed you to see that religion more objectively and to resist their later attempts to manipulate you. I especially liked the story of how you became aware of ancient mythologies being dead religions that real people had once believed in just as people believe in religions today. Thanks for sharing your story! I really enjoyed it.
Whore of All the Earth, I also just watched the loudmouth bishop start to go on his power trip and try to take over the discussion at the end, and it made me so angry. Ugh.
On the subject of getting more women to contribute and lead in the atheist community, the why of it is as familiar as it is tragic.
That is, women are discouraged from sharing their own viewpoints, perspectives, life experiences, especially if they can be seen as “controversial” aka human or real. And the why of that is because the default setting of maleness in our society often manifests itself in a form of toxic masculinity that is less about some variety of attributes such as for instance, athleticism, casualness, etc… and more about what they aren’t, specifically, being feminine.
And this becomes all consuming because the toxic masculinity worldview ends up becoming this large thing where masculinity retains for one specific privileges that are subject at any moment to be taken away if one is seen to do anything that can be seen as feminine or sympathetic to femininity. Thus, you get a bunch of men psychologically invested in not only being hyper-vigilant about fighting against anything with the taint of women, but whom see it as life and death to do so at anything feminine or female that gets within a certain radius.
These strands of men and this social idea ends up driving male actions to basically seek to disrupt, antagonize, troll, and otherwise prevent women from being taken seriously or even state their cases or life experiences because the men see it as personally necessary to do so to retain male cred and retain the privileges afforded to male people (such as the right to share an opinion unimpeded).
Then you combine other factors. The interesting fact that when men and women are forced to talk the same amount, both sides perceive it as being dominated by women leads both sides to “calibrate” towards a male-dominated conversation. There is also the fact that women are culturally raised that there viewpoints are not worthy of attention and furthermore that their “natural role” is that of arbitrators or peacemakers, means that women especially in formative years and young adulthood will be fighting against learned instinct to stifle one’s opinion and defer to other people in order to “keep the peace” even if they kick themselves afterwards for doing so. Even the interesting fact that there’s a general freakout whenever a space becomes “female dominated” aka contains more than half women, wherein men seek to flee it and dismiss it as feminine or otherwise try and “fix” the imbalance by deciding something needs to be done to make it even harder for women to get to that level or artificially spend even more time focusing on the men.
The whys are obvious, really. The same old sexist song and dance that will plague any mixed-gender organization while society remains structurally sexist.
The how, I’m happy to say, is also an old tale writ large. We will get more women in atheist leadership the same way we slowly get more women in college or more women with careers or more women in sports or more women in politics or more women in business.
That is to say, more women of courage stepping up and coming out and being the vanguard against the usual malarky of the trailblazer, sympathetic male allies making more concentrated efforts to read, listen to, and learn from the works, life experiences, and viewpoints of female members of the community, growing pressure against those who seek to retain a “boy’s club” atmosphere and tolerance for diversity in general, and the slow work of time.
As with atheism in larger society, women in atheism will have to come out, speak up, be unafraid to complain and work step by agonizing step until a generation of atheists hardly feels the old gender divide at all. Basically, all equality and progressive movements have the same struggle against bias and status quo of just pushing the rock until it’s enough up the hill that the next generation is almost oblivious to where the rock started because it’s just natural that it be up here.
Which is awesome, because while it sucks that women are underrepresented in atheism as in most things, the answer is not really as frightening or insurmountable as it may seem. As more and more women break through glass ceiling after glass ceiling and come out and get feminist ideas to comingle with atheism, we will see a natural shift where more women almost automagically appear simply by it now being a little easier for the next woman back.
And what sympathetic male allies can do in general is what PZ and others are doing, learn from feminist and female critiques of current atheist culture or society in general, listen to female perspectives and fight against social pressure to immediately dismiss them to avoid being corrupted with the feminine, and promote and highlight women and keep a mental note to fight against cultural bias to automatically preference male voices as automatically more authoritative and passionate. And reading some feminist theory probably wouldn’t hurt.
It’s just that easy.
Oh another bit on the how low frequency of X in any subgroup occurs is everyone gets tired having to -ism 101 every thread their involved in. When speaking, having to give a rundown of sexism 101, racism 101, homophobia 101 just to make a point or explain life experiences and having the same battle each attempt to do so, can get tiring and block from the intellectual exercise of the actual topic and the whole point of the community in general. It’s nice to be able to jump into a feminist analysis of a sci-fi movie or to discuss women and atheism without having the same old argument just to get there. This often leads to lurking behavior (secret fans or the like who avoid the public displays of subgroup-atude) or flat out saying it’s not worth it (why bother being in the conventional community rather than a subgroup of the subgroup or enjoying it as a personal thing if it’s just going to piss you off to try.
Becca @24: Ditto to all you said, demographic-wise.
My aching joints wish I were 20-40, no matter what economic class.
Certainly, women have been socialised to be conciliatory to a far greater extent than men. [A side effect: girls are raised to become more manipulative. Remember all those “Rules” books?’] An assertive women is often shouted down, tagged as “bitch”, “whore”, “cunt” etc., ad nauseum, that lovely madonna/whore dichotomy. Is it any wonder that many women become disgusted with the whole thing and others don’t care to deal with it?
A mere bagatelle, as I don’t have DC’s talent:
The woman doth roar –
She must be a whore
To be a good lass,
She must sit on her ass
When matters descend to misogyny, it can become futile to continue. Lecturing is more controllable, IMX, simply because a blog can be spammed by misogynist trolls, which tends to take the focus off the subject as people repsond to the troll. If one is lecturing, one has the ability to deal with hecklers in a different way. [I prefer an Uzi, myself, tho’ it’s become impossible to take them in one’s carry-on luggage.]
Amusingly, I was once called a “prick” here. I couldn’t tell whether the raver was an equal-opportunity name-caller or just thought I was male.
I’m fairly assertive, tho’ I enjoy subtle argument. I was once accused of “using people’s own words against them”. which was deemed “unfair”. [Is it any wonder I ended up in law school?] It’s sometimes easier to achieve that *Click!* moment by leading someone in a logic circle that butts them up against a rote belief, especially if one does it in white gloves.
BTW, boys – “priapism” is a sexual dysfunction that has nothing to do with penis size. If P23 truly suffers from this condition, he needs to get himself to a doctor, before the damage results in an inability to get an erection. If I had a penis that wasn’t working correctly, I wouldn’t boast about it.
But…
I can and do write assertively about religion, atheism, etc., and I’m also am quite fond of, shall we say, “doileys and handholding,” to use PZ’s terms.
And I’m not referring specifically to this post, and I’m only speaking from my own experience, but I often do feel that female atheist writers/bloggers, etc., are supposed to choose: either you’re into “doileys and handholding,” or you’re “ferocious,” which I find incredibly frustrating. I haven’t any interest in being “ferocious,” but I certainly am willing to write in an assertive manner when the subject calls for it.
Check out Mrs Betty Bowers on youtube. She doesn’t roar, but her wit is sharp enough to inflict some deep wounds in the flabby, distended, putrid body of Christian lunacy.
On her talk itself, it raised some interesting ideas for me.
First of all is how consent seems to be treated in general. I think sexuality often struggles in the midst of several separate pressures. Cultural weight (often as a result of religious ideas of women defining secular culture) wherein female consent and full informed consent in general is a relatively new social idea despite it being critical for moral sex, first of all. But also religious that defines consent of the parties if it is consulted at all, being wholly secondary to the consent of God as defined by religious elders. Furthermore to achieve his consent one must deliberately avoid seeking a state of informed consent rather instead just guessing the best you can without information or communication.
Finally, we have progressive push towards a world wherein full honesty with ourselves, our partners and the primacy of informed consent, which struggles against us often growing up in cultures ranging from ignorant of to hostile to the notion of consent and a diversity of human experience. As she points out in her talk, a lot of religious effort is devoted to the act of shutting off sexual options and possibilities that occur in the diverse spectrum of human sexuality and lust that are not based on the primacy of consent. That is, religions just cross them off the list and add them to the “no consent” or in place of the “no consent” actions as bad sex and externalize the reason to something that trumps the primacy of the informed consent rule.
I think this also affects the no consent culture we deal with, because if there are a large number of people being raised to see “it’s bad, because” as having power over the primacy of consent, the primacy of consent is hardly even noticed or referenced. See how many people blather on about the slippery slope of tolerating gayness to allowing nonconsensual relationships like child molestation or bestiality because the primacy of consent has been wholly eclipsed by the “it’s bad” religious God card.
When you combine noticing this to the interesting fact she noted and raised which is that for 99% of people sex and sexuality is a critical aspect like hunger or being tired and the point of the one guy about how cults find controlling something fundamentally human like sexuality to be critical to controlling the people in the cult and driving their thought processes. I think you find the answer to the driving cohesiveness of conservative philosophy and how the religious tend to operate like sheep and why religions have such a hold on the world. That is, by controlling some basic human aspect and giving an otherworldly and wholly arbitrary set of rules regarding it will give you a decent amount of control over people themselves.
Thus, I wonder if part of what we need not only for greater sexual freedom, but possibly even the atheist movement in general is genuine sex education in this country. I don’t just mean reproductive education or sex precaution education or minimalist “here’s your flak jacket” sex education, but actual genuine in-depth education about sex and sexuality.
By that I mean, actual education for young adults and teens about sex and sexuality, how to decipher their own sexuality, how to explore it safely, how to explore various sexual acts safely, how to find what you want, how to explore for one’s self, how to stand up for what you want and avoid being pressured into what you don’t or are not ready for, how to cut your losses from a relationship and recognize how lust and love can be two separate things, both of which can be important in their own ways, and how to avoid pressuring others and how to recognize and practice informed consent and avoid predatory behavior.
This would cut down on rapes, allow people to have a baseline to sexual exploration rather than everyone starting from scratch and learning bad lessons from porn on what “everyone wants” rather than what they themselves want, and become more comfortable with their natural sexuality in a more organic, less secretive and guilt-ridden manner wherein everyone assumes they are the sole outlier because no one’s talking about it and there’s no one to talk to.
Basically, I wonder if what is eventually needed is essentially what the right-wing screeches about every time the minimalistic “wear a condom, STDs are bad” sex education is brought up, that is, education about sex wherein we teach our kids about “fellatio and anal sex” and how to figure out what works and doesn’t work for you, how to ask and how to refrain if you’re not ready or it doesn’t work for you and how one’s consent is primary rather than whether or not people having a sexuality, especially teens freaks out the Jesus pushers.
Anyways, those were some of the things I was thinking about while listening to her speech and Q&A.
The women I know have tongues so sharp, they don’t need to raise their voices. They can send someone sobbing in tears with a single devastating sentence.
But that’s besides the point. Women are excluded from all sorts of things, atheist movements/groups are no exception. It doesn’t have anything to do with genetics or biology, and it probably has more to do with who controls resources. Women still hold the majority of burden when it comes to raising families and managing a household (this is especially true if you take a global view rather than a Western view of the world.) In other words, we’re tired. Few can actually afford nurseries, childcare, housekeepers, babysitters, etc.
Ironically, religion is often the tool used to keep things this way. Sigh.
@64
I suspect it’s the fact that women are sort of expected to be either ors. A woman’s a bitch or she’s a meek mouse, one or the other. But if there’s one thing really obvious in biology it’s that either or switches are actually not all that common the more macro you get. In a human population, we express ourselves as a spectrum on virtually everything. There’s a remarkable biodiversity gone unexplored or unremarked upon.
And I think there’s sort of a consciousness notion that often strikes women that they need to choose one or the other and they often are pictured as one or the other by society, but we’re as diverse as men and male diversity of tone is hardly remarked upon.
I mean, this is a “firebrand” style blog, right? But PZ definitely takes the soft road sometimes and isn’t above a little hand-holding at times or above acknowledging why someone has difficulty with a concept. Women can have the same aspects where they may have firebrandy aspects here and more hand-holdy aspects somewhere else or at different times or on different struggles.
Luckily as Greta pointed out, this is a wonderful feature to liberalism and all the subgroups that often make it up. We can attack stuff from lots of different angles and various methods can end up working together to work in different ways. The soft-sell might ease people into giving the hard-stuff a chance, the hard-stuff can radicalize or provoke an epiphany and sneaky or personal can stir the heart-strings to humanize in the first place.
@63
On women and manipulativeness, it’s an interesting side-effect of sexism’s silencing and downgrading of female viewpoints and emotions. Basically, women end up being shunted into adopting passive-aggressive spaces because stating things clearly often leads to violent reprisal or being ignored in general, so passive-aggressive stances end up becoming a tool whereby a woman can try and make basic needs heard while avoiding the wrath invoked by direct confrontation or statement at the hands of a fragile often male ego.
The worse the reprisals, i.e. the intensity of the sexism in the culture or the relationship, the more women are forced to be subtle and rely on passive-aggressive tactics and thus get more and more of a reputation for manipulation and deviousness. Hence why women were seen as and often had to resort more to “manipulation” and passive-aggressive tactics in less-egalitarian times, subgroups than in more-egalitarian times and subgroups.
It’s an interesting fragment of human history how overt oppression often leads quite directly to the invention of sexist excuses of oppression based on myths of the primacy of female deviancy and duplicitousness.
I don’t think so. Most people look to religion to get away from the lack of autonomy in their lives. Being part of a religion is one of the few things some people have control over, which is why it doesn’t take them much to get defensive over it.
or at least, this is a different perspective about it.
Thanks as always PZ, for being an awesome feminist guy! On my YouTube analytics at least, my primary audience are 85% male, with 45% of those being 36-45 and about 20% each for 26-35 and 46-55. In other words, 85% of my audience are men between 25 & 55. Does this bother me? No. Does it make me feel less competent or like my arguments are any less valid than if I had a more demographically representational following? Not really.
When we see women we admire, we should let others know. Post ’em on your Facebook or tell PZ how cool they are. Just be a supportive community, and when we do roar, listen. :)
http://www.youtube.com/user/angieantitheist
http://angietheantitheist.blogspot.com
You don’t have to be kinder or gentler. But hearty repudiation of the sexist and racist and homophobic, etc., crap that appears in atheist communities, under the guise of rationalism would be helpful. Otherwise, atheist women are going to wander off and be atheist women in their own space. Or just assume your commenters include too high a shithead to non-shithead ratio and read without commenting or identifying ourselves in surveys.
Attack the misogynists in your population with the same fervor you reserve for believers and maybe you’ll be worth the commenting time and participation of women who currently don’t bother.
I’m wondering if there is an app for this like there is for global warming. It would be great I think.
@71: Mandolin, yes!
I’m still stuck on the atheist shoes metaphor for this conversation. It sums up everything so succinctly and clearly.
@#58 Carlie:
My husband might tell a similar joke. I might laugh, because I know him and know that he regards me and females in general as equal, and I’m fairly sure he doesn’t define me by my shoes (although they are numerous and awesome). Then I’d give him a dirty look for being a doof with the stupid, ridiculous shoe joke. But if he posted it publicly I’d smack him upside the head with my third-favorite Manolos.
@72
That would be awesome, though I’ve found it doesn’t always work the way you’d like. I initially loved the idea of the “Finally a Feminism 101 blog” blog and started linking the basic concept stuff when I was having the standard rape is real style argument and the unfortunate “But the dictionary has a different definition of sexism” standard argument with a misogynist and they immediately dismissed it because “I refuse to read anything with feminism in it because it’s obviously biased” blather.
I’d like an app that combined the instant debunking or explanation coupled with a second app that delivered an instant electric shock through the device’s frame if they tried to go “oh well you used the talking to a misogynist app, so…”
I’m a young female atheist and I have been an atheist all of my life. Most of my truly atheist friends are male, however. My remaining female friends and acquaintances are much shadier in their religious leanings. They also tend to be less committed in terms of pseudoscience. They won’t be quite on the “it’s all bunk” side.
Although I’ve always been an atheist, I think the thing that really brought me over solidly was simply being confronted with the topics of religion and pseudoscience, and then thinking about them.
I feel like one way of getting women and girls into the atheist camps from the almost-atheist camp is to encourage more casual discussion on pseudoscientific and scientific topics. I think it is true that a group of women discuss these things less frequently. It may be because men may be more okay with alienating/offending one or two of their group than women are.
*prepares for accusations of sexism*
This thread just made my day. Seriously awesome posts with remarkably few trolls, considering the subject.
Feminism is the reason I am an atheist. No self-respecting woman can take the bible seriously.
@ 73
Yeah, the atheist shoes are a great object lesson. Rapid appearance of threatened male trivializing female viewpoints and arguments as well as blaming women for their own oppression.
Dismissal not only an old saw and unfunny joke but whose unfunniness and trustiness for misogyny is based in the fear it holds the feminine and especially an aspect of the feminine that the male community is very distanced from and which accordingly has been deemed unimportant and trivial (despite part of the purpose being for the purpose of making oneself more attractive to one’s partner or prospective partners) in a way equally trivial male-dominated pursuits aren’t.
Furthermore, object is often an ancient weapon against women, a fashion means by which to get women to wear objects to make them attractive to ideally a male audience that often hobbled, harmed, or slowed movement freedom because women are culturally judged by their “overall sexiness” by male peers and bosses often.
And that’s before uncovering how the OMG shoes argument is also often used as a culturally subtle means to equate being feminine with being ditzy, shallow, easily attracted/distracted, etc… The women would join something they didn’t have any specific strong interests so they could get the shiny coin for their magpie den and being so shallowly drawn they’d obviously have nothing worthwhile to contribute. Furthermore, seeing as this was crucial to getting women, this is some shared trait of all or most women and thus all women’s contributions.
Furthermore, the argument is already begun with set up parameters (shoes equal shallow) thus forcing women to acknowledge a feminine elements and thus lend expected credence to the argument (One goes, yes, I like shoes and have that feminine trait, and admitting to it seems to support the unsupported connection that shoes have anything to do with shallowness) or dismiss a feminine trait (I don’t obsess over shoes) and still end up lending credence to the subtext argument (and if I did you could ignore my argument, luckily I am masculine enough in this respect to be taken seriously).
It’s like a beautiful setup of the fragile male need to avoid the icky feminizing rays of species woman by pre-emptively smacking them down and how it dovetails neatly with the damned if you do-damned if you don’t-bore the audience to tears if you try and navigate the minefield no-win situation that faces a lot of women who try and make their voices heard.
It’s like the old question of “when did you stop beating your wife” and it appears in any conversation often on that semi-joking insipid level.
It really is a wonderful illustrative piece, you’re right.
I thought the talk was very good and very interesting in the first half hour and for the questions at the end, but I can’t for the life of me get what she was on about with all his weird “sex as transcendence” nonsense in the middle. Sex changes one’s perception of time and space? Sex makes you feel like you have telepathic powers? Sex allows you to transcend the individual? Sex is an altered state of consciousness? Love, yes, I can understand that in such terms. The Platonic idea of the lover and the beloved, learning to think more about the needs of another than oneself, all that fits with what she’s saying. But she isn’t talking about love here, she’s explicitly talking about sex. Sex, as in the squelching, awkward, often regrettable, fumbling biological process that our hormones tell us would be a very good idea if only we could get some of it. Yeah, orgasms are pleasant and everything, but they’re hardly the kind of mind-altering experience she describes. I strongly suspect that we will need to ditch this kind of ridiculous, hyperbolic and naively hopeful exaggeration before we can have sensible, rational conversations about sex at all.
Then you’re doing it wrong. :P
@ 78
Sex is way more satisfying and important for some people than for others.
I’m with you there. It’s just not that big a deal to me at all.
But it’s quite possible she’s talking about it that way because that really is how it seems to her. Obviously she’s wrong to phrase it in such general terms, but then in a way so are you :P
But IS sex really like that for them, or do they just say it is because they’ve picked up the idea that it should be, and they’re under considerable societal, cultural and ideological pressure to confirm that this is so? Are we seeing not sex here but simply another exaggerated cultural distortion of attitudes towards sex?
@78
It’s complicated, but short answer is that it can feel like that. The pleasure sensation possible, especially if sex is a continual, wholly inclusive thing (foreplay, erogenous zones, etc…) rather than the narrow scope we often think of it culturally. And the reason is as she says wholly biological. We have nerve endings and for sexuals those nerve endings especially if they are primed and teased while pheromones and mental stuff is going on can be a big huge electrical surge on the pleasure center that can “clear the mind” a bit (for many sexuals).
Of course, as the corollary to that, we are a wondrously diverse species and as such sex, sexual responsiveness and sexuality are just as diverse. Some people experience very intense orgasms that are easy to mistake for mystical for those who don’t understand how powerful nerve endings are (our brains and who we are is pretty much all nerve endings of various types and styles). Some people experience very muted orgasms and some people such as many asexuals like myself do not experience orgasms at all (the body works, but the pleasure wash orgasmic aspect of cumming is pretty well disconnected).
So posing it as a universal, yes, can be unrealistic, but I can understand her point given how most people tend to default to muting their sexuality and talking about and valuing sex and thus encouragements to acknowledge it and how important it can be to the body (being a highly pleasurable washout function, it can be critical stress-reliever, mood improver, as well as fulfilling sexual needs that can build up because 99% of people are sexual creatures (there’s a reason people jump to hunger rather than something less critical when describing how weird it is to lack it).
But yeah.
no, it really can be like that sometimes. and sometimes it’s just scratching an itch. as the saying goes, YMMW.
or even YMMV
@81
From the records of self-description, it seems so. A lot of people who would not be generally prompted to lie have stated similar experiences, especially with women, especially in the lesbian community, probably because of the greater consciousness of foreplay and acknowledging female pleasure.
So, yeah, it can feel transcendent and the like, but a lot also note that it doesn’t always feel like that often even with the same partner at the same general level of sexual and love-level attraction. Basically, like love, lust, and everything else, horniness and sexual sensitivity and intensity is just as seemingly random.
And again, some never experience this. It is pretty well physically impossible that I’d ever achieve a “transcendent” orgasm nor do transcendent orgasms mean anything other than, damn that was a goooood orgasm.
Perhaps there genuinely are people who feel sex more intensely than others. One wonders quite how common such people are, however. In my experience (and admittedly I have only had about 30 sexual encounters) there does not seem to be a noticeable difference between individuals in terms of responsiveness. Admittedly I was not privy to the intra-mental perceptions of said individuals, but from the physical signs they gave, none of them appeared to respond in anything like the ridiculously exaggerated way touted in the talk.
Now, admittedly, perhaps 30 people is too small a sample size to tell me anything, but I would have thought that if there was significant difference between individuals I would have noticed SOMETHING. Unless the vast majority of people are somewhere in the middle region, and it’s only incredibly rare outliers who feel significantly more or less intensely than the rest of us.
What rowmyboat @# 40 said. A hundred times over. I spend a lot of time over at Shapely Prose and The F-Word for just those reasons.
That being said, I have always found this to be a (cyber) space that feels very safe and I come here often. I don’t comment much because like someone else said above, I don’t often feel clever or witty enough. (Not because I’m female, I just know when I’m outclassed. Also I want to be NakedBunnyWithAWhip when I grow up) I also have a habit of not commenting unless I’ve read the whole thread and these threads do get long!
I read (with some trepidation, as a fat woman) the entire Kevin Smith thread and it was just about what I expected; close to the exact amount of “just diet and exercise, ya fatties!” and perhaps slightly more defense, so thanks for that!
As for Greta Christina’s talk, I have watched about a third of it so far (gotta finish it later since I have to get to work soon) and what she says is pretty much how I feel and have pretty much always felt about sex and ethics. I had to keep it pretty much to myself in the 1980’s, though, when I spent a lot of time looking for guys who were willing to put out (luckily, finding such men was never difficult!)
-dwarf zebu
#86
Well honestly I’ve only felt anything close to that once or twice and that involved incredibly deep feelings of love, security, and all that. So I’d tend not to connect it to sex but more to the larger bond with the person… but then again it is connected to sex.
But I’ve also slept with waaaaay fewer than 30 people (no that is in no way a value judgement going either direction, btw) but I do think the individual person varies from time to time. That is I think there have been those times when I think it was almost surreal for the other person and those times when it simply met the requirements.
@86
Nor would you have. Orgasm intensity is a mental state. I’m fairly scientifically inclined, approach sex wholly from that background because I’m an asexual and if I’m going to be performing limited sexual behavior from my partner, my interests and benefits are wholly emotional and intellectual.
As such, I have rather personal data that what a partner physically shows and how intense or pleasurable it was to them can be remarkably hard to divine from physical cues. I’ve had her do hard tenses and bucks and describe a rather forgettable “that was relaxing, dissipated quickly” and ones where I felt like I messed up and ended up cutting it short right when she got off where it felt like one long rolling super-intense orgasm on her end.
It’s basically a great proof that nothing can substitute for a good honest conversation with one’s partner and regular check-in because physical cues can be rather misleading.
Not to mention that depending on the mood, etc… orgasms aren’t actually the be-all end-all of sex. Sex can feel “transcendent” just in the raw sensation of it. I’ve had sessions where my partner had a weak orgasm, but the time pre-orgasm was really intense and fulfilling and times where I keep on losing her horniness and there’s a decent orgasm but it’s mostly forgettable because it was just “scratching the itch” as it were.
Basically, this shit is fascinating on an intellectual level.
@88
I suspect that there is some significant degree of confusion for many people between the sex itself and many other emotional feelings (the love, security etc.) that attach to the same individuals with whom the sex is being had. But surely it then behoves us to separate the two apart and determine more precisely which phenomenon we are referring to, rather than leaving it as an anecdotally fudged-together mess? If this is really the coincidence of two pleasurable phenomena (love and sex) then surely it is better to regard it as such, rather than to treat it as a single phenomenon?
Perhaps it is easier for me to do this, because I have never actually had sex with someone I love (or, indeed, with anyone I have had any emotional investment in at all).
As for sex being different with the same person multiple times, that I also have not done, so I can only take your word for that.
As for having conversations during sex, I can think of little more off-putting. This is perhaps because when I try it I sound like threepio from Star Wars doing audio descriptions of pornography for the blind. I am invariably told to shut up and get on with it in silence.
#90
That is interesting. I’m honestly not capable of having an orgasm with some one I’m not emotionally connected to. I could perform for the other person but it makes me want to look for some one else who I could be closer to. So… not likely to happen more than once or twice.
@90
Well as much as you seem a bit invested in the separation, it is physically sexual, that much seems accurate from what I’ve read and experienced personally. Now, emotional aspects, levels of love, lust, and moment-to-moment horniness (how the lust manifests itself in the intensity and responsiveness of the nerve endings to touch at any given moment, etc…) will certainly play an effect, but the effect still requires the base component to run.
And by putting together people’s stories, it doesn’t seem like hybrids are likely (plenty of people have had their most intense orgasms with one night stands or people they don’t love, many asexuals in love do not experience orgasms at all much less transcendent ones, etc…)
It seems like you are perhaps responding to a subtext that I don’t believe she intended. Lacking a “transcendent” orgasm doesn’t make one incomplete, lacking, bad at sex, unfulfilled, other orgasms less than, or sex in general less than. Nor are they anything approaching the norm. They are remarked upon because they are seen as remarkable, obviously. Furthermore they are also not critical to either sex or life. A transcendent orgasm is a great orgasm nothing more nothing less. Sex can be varying levels of importance for people, can hold various intensities and can manifest itself in different styles of orgasms or ability to come in certain ways.
In short, we are rather diverse species, stop worrying about it.
@91
Uh, while dirty talk can be useful in its own right, I was more talking about checking in, finding out how they’re feeling, where they want to be touched, what’s working or not working. Open honest communication in general and a way of insuring continued consent and pleasure through the sex, which can also be hot, because who doesn’t like hitting the special spot that drives a partner wild or guiding them to hit yours?
Oh, I’m not seeing it as somehow making me incomplete in some way, I’m just wondering how much we can trust what seems an entirely subjective reporting of this putative phenomenon. Were there actual neurological or physiological evidence that such things exist then I would be convinced, but has anyone actually demonstrated the existence of these “transcendent” orgasms in the lab yet? Surely there must be objectively verifiable evidence for them, otherwise why do we accept the validity of this phenomenon at all?
And I don’t need this talk to tell me that I’m crap at sex. Two thirds of the people I’ve done it with were more than forthcoming on that score, and the others were, in all honesty, just too polite to say.
‘That being said, I have always found this to be a (cyber) space that feels very safe and I come here often. I don’t comment much because like someone else said above, I don’t often feel clever or witty enough. (Not because I’m female, I just know when I’m outclassed’
Maybe that’s the difference between male bloggers and female ones: we don’t recognise when we are outclassed and carry on regardless. At the end of the day, it’s just blogging. Losing an argument in cyberspace is only like losing a videogame.
You’d think that women would be far more vocal than men since they bare the brunt of religious oppression – and yet I’ve seen one-time ‘feminists’ like Germain Greer defend FGM. There are plenty of less well-known female atheists blogging out there but the Ophelia Bensons of this world are all-too rare.
At least the majority of homosexuals I know recognise there isn’t much in organised religion for them.
I wasn’t talking about “dirty talk” either (I know that such a thing would be inherently ridiculous done in my voice and mien), just simple inquiries into whether what I am doing is acceptable, or if there’s anything else they’d like to try. That sort of thing. Generally I just get told to stop talking.
Sadly there really is not a lot of amazing sex research, especially for women. There was the study… I can’t remember it well now, but I believe the finding was towards a percieved lack of awarenes of arousal in women. Or rather the women were showing what the researchers were using to measure sexual arousal (I seem to remember it was wetness though and not something more certain like clitoral swelling or something)… and yet the women reported not feeling aroused.
I think we accept the validity because it’s so damned hard to show in a lab setting and yet it is the sort of thing one tends to think could at some point be measured or tested. It would be an amazing advancement in understanding our brains and bodies at least.
Love it !
Haha. I have to agree :)
95-
Um, gosh, no, there haven’t been enough exhibitionist couples relaxed and horny enough to perform multiple sex acts to reach an orgasm level intense enough that they consider it “transcendent” while being heavily limited in motion and possibility by multiple electrical wires hooked up to their head and possibly some examination along the body, much less a University head willing to okay the project.
Interestingly enough when talking about subjective emotions such as how something experientially feels (aka feeling transcendent), we would normally defer to the subject’s self-reporting usually under circumstances where likelihood to lie is decreased. Given the personal narratives wherein one is unlikely to lie and the variety of experiences both seen in my semi-scientific setup as well as in various double-blind interviews on sexuality, orgasms that feel transcendent to the subject in time occur from time to time.
Hence the phrase: “can feel transcendent”. If you’re responding to the word itself and going “but transcendent implies a supernatural element” etc… Well, she addressed that, she’s talking about how a biological process based on the excitation of a complex series of nerve endings can produce a physical response or sensation that can feel to the subject at hand “transcendent” and how we do ourselves a disfavor by taking that wonderful biological thing and reducing it to some mystical object or force instead of just enjoying it on its own merits.
And just as a note, there is a problematic nature in assuming the inherent dishonesty of female self-reporting of experiences and such a trigger response often is why many women equally have a trigger response against anyone such as atheists who start talking overly much about “rationality being everything”.
In short, a number of women who are otherwise atheists have had bad experiences of having their statements regarding their experiences and other valuable sociological and psychological data be discounted or immediately dismissed by people who don’t seem to understand that rationality isn’t dismissing evidence wholesale just because it’s “subjective” or from the mouth of females.
Not accusing or anything, just stating for the record how it can be problematic.
In all honesty perhaps I AM doing it wrong. Though if so then I am at a complete loss as to how I might do it right. I have read dozens of books on the subject and it does not appear that I am at wild variance from any of the things they say. If there is some secret trick involved then nobody has been forthcoming as to its essential nature.
@101
Why are you assuming that I am doubting female responses rather than male ones? When did any of this become gender-specific?
From what I have observed and anecdotal evidence from speaking to other females, I think as far as sex is concerned we are simply a very diverse group of individuals. From personal experience I have never failed to achieve orgasm and can orgasm intensely through mental focus alone. It doesn’t seem to make a difference during sex whether I am emotionally invested in my partner or not. I also have a huge variety of orgasms from mild, slightly twitchy ones through to mind blowing ones where I almost forget to breathe for a while afterwards. From the male partners I have had I seem to be unusual in my responsiveness.
I should say, it does vary during my cycle and there are times and emotional states where I am much more responsive than others. My sexuality also occupys far too much of my attention, in my opinion, and I usually have to climax several times a day. It is not always a good thing. I have seen documentaries where women have far more extreme cases than I do and constant arousal causes them severe problems in their life.
It is a spectrum, like most things. Diversity is wonderful, isn’t it? :)
Also, I was in no way buying into the idea that there must be some supernatural quality to such phenomena. It’s all biology, obviously. But given that this is so, surely it WILL generate evidence, and if we want to understand how and why the phenomenon works we will need to gather that evidence.
But I do not see how, until we have non-subjective evidence of the phenomenon, we can say for sure that this is anything more than personal self-delusion. There might be real physiological processes causing it, but it could just as easily be a psychological anomaly.
102-
Well, first orgasm intensity isn’t the be all/end all of a good time. Secondly and most importantly, there really isn’t one good foolproof method that’ll work on all partners even ones that share a sex or emotional relationship to sex. Different people have different erogenous zones, different sensitivities in different areas, different responses to various activities, etc…
The best rule of thumb is really communication. Getting comfortable enough and honest enough with each other, even as a one-night stand that they’re willing to tell you what drives them wild or at least give some basic yes, no, or to the left, no up to checking in.
Something else that’s good to follow is don’t be afraid to drop it or drop down a level. If they’re out of it or they’re needing to focus just to remain horny, drop it down a level and try and build it back up.
But really it all stems from communication. Getting comfortable enough to talk and have them communicative seems to be really important in general even if it’s just like a game like “how does this feel” “how about now” moving from gentle touches slowly up.
Also, privately I always laugh when I end up in the role of sex advisor, even though I end up doing it a lot.
None of this is at all new to me. All the books constantly harp on about communication with the other person during sex. But in reality I have found it almost impossible to communicate during sex, because people don’t tend to tell me anything, and if I press the point they tend to get exasperated and tell me to shut up and get on with it. Were this just one or two I could understand, but it’s pretty much all of them. I just assumed all people were like this. Surely it can’t just be coincidence?
Probably not coincidence, but probably there is some other causal factor? No, not everyone is like that. But maybe some of them really don’t know how to answer and so resent being asked?
I know I hate being asked, and that is unfair. But it’s because it would be months before I really felt close enough to enjoy myself and it’s very possible there won’t be months of relationship to wait for that emotional bond to form.
@105
Well yay, and I wasn’t accusing, just bringing up the aspect, but you’re already aware so I didn’t really need to.
And well, something that’s psychological isn’t inherently unreal. Nor is it wholly divorced from something physiologically occurring. The brain is a physical object after all.
On physiological effects of orgasm. Perhaps we will see it. It is basically a pleasure response running from “buzzed” nerve clusters in various parts of the body mixed with some complex set of inputs from the lust centers of the brain that we’ve as of yet failed to isolate (because the brain is fucking hard and our current level of instruments are bullshit).
But the thing about what she’s talking about re: “feeling transcendental” is well an experiential thing. We’re talking about something that is inherently psychologically. Now given the likely origins of an orgasm or sex session that’s “transcendental”, and causes the sort of psychological hallucinations she mentions (basically what she describes is standard pleasure principle and sexual touch washing out the other sensations of the body except perhaps one’s mental focus on what they’re doing with their partner at the same time (the experience of feeling like one was almost psychically linked)), we may indeed be able to measure it in some future time when we know how to reliably.
But in the meantime, I sort of find it silly to dismiss as illusion an experiential sensation (intense orgasm) that has some pretty obvious origins, some good subjective evidence of validity and a decent physiological theory for how it come about (again, an “intenser” more “drowny outy” version of the standard sexual arousal, sexual orgasm (which is indeed a mental artifact more than a physical one, though it is often manifested simultaneously with cumming (but not always))), just because the technology isn’t here yet.
Just cause it’s an experiential, mental thing doesn’t make it an illusion. Indeed, given what we’re asking “how does this sensation feel to you subject A”, a subjective answer is what I’d expect (It feels like something transcendent), especially as compiling lots of people’s subjective experiences, we see a wide variety of responses even by the same person with the same partner.
I often wonder whether sex would be easier in a situation where emotional attachment was present in addition to the necessary physical engagement. Much as I have tried to engineer such a situation with the person I love, it has entirely failed to materialise and in all honesty probably never will. But, then again, I am probably fooling myself that in such a case it would be any different.
To be honest I have never really found there was enough time during sex to build up any kind of relationship with the other person, let alone enough of one to feel at all comfortable (which, as a deeply sociophobic individual, takes me many many years indeed to do). Generally it’s all over within five minutes, and they’ve packed up and left within ten. People say it’s supposed to last longer, but in my experience it never has. I guess that’s just the way of things really.
@110
Well you see that waiting for the bond often doesn’t work out. In fact I think it usually doesn’t which is why it seems so wonderful when it does even if it doesn’t last either some times.
But you see that waiting and not working thing would account then for my superbly low body count I guess.
Different strategies? It’s all so YMMV.
well, the most mindblowingly awesomely epic sex I’ve ever had was with someone I had no emotional connection to. He was an acquaintance whome I’ve met in meatspace maybe 3-4 times total. so it isn’t just conflating love with sex. there was no love, but OMFG was there sex.
Hrmm, actually that’s not really what I meant to convey in my rather careless and haughty comment #100. I meant there is such a thing as, for lack of a better word, a “mindfuck” that feels transcendent (speaking as a male).
So I’d say “yes it can” to all of the following:
@107
Well, it probably means, ironically that things moved to sex long before both parties were really ready for it. I’ll admit to being a bit of a consent-fetishist, but I don’t see a partner unwilling to talk about what she likes and doesn’t like before “getting jiggy with it” isn’t really comfortable enough to fully relax when the jiggy comes.
In that respect, the recurrence seems to be a problem with partners or more likely if it’s occurring at that speed, a too rapid motion towards sexual intimacy without a good pre-sex talk, possibly while in the cuddling phases.
And if we’re talking one-night stands, then frankly a partner who’s not able to talk with random partners about what she wants at least on the most basic level of encouragements or suggestions probably isn’t in the right head space to be doing one-night stands to begin with.
So ironically enough, as much as your beating yourself up, it might not be something wrong with you or your technique per se and more the pre-sex communication stuff is getting bypassed way too quickly.
Again, I never said that illusions do not have a psychological basis. Clearly they do. But it is a different psychological basis from that of other sensations, such as the orgasm. Hallucinations, visions, dreams and so forth all are psychological phenomena, but they are all different psychological phenomena and their symptoms and progression should be analysed and assessed separately. To merely assume, without investigation, that this putative “transcendent” orgasm is something different to just a normal orgasm wildly exaggerated by the mind of the individual is somewhat unscientific I would say.
@114
It’s not a case of not being ready for sex. I have only ever had sex with people solely for the purpose of having sex. I have never had a relationship, so that’s not an issue. I’d like one, oh how desperately I’d like one, but it’s never happened.
I guess you could say they were all “one-night stands”, but that generally implies that they slept the night, which they didn’t. They arrived, the sex happened, and either they left or I did. One or two had a quick drink beforehand. None of my sexual encounters have ever really lasted longer than a quarter of an hour. None of them have ever spoken to me again, despite my attempts at communication after the fact.
You’re also assuming they were female. This is not the case.
@110
Yeah, try talking way way before the sex about the sex and spend a fuck ton of more time on foreplay and not just on the usual points of the body. Doesn’t work on everyone, but a lot of people have erogenous zones on their back and respond well to a good back massage. People will also have random spots. Some people have sensitive wrists, some sensitive toes, others really sensitive thighs, armpits, necks, earlobes, or stomachs.
If you’re just starting the conversation at insertion, you’re doing it way too late and thinking way too narrowly.
Regarding sociophobia and unrequited love. I suppose the thing to tell you is that stuff does get better. It sucks, yeah, but I’m sure you have friends you can hang with so appreciate those social interactions and try and remember to relax when approaching anyone and be willing to accept that any negative response isn’t a condemnation of you, but merely that it was a possibility you explored that didn’t pan out.
On unrequited love specifically, we’ve all been there before. More likely than not, you’ll probably fall in some level of love with someone else eventually probably someone you didn’t expect. And if not, well, there are a number of aromantic asexuals who are asexuals who have never fallen in lust and never fallen in love. They have rich great lives with family and friends. There are also a large number of people who explore lust and have yet to really fall in love. There’s ways to enjoy that and relationship structures like friends with benefits that can fulfill many needs.
In short, don’t try and shoehorn it. It’s life, crazy messed up thing that it is. Good luck.
I thank you for your concern as to my unrequited love. Unfortunately I have suffered from it and the terrible depression it brings for the last decade, pretty much my entire adult life. Despite my every attempt to overcome it, it has only got worse with time, not better. I am now resigned to it, for better or worse, but I fear it will be with me always.
@ 118
I think I relate more than you might think fwiw.
I hope you are able to have some closeness and companionship in your life. I really do. You said that you have extreme social phobias? That can be so crushing, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. It really doesn’t. Of course as an internet stranger I’m not in a real place to say what might help and anyway it would depend on what you want to try but you have some encouragement maybe because I do know that such things can be improved (they have been improved for me).
did somebody say earlobes
@115 Well as I said, working backwards from the stated experiential nature of the effects, a good strong hypothesis can be entered that a “transcendent” orgasm is a very strong orgasm because of how having the brain focused on the pleasure nerve response in a muting of the other senses would produce the hallucinatory effects noted.
Now how this would appear physiologically (a mentally “strong” orgasm would be really hard to measure with current technology) is entirely up in the air, but given what has been reported and what we can suspect regarding the likely physiological and mental nature of the orgasm, I feel it’s a reasonable theory generated from trying to understand why people report the experiences they experience rather than assuming they’re all lying in banal ways.
@116
Damnitt, I thought I gender neutraled all my pronouns and sexual aspects, sorry for the fuck up.
Regarding ready v not ready. I’m not talking about being ready for a sexual encounter of some form and for really being open and ready for the unique dynamics of a “one-night stand” (one-night stands require someone very open about what they look for sexually because of the reduced-time of the interaction as a whole and the fact that they’re looking for a fulfilling sexual interaction).
Basically, being ready for sex (with you now) in specific rather than sex in general means articulating at least basic information of what they’re looking for, basic level encouragement and the like. A good basic setup in a hurry is trying various light foreplays pre-genitals with “how does this feel?” “how about now?”
Now, it’s also quite possible that what you’re running up against is “sexism hurts men too”. In short, men are not used to being regarded or regarding themselves as sexual objects and as such may not be used to articulating their desires adequately.
Based on statements by my partner regarding her male partners, there seems to be a general idiocy on the subject of handjobs and blowjobs wherein men assume its intuitive despite the fact that everyone’s penis works differently and without information from the top it can be a bit hit and miss especially at first.
In short, your partners may just suck. Eventually you’ll sleep with someone who doesn’t.
shit; went to have dinner, fell behind on the conversation. from where I left off:
uh… unless you can find someone with a lab/nerd fetish who’s also an exhibitionist, this might be a wee bit difficult to measure, I’m afraid :-(
I think I remember that one… I think it was in relation to self-knowledge and masturbation, i.e. there was a correlation between how often women masturbate and whether they mentally feel aroused when their bodies show signs of arousal…
yeah… no clue. I suspect the reason the above mentioned session was so mindblowing was because it happened at the end of a long phase where I wasn’t feeling like having any sex and thus had all this pent up horniness that was waiting for the right opportunity to be released, plus the fact that the guy inadvertently satisfied a kink of mine I find usually incredibly difficult to satisfy (inadvertently in the sense that I didn’t tell him about it, it just sort of “went there” by itself)
true, but certain human phenomena are a tad bit difficult to measure… but once we get enough exhibitionist lab/nerd fetishists together in one place, we can totally do this study
uh… how is mindblowing sex different from the illusion/self-delusion of mindblowing sex? both are things that happen in the brain, to the brain, with physical feedback…
a lot of them are. I for example prefer non-verbal communication whenever possible (i.e. putting his hands where they’re supposed to go, demonstrating, etc), plus conversations about sex when not actually having any. I find conversations during the act a wee bit distracting, but even so, one or two questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no” dont interfere at all.
yeah, that’s what I was trying to say: thinking you’re having mindblowin sex is the same as having mindblowing sex, since most of it is psychological anyway.
um. yes, 5 minutes of boinking isn’t going to lead to mindblowing anything, I think. Where’s the foreplay? sex is more than just that part with the penetration, and usually the least interesting part, too.
exactly. plus, like i said, not all of it has to be verbal; but non-communicative partners (verbal or not) won’t get great sex, and won’t give great sex, either.
how?! you do know it’s possible to orgasm from mental stimulation alone? is that just the “illusion” of an orgasm?! also, we’re not talking about orgasm in particular. spectacular sex can end in a very average orgasm, and forgettable sex can end in a spectacular orgasm; and the former is by far preferable with a partner (i can achieve the latter all by myself)
that has nothing to do with anything. even in one-nighters, things have a certain timing, and sort of communicating what one wants and likes is part of the pre-sex timing. sometimes this isn’t necessary or wanted (because you’re really just trying to scratch an itch), but often that should happen before or during the part where you start getting frisky.
if this is a male-male thing, then actually I have nothing to contribute, since I’m female :-p
however, I’ve heard men talking about mindblowing sex too. I suppose they could be lying/bragging, though… :-/
ugh, that sucks… dunno what else to say. My depression and social phobias at least haven’t resulted in permanent loneliness, since occasionally I do manage to find a boyfriend…
@118 I really do sympathize. I understand just how much suck can suck. But I can indeed tell you, it won’t always suck at this level of suckitude and there’s usually something or someone you can appreciate even if big things like love or lust are going unfulfilled.
And in case you think I don’t really understand. I went through the worst gender dysmorphia of my life while distanced from my family, friends, and partner by the distance of 9 time zones at the same time the master’s nervous breakdown hit and I got a bad case of agoraphobia. I know how much suck can suck.
But it won’t always suck, even if you carry the scars, even if recovery feels slow and painful, things will get better and there are things to appreciate.
@120
On a brighter note, :)
Human sexuality is awesome.
It is possible, I suppose, that there was some degree of personal discomfort and inability to articulate among my sexual partners, though I doubt it was down to an inability to perceive themselves as sexual beings, or to be regarded as such. I find this a problem which afflicts very few gay men indeed.
Possibly they just expected me to know what to do implicitly (they certainly seemed to know what to do themselves), though from recollection it seems more that they didn’t actually care very much than that they were presumptive. It is entirely possible that I have just had the misfortune to find thirty odd entirely inappropriate people, especially given that, as an inherently unattractive person on every level, I must make do with what I can get.
Nope. No can do, mate. I’ve never been able to get vimeos to play nicely. Has anybody ripped this to YouTube?
This self-image can’t be helping you.
Believe me people far uglier than you inside and out are getting better. You can get better.
But surely orgasm itself ISN’T a purely psychological phenomenon but an actual physical one too, even if a vanishingly small number of people can actually think themselves into the condition with no physical stimulation at all? Surely the pleasure of one’s thoughts is of a different nature entirely to the pleasure of the bodily processes involved in orgasm? And Surely if psychosomatic disorders can produce the impression of pain then a similar disorder might produce the impression that one has had the physical sensation of orgasm when in fact one has not? Might this not account for the tiny proportion of individuals who have felt these putative “transcendental” effects that the rest of us do not?
In my experience 99% of everything other men say about sex is so dissonant with my experience of it that there is no credible explanation but that they are exaggerating out of all proportion.
@124
Oh don’t sell yourself short. You’re sexy to someone because sexiness isn’t really an objective thing.
Regarding partners, Jadehawk’s long post has some good points. A partner that’s uncommunicative, presumptuous, and makes a person feel like they’re ugly and lucky just to have bad sex is the exact type of person who’s going to tend towards both giving and receiving bad sex.
And sadly, it is possible to sleep with 30 odd people and get little more than an itch scratched. Furthermore, if it helps, my partner’s relationship to men before her boyfriend (I don’t count the time I thought I was a man) had a similar arc, where they weren’t communicative enough, were a bit presumptuous and were snide and assumptive about how she should just naturally know how to work a penis without input (hint, it’s fucking hard to work anything sexual without at least minimal input and even then).
While it fucked with her self-esteem, there was only one important lesson there for both her and you, those guys were douchebags. Just be glad you didn’t try to get into year-long relationships with them
I get orgasms from dreaming. no physical stimulation necerssary at all; and they feel exactly the same as orgasms from physical stimulation.
and, once more, it isn’t exclusively about orgasms. great sex can be followed by a mediocre orgasm, and vice-versa.
WTF does that mean?! how can you “think” you have an orgasm without having one?!?!
@126
Reading this I’d like to add to my comment to google name @124:
You’re good enough. You’re smart enough. And doggone it you deserve better and you’ll get better.
It’s based on a joke, but it’s sincere. And his advice is really good. Always value yourself even when it’s hard to do so.
My self-image is determined entirely by the evidence unfortunately. After nearly ten years of intensive effort and the execution of every trick, while, stratagem and approach I can catalogue, I have had absolutely no success in finding a boyfriend whatsoever. Irrespective of the theories I might cast as to why, the inescapable fact of my unattractiveness to other members of my gender remains. Deluding myself that I am more attractive is, I fear, not going to change that.
I appreciate the kind words, really I do, but like everyone else I am aware that they are just well-meaning politeness intended to salve my wounds.
I feel I should clarify that I was speaking about the occurrence of sex feeling transcendent, not the orgasm. At least, the orgasm is only a part of it.
@127
You’d think so, but the orgasm is definitely on the processing end and generally connected to the physiological response of “cumming” likely due to some interaction of moment-to-moment horniness, other nerve ending responses and mostly and most critically the lust centers of the brain.
But it’s definitely a mental object, which often but not always is tied to the physical response of “cumming”.
This can be demonstrated by two easy examples:
A) Jadehawk can achieve the mental orgasm without physical stimuli resulting in cumming.
b) I can achieve cumming without any of the orgasm properties reported by sexuals who achieve orgasm (not even really the pleasure one).
Given that these two examples can exist at all strongly indicates that orgasm and cumming are two separate phenomenon that are only mostly or possibly even “normally” linked but that one is definitely a mental translation and the other a physiological response to external stimuli.
And the strength of this mental stimuli can vary. I know you’ve got your heart set on it being dismissable, but it’s really not out of this world to have a mental translation designed as a response that involves the pleasure center, one of the most brain dousing sections of the brain to produce effects wherein the pleasure center ends up being the main experiential aspect to the muting of all other inputs creating a hallucinagenic state.
Indeed, it can be understood in a remarkably similar vein to well, drugs. Heroin in particular can override the brain with the pleasure center creating experientially…transcendent happy experiences for as long as the high lasts. A less damaging shorter term version based on the high nerve levels that can be aroused is not only possible, but darn well expected. That’s the point of the pleasure center.
Pfffft. You underestimate my amazing lack of social tact. I’m not being polite, rather I’m respoinding to something I percieve in your language and phrasing. Something refined and thoughtful that I’m certain some one could appreciate.
@131
Not really, I’m a brick. I know of what I speak. It’s not empty words or “that boy is screwed, but I’ll humor him”. I am pretty nearly the least likely person in the world to have found a partner, much less one that could handle my transition.
It never seems the case when you’re lonely and aching for genuine love and relationships. But one day something random will happen and it won’t be someone you sought out for that purpose, but it’ll happen because love is a random thing. And even lust is a random thing.
But it will happen. And I’m not humoring you.
Orgasm is different from “cumming” is it? I was not aware that there was a technical usage in which the two were employed in different ways. As far as I was aware the two are synonyms for the same physical process.
I guess I do have a fair bit invested in dismissing the apparently intense sexual pleasure that others claim to experience as nothing more than frivolous exaggeration. If I am honest it would help to validate the bitterness I feel at my friends and everyone around me, who all seem to enjoy life so much more easily than I do, and manage to achieve relationships and sexual happiness with an effortlessness and utter lack of rigorous application, where my most zealous and intensive striving has proved completely inadequate to the task.
I wish refinement and thoughtfulness were enough to win the prize I so desperately desire. Alas, even if I did possess more than the merest veneer of those qualities, it has done me no good whatsoever. It has certainly made me no more attractive to any, and probably a good deal less so to most, even though the circles in which I move tend to value such attributes, or at least claim outwardly that they do. The more fully myself I am the less attractive I become it seems – overlooked for those who bear not a trace of the supposedly alluring characteristics I have assiduously cultivated.
Hmmm, the top of the thread is a post about why there are so few female atheists relative to male atheists but when I skipped to the bottom it seems to be a therapy session for a self-loathing homosexual virgin.
I guess a lot can happen in 136 posts.
My rantings wax most verbose.
I wish I had not wasted everyone’s time with my melancholy. My sincerest apologies to PZ and the assembled Pharyngulites for my ill-considered contributions to this thread.
I am still recovering from the morbid despair that Valentine’s Day has wrought on my emotions, and this topic on top of that has raised a most uncomfortable humour within me.
It is gone 5am now and I am far from at my best. I should not have allowed myself to give voice to my problems in this setting, a Pharyngula comment thread is definitely not the forum for it.
@136
Well, I wouldn’t say technical as I’m just using my own terminology to explain my experiences and the difference between the two I’ve independently “discovered”. You’re absolutely right that in common parlance they’re used interchangeably.
As to the second paragraph. No, really? But desires aside, intense orgasms happen, but how you’re taking it isn’t the way to take it. Intense orgasms can be nice, but you know what else can be nice for sexuals? Sex. Even sex that just scratches the itch can feel nice. Know what else can feel great for sexuals? Good masturbation. Explore your body, find the hottest porn you can and really give yourself a good one. My partner has given herself orgasms so intense she couldn’t get up for awhile, learning your body you can probably have a wild time yourself.
And as far as why you’re bitter? The ease of relationships you perceive. Yes, because relationships are enigmatic. They don’t come by wanting them to come or trying really hard to make one appear (maybe a sexual encounter but a fulfilling relationship with someone worth starting a relationship with is a much more complex matter). And you’ll find it the same way we all do.
Random, stupid, how the fuck did that happen chance. A one-night-stand won’t suck and won’t leave the next day. A friend or acquaintance ends up going there and things just sort of fall that way. You randomly meet someone off ok cupid or manhunt and hit it off. Fuck I’ve had more than my share of friends who met their true loves on internet forums or blog threads. It’ll happen and you’ll look back to how it happened and go, wait, that wasn’t the romantic deliberate shit I was expecting.
In the meantime, don’t stress yourself out. You’re lonely? Focus on your friends. Appreciate them, take the time to really focus on all the emotional support they give you and realize you are loved, just not in a romantic way. People find you interesting and awesome and no one can take that away, least of all yourself.
If that fails, try some anti-depressants or therapy, might help clear some of the fog so you can appreciate what you do have easier.
Hang in there buddy.
From what I have observed from my gay friends,looks don’t count for too much when they are looking for long term relationships.
If you don’t have a sparkling personality you can certainly cultivate interests that will make you appealing to others who share those interests.
Good luck.
@138
Threads meander.
Some of the good meat on topic was in the middle. Short synopsis:
Sexism sucks and means subgroups tend to be male-dominated at first and require glass-ceiling breaking and allies in community willing to internalize feminist ideas and make public stands against sexism and counter cultural biases that privilege male voices.
Also some hilarious and awesome uses of a troll’s “atheist shoes” joke as an object lesson of why that might be.
I assume he means something like having the mental sensation without the pelvic muscle contractions every 0.8 seconds for 10-20 seconds straight.
Does the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy” mean anything to you?
Thanks for the synopsis Cerberus.
Being a male atheist that personally knows very few openly atheist women I don’t claim to be an authority on the topic but that explanation sounds like a reason to blame men and a male dominated society for there being so few women atheists.
Oddly that explanation itself strikes me as a sexist.
I grew up in a very religious environment where there were no open atheists in my sphere of influence. The “society” around me made it quite clear that theism was the only acceptable worldview.
By the age of twelve I had rejected the idea of a deity. I was very quiet about it as I knew that it was not an acceptable position. I was also very guilty and lonely that I had rejected the very basis of the family and community of which I was a member.
Yet by fourteen I was vocal and defiant in my rejection of religious belief.
I have found me experience to be fairly common among other male atheists. This leads me to believe that if I could self-identify as an atheist against all the societal pressures and sanctions against my choice a female wouldn’t face substantially more resistance to her choice.
I suspect their is something more to this issue than the sexism/paternalism angle.
While I don’t believe that men and women should be compelled to submit to gender stereotypes I do think that there are some fundamental differences in the physiology of male and female brains.
I doubt that it is purely societal pressure that is responsible for the fact that women are often superior emotional communicators and care givers across many varied human cultures.
I wonder if some pre-wired physiology is at least partially responsible for the predisposition of women to accept a “spiritual” dimension to life.
James at #146:
That is very possible.
What’s the evidence that it’s true?
Azkeroth,
Well, I haven’t conducted a double blind study or anything. I was just positing a possible explanation based on my, as stated, limited experience with female atheists and women in general.
However, evidence that women are the main care givers and highly represented in “spiritual” activities in many cultures is probably not that hard to come by. I certainly have observed this in my several decades of interacting with female humans in many different cultures on three different continents.
Anecdotal evidence I know, but I just stumbled in here an hour or so ago and was just thinking out loud. Did anyone present verifiable evidence that sexism was responsible?
The relative scarcity of female atheists is a condition that has vexed me through the years. The best I have done as far as female partners is concerned is one “something must be out there” person and a lapsed Mormon. I’m currently with a Christian that accepts my views and doesn’t push hers. A kind of a spiritual detente.
Very interesting topic.
I guess that’s a woman-bit I must be missing. I’m completely incapable of being spiritual. I tried; doesn’t work.
I find it far more likely that as long as being spiritual is seen as nice, and being atheist is seen as rude, evil, militant, etc., and at the same time women continue to have it drilled into them that they must be nice, polite, and not cause a commotion, they will always be more likely to be spiritual than atheist.
And the ones that are atheist are going to keep quiet about it, to avoid causing a commotion, as Ol’ Greg mentioned earlier.
Jadehawk,
I defer to your greater knowledge of the female atheist since you represent the species.
Still, after experiencing the extreme pressures to conform to theist beliefs and norms that I was subjected to I wonder if a female would face any greater group pressure.
I literally endured beatings to get me to attend church and my exasperated parents realized that the more they pushed me to believe the harder I was going to push back. I was a pariah to our Mormon community but yet I persisted even though I was sure that I was a freak that just hadn’t been infected by whatever was making everyone around me believe in these crazy stories of a sky daddy.
Also lack of deistic belief wasn’t really a choice I made. I was compelled by logic and the lack of feeling anything remotely like “The Holy Spirit”.
While I might have remained closeted if I thought I was going to be killed I could not have changed my mind about the lack of credible evidence of a “spiritual” existence and attendant magical beings.
I doubt societal pressure had anything to do with my actual lack of belief other than the public expression there of.
Do you suppose there are hordes of closeted female atheists out there repressing there godless urges? What in your experience makes you think that females experience pressures that actually influence their inner perceptions and reasoning on the subject of god belief?
there’s plenty of people surpressing all sorts of thoughts critical of their beliefs. “crimestop” is a very real phenomenon for a lot of people who didn’t have this early realization of “this is all bullshit”; which is kinda rare… a lot of people come out of their belief later, and it can be more difficult for women, especially in the sort of super-fundie cultures that tell women to depend on men for absolutely everything.
I don’t remember where I came across this, but I remember a story by Dutch counselors and therapists telling about how frustrating it was for them to work with the wifes of super-fundie muslims. these women had no concept of “i like” or “i want”. everything was “my husband likes” and “my husband wants”. And I have heard a similar report from a woman who had been part of Quiverful, and who said that she had gotten to the point where it didn’t even occur to her anymore that she could want things of her own and for herself, even going so far as to buy the toothpaste her husband wanted but which irritated her teeth. the normal solution would be to either find a paste both liked, or buy two kinds. but that didn’t even occur to her. she bought what her husband wanted. people who are zombified like that cannot get themselves out of religion at all…
and a milder form of this is what leads a lot of (American; I have not had this experience with Europe at all) women to refuse to go further in disbelief than the Oprah-ish fuzzy spirituality. Some of them might really just believe that. Some of them have been trained to believe in nice things, no matter what, and will make themselves do so and squash any thoughts to the contrary. and some of them are just hiding, because coming out as an atheist is just another reason to be discriminated against, and being discriminated against simply for being female is a sufficiently large pain in the ass.
basically, if you’re female, you’re already more mentally and physically worn out and exhausted from every-day discrimination on that basis than men are (and it’s not like women aren’t beaten and otherwise abused in order to force them to go to church or whatever), so you won’t look to dig yourself into another hole as eagerly, you will hold on to whatever will make your life less difficult, and if you already are an atheist, you will not make your life even harder on yourself and tell everyone about it.
fuck it, I’m going to sleep. I’m starting to sound incoherent.
But surely you are aware that most people don’t subject God-belief to the compulsions of logic, otherwise we might expect a lot more nonbelievers of either sex.
There might be some difference in the average prevalence of spirituality in each sex, but not enough to make atheist women as thin on the ground as you imply.
For example, in an UK poll men and women answered whether they believed in God as follows:
Yes M 36% W 42%
No M 43% W 31%
Not sure M 22% W 28%
Even if somewhat fewer women are atheists, it shouldn’t be that hard to encounter one, at least in places where non-belief is common.
windy,
Hmmm, looks like I should have looked for atheist girlfriends in the UK.
Here in the US the numbers for god belief, for both sexes, are much higher from 62% to 95% depending on the poll.
recognition? yes. as a woman who has felt trivialized or worse, invisible, by nearly everyone around me, women will begin to express themselves more when they are heard and recognized and their ideas are criticized on their own merits instead of being ridiculed simply because they come from a woman.
Why are there more male atheist leaders than female ?
Why are there more male political leaders than female ?
Why are there more male Nobel prize winners than female ?
Why are there more male corporate board members than female ?
Why are there more male 3 star chefs than female ?
Why are there more male fashion designers than female ?
Why does male football attract hundred times the audience than female football ?
etc…
Heck, we still live in a male dominated culture, and it’s only changing slowly. Thank religion for that.
And about feminine physiological predispositions towards spirituality, I’d like to see some evidence. And No, most polls that show more male non believers than female aren’t good evidence as they don’t cross correlate for level and type of education, a much more determinant factor than sex.
Do you have some evidence that it’s more determinant in the UK? If you look at that poll I linked to, “social grade” – which probably correlates with level and type of education – has less effect on belief than gender. I agree that polls are not good evidence either way, but this is not a very good argument against them.
I’m certainly not private about my atheism nor are my atheistic female friends and family, which I’m lucky to have many of. For the most part though, I’m still trying to show people like my mom (queen of woo woo, I swear) that life without god doesn’t suck and they don’t need to feel sorry for me.
Based on online interaction, it’s obvious to me there is a disproportionate raio of male to female atheists. In my personal life, though, it’s the opposite. Lots of strong, intelligent atheist women and only a handfull of atheist men.
re atheist shoes
I kinda found the joke funny, interpreted as a bit of irony, but maybe only because it reminded me of Isis the Scientist and her precious hawtness and shoe fetish shtik. (And her not being an atheist.)
BTW, boys – “priapism” is a sexual dysfunction that has nothing to do with penis size. If P23 truly suffers from this condition, he needs to get himself to a doctor, before the damage results in an inability to get an erection. DominEditrix
And in the case of Priapism23, brain damage.
I seem to recall a dozen or two posts describing elements of the way women are socialized (the social roles and expectations modeled for them and in some cases explicitly taught to them) and linking those, tentatively but in a detailed and specific manner, to women feeling uncomfortable identifying as atheists or involving themselves in the atheist movement. Which, especially given the difficulty of doing experiments of this kind on humans, is considerably more compelling than just speculating that there must be some “innate” mechanism.
I always thought that perhaps a reason there are so many straight, white, cisgender male atheists compared compared to any other stripe was because a lot of the activist energy of these groups is consumed in equality activism, for gay/bi, racial/ethnic minorities, trans and feminist reasons. How many less straight white cisgender male atheists would there be if that was an oppressed group that had to devote energy just to fighting its own corner?
@161
Pretty much. I don’t really want to respond directly to Captain Kirk, because I feel I and others already laid out our cases back in the 40s-early 100s and pointed out how these problems affect pretty much every subgroup. Unless women have some genetic defect that makes them “naturally” inferior at genre fandom, business acumen, law, politics, punditry, television news, science, atheism, geekdom, sports fandom, most fandoms in general, and various other activities and subgroups too numerous to mention, the well documented and oft repeated early male dominance and having to withstand a hostile space to gain entry problem tends to be a general problem rather than one held by atheism in specific.
Though I find it interesting that a lot of us did take a good amount of time to document how female voices get discounted leading to women feeling ignored out of or like they don’t belong in a movement or organization and Kirk comes in, reads only the synopsis, doesn’t go back to read any of the female voices, dismisses them wholesale in favor of an argument that is literally based in the sexist tradition of “natural inferiority” to explain it.
I know he didn’t mean it like that and will probably be appalled that it came off like that, but that’s like a textbook object lesson of what we’ve been talking about the difficulty of being treated like a full human being while female and how that plays out in many subgroups including atheism.
In one actual response to Kirk though, I would like to remind everyone that oppression stacks. Being an atheist means you’ll have cultural pressures, condemnations, and various crap. Being a woman means you’ll have cultural pressures, condemnations, and various crap. Being an atheist woman means you have the cultural pressures, condemnations, and various crap of both groups, plus some extra pressure for being “doubly weird”. It’s not like it gets nice and separated. They tend to mix making both worse than they’d be normally. The more minorities one is, the harder every piece of that gets. Pam Spaulding, disabled black lesbian atheist, will get more crap in her day-to-day life than even PZ Myers will experience in his life and he’s probably one of the biggest targets for the far-right in the atheist movement.
This isn’t an oppression olympics thing, just noting that oppressions stack.
This phenomenon is not so exotic even. I operated for a good deal of my life like this. In fact I remember when my own mother asked me what I wanted (in a big way… like life/goals/etc.) and I could tell she was looking for the “right” answer but for some reason I decided to be honest and I said “I think the smartest thing is not to want” my reasoning was that if you have no concept of self and want then the complete lack of power and control over your own life will not be so painful.
And so it began.
This was the wrong answer, and I learned not to answer questions anymore by thinking about them. Ironically learning to do what I had already realized was the only route to survival.
Abuse of all kinds does this to people which is one reason it is so hard and frustrating to try to get people out of that cycle. How can you act in your own best interest if you don’t have interest for yourself or a self to have interest in?
I do think that is the origin of such patterns too. When you operate under a patriarchy or any system that “takes care of you” but without your right to say what is important to you, or what is care, or who you are… then it is no longer “providing and protecting” but simply weakening you to such an extent you are not able to know whether you are being provided for or not.
Women shake it off all the time. They emerge from it. And some are not so impacted by it…. but this trap is still there and still active.
I do think it accounts for some lack of representation for women because for women in general and all over the world just to see themselves as individuals with ability to decide what they want and don’t want and control those things is still something that is not “granted” so to speak.
I don’t think the same thing could be said, or at least not with the same frequency for men. It is most common I think for all men to at least be seen as an individual who acts for their own benefit or acts to control their circumstance. And thus more common for men to do those things: to act in their own benefit because it’s granted that they have a self to benefit.
I’m a strong, intelligent, creative atheist woman in my early 40s, who is well-liked by anyone who makes the slightest effort to get to know me, despite possible Asperger’s. I’m not perfect physically, but then again neither am I so unattractive that I repulse people. Unfortunately I’m a teacher of engineers, which means the men (specifically) who like me are disinclined to mention it either because they’re (justly) afraid of work harassment rules… or because they’re engineers. (I kid because I love.)
I’m an atheist weirdo because I find Tarot art soothing and a suitable spur to contemplation (think Jung, not fortune-telling). I was looking at a new deck in a local pub this weekend, and I had five separate people approach me and ask questions. I love it when people ask me questions, and we all had lots of fun exploring the deck in non-mystical ways. I told them, “If I thought any of you were in danger of confusing this set of evocative pictures with magic, I would take and tear them in half right here in front of you.” They got the message.
But I was struck by the irony of me, who almost never goes to pubs, drinks, or attracts people socially, who is an atheist, suddenly being the center of a small, interested group of people who liked and appreciated me, even though I was totally up front about my atheism and my issues with getting out and finding people to make friends with.
It made me realize that maybe, if I feel like I’m out here on the edge of the bright realm of lovers… maybe I need only step forward a little more.
Thanks to Cerberus and to Ol’Greg for certain words of encouragement that weren’t directed to me, but that I heard anyway.
Cerberus at @163,
You seem to want to pick a fight with me, or maybe just posture to feminists, by misrepresenting my words.
In the case of atheism, as in any expressed complex human behavior or characteristic, there can be two explanations, or a combination there of, nature or nurture.
I simply posited whether nature could have some role.
Hardly an unenlightened sexist trope requiring the kind of condescending smack down you issued.
Is simply asking this question offensive?
Kirk out.
Go back and reread her post. Think about it for a minute.
FFS, I *have* Asperger’s and it’s immediately obvious to me what you’re doing wrong here. That ought to worry you.
166-
Well, frankly yes. Posing that question is offensive. Women have constantly been assumed by naturalistic argument to be inherently inferior to men, this argument has been used to justify millennia of oppression against women.
Women couldn’t be in control of their own lives because they can’t intellectually handle it. Women aren’t full adults that can make complex decisions about their bodies. Women can’t be allowed into sports because they are weaker and wouldn’t be able to compete. Women can’t be allowed into colleges because they won’t be able to handle the high level of education and would be better at more domestic tasks.
Naturalistic explanations for why women are underreported in any given arena on life have often and almost always been theorized as the result of some inherent inferiority or shallowness inherent in all or most women by men as a tool to justify excluding them and listening to their viewpoints or having to treat women seriously.
Given that this tactic is always the first jumped to and has yet to be proven right in pretty much any arena known to man (even areas where there is a slight biological difference between sexes, the differences are wholly dwarfed by the spectrum of difference inside each sex) and nearly always proven wrong, especially in matters of intellectual capacity (and yes, positing that women are “naturally” more gullible and less logical is very much arguing that they are “naturally” less intellectually developed or capable).
Furthermore, when we further note that those who pointed out the large field of female experiences and fought against this step by step for inclusion were every time proven right on the relative lack of difference on any meaningful level between male and female capability on a biological level, we get more evidence.
Now, let’s kick it up a notch. Let’s look at an interesting subgroup. Transwomen and transmen. Neither have shown any difference in mental acumen before or after transition. I didn’t somehow lose aspects of logical conclusion making when I flooded my body with estrogen, neither has biologist/activist Julia Serano. Nor has any trans man I’ve known reported a sudden gain in logical ability.
Not enough, let’s examine a population, say biology professors where women have completed a lot of glass ceiling breaking. Have they shown signs of being intellectually inferior to male biology professors or less able to draw inferences and conclusions? Not in my experiences, nor have they shown signs of being more gullible on average. In fact an argument can be made that men owing to their privileged position are more prone to repeatedly debunked theories such as the female brain being inherently less competent than a woman ever would be.
Now let’s examine the aspect culturally. There is a shared history of all organizations, not just those based on intellectual capacity or logical deduction like atheism, but things like enjoying sports, genre fandom, even book clubs though it has started to be seen as more feminine these days. Would you say that women are naturally uninclined to be genre fans despite fantasy for instance having a decent female writing community? What about comics? Are women just naturally sucky at creating compelling superheroes? Are they naturally driven away by the medium?
Or are their shared cultural elements that we described both in history and in modern times that plagues most subgroups except those explicitly seen as feminine (and men run away from fearing they’ll make their dicks fall off, see also any hobby that at any time attracts a majority of women) especially in their nascent states end up being male dominated and women end up needing to break through?
Now, see, me and other women made strong cases for this and we also included in those cases that men often dismiss the opinions of women wholesale even if and sometimes especially when they don’t have a case of their own and end up creating hostile environments where women have to fight every inch just to be heard and to be believed and treated as an intellectual equal.
And well, that last point, you kind of really really proved it. We took a good amount of time, we built our cases, we argued our positions, you avoided reading it, got a simple synopsis, immediately dismissed it for an often disproven and problematic theory. When called on it, you continued to avoid reading the earlier points and more sternly asserted your unsupported opinion as if it was truth and that we women should simply accept as natural a state of affairs where our opinions are meaningless and easily dismissed because of shared intellectual inferiority.
Finally at the end of it, you resorted to usual guilt tactics, trying to feminist bait and overstate your recycled garbage.
But sadly, whoops, I am proud to be a feminist. I am proud to be part of a tradition of women who stood up and refused to back down when a man went “oh, you’re just naturally dumbasses”. I am proud to inherit the causes of the glass ceiling breakers who made sure I can feel safe being at a comic convention or a genre convention, am not seen as an aberration in a biology lab or speaking out for a cause.
And frankly, Kirk, yeah, it is unenlightened sexist garbage to argue for a natural female intellectual inferiority. Oh, right, I know you are just framing the issue. Isn’t it possible that instead of yet again following the same pattern as comic conventions, genre conventions, science labs, government halls, law offices, schools, that this time, suddenly this time the natural difference is not only actual natural but enough to dwarf the intrasexual differences enough to create gross inequalities in membership, naturally?
It’s like God, Kirk, sure, it’s theoretically possible, sure, but more likely than the well-studied and oft-repeated alternative? Not enough to waste my life on an afterlife or accepting a “natural” second class citizenship in every non-feminist subgroup I ever belong to?
Fuck no.
In short, Kirk (Cameron), I believe you just lost. To a girl.
Also, might I take a brief moment and just really highlight the immense fail that is trying a gender naturalism argument on a trans person.
I mean, trying to make that argument to them is basically going up to a living refutation of their point and basically asking them to discount the fact that your existence neatly refutes them to ignore that and give them a freebie. It’s wonderfully moronic.
Uh, no, estrogen in my brain doesn’t make me stupid, or less logical or more gullible. Testosterone didn’t make me extra awesome at math and pattern recognition and deduction,
And that’s before we get into the wonderful social studies papers done by various feminists over the years documenting how the intersexual differences are almost always non-existant or woefully overswamped by intrasexual differences (the big two seem to be a slight decrease in ability to control outward effect of emotions and some fat and muscle shifting that can lower physical strength slightly) and hardly a good basis for just cutting women out altogether or assuming they’ll never produce an outlier who can defeat the vast majority or potentially all men (the current world record ski jumper is a woman, over both sexes). (And it also happens to ignore shit that ruins a good sexist theory, such as men who believe men are better handling pain naturally, but ignore that child birth hurts way more than even the most daredevil man will subject himself to willingly)
And even before we note as I did the problematic origins and continual uses of the naturalistic differences theory of gender-based oppression or inequality. Especially how it’s often been a deliberate tool to keep placing obstacles to allowing women an equal level to compete with men or contribute on their own merits.
In short, please join me in appreciating all the levels of fail in the fail rainbow.
It’s a wonderful sight.
Check out a feature in the Sacramento News & Review, which features eight women from there teens to 60s discussing feminism. A few of the women are atheists as well.
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1362042
I’m fascinated by this too! Not in a spiritual sense, in fact the spiritual aspect is a bit boring to me (well *some* of the history and biographical info is interestnig)… but in terms of symbolism and aesthetics it’s a topic I have a lot of interest in. The iconography is really rich in a way other contemporary aspects of visual culture have abandoned (IMO in a more sophisticated way than the overt symbolism of Surrealism), and the way that people connect to images psychologically is one of my favorite subjects.
*aaaaanyway*
I just had to jump in to that.
Oh and sorry, I haven’t felt like touching the naturalist argument just like I didn’t touch the shoe joke? Why? Good example of just what other people were talking about:
I’m tired of it.
I’ve already argued over things like that here and I just didn’t feel like putting the energy into it.
People usually get all hurt and defensive about it because it’s like you’re saying they’re big meanies if you point out that the joke is inherently sexist. Rather than just say, “Yeah it’s totally demeaning to women but I lol’d because I find sexism funny” or something honest like that. It’s way too much to ask that people take some personal responsibility for what they find humorous. No they have to also be morally just so they’ll usually go round and round with you for hours trying to get you to prove to them that the joke is sexist. Of course one important thing that CAN’T be used is women who say they find it sexist, or find it offensive, or who feel demeaned by it. Women’s opinions, feelings, and reactions are not important.
They want to assume sexism is spheroid and put it in a vacuum or something. Yeah… good luck with that.
After this they’ll just move the point of the joke, or bring up that women do in fact like shoes, or blah blah blah.
But almost no one here would let a joke slide like “I know what could bring more people of color to this blog… MENTHOL!” And then defend it by saying “prove to me that black people liking menthol is racist! You’re the racist!!1!one1”
And then turn around and say… “but when I go outside all the black people that work where I do are smoking Kools (nevermind there’s only two of them) and therefore you’re just denying that the joke is funny and not racist!”
And yet damned near every time this subject comes up here with women that argument has to happen.
Yes, Kirk… having that argument more than five times in a year makes you want to say “fuck it… i just won’t post!”
Why?
Because many women, much like men, don’t like to lose hours of their life to pointless and futile arguments that will only be had again… and again… and again.
@172
(Slow clap)
And here I wasted all that time on the caustic debunking angle.
Great post.
I own about twenty decks. They’re all quite different, and I interact with the symbology and mood of the artwork in different ways. I was raised as a Christian in an ethnically Jewish family that is highly literary and musical and artistic, so in a way I’m kind of predisposed to that sort of thing. I have a few friends who are professional “psychics,” that is, they’ve talked themselves into believing that they and the cards have “power,” and half the time I have to fend off their well-meaning insistence that I also have “the power.” It’s meant to be a compliment to my skill in getting meaning out of the cards, but honestly, it’s not any different from being at the psychologist and being told, “Make up a story about this picture.” :)
I think it’s best to just let the females in the Atheist community speak for themselves, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
I am a 55 year old female and rich (I only mention this as a demographic point after someone speculated about the economic class of most blog commenters) atheist. I keep my lips zipped for the most part as I am married to a religious hindu and my relatives are religious. Keeping the peace has value for me, at least at this point in time.
The sex talk in this thread was sweet and open. Someone mentioned their inability to get a boyfriend because they are unattractive. I am not and never have been attractive. However, I am self confident. I always could find boyfriends, I think it was the confidence.
Get healthy and fit, if possible, it will help with self confidence. My years where I was the most sexually appealing was when I was in college and would run. I also did very well in school so my confidence was at a high.
okay, i’m tired so i’m putting this in point form so i don’t babble
1. female, 36 years old, upper middle class background w/graduate degree (what was up with that, btw – any statistical proof of that?), decidedly NOT a shoe person,(again, way to belittle women, winner – yes, obviously all the millions out there are SOO addicted to shoes, we can’t see straight unless there’s shoes involved),but am a board hoarder – have a library of roughly 1,000+ sci-fi/fantasy and suspense
2. i’ve been an atheist since i started questioning at age 16 – raised Catholic, but after my parent’s divorce, ended up getting confirmed at UCC (at 16 – lol) – so i did end up in quite a liberal church, but didn’t halt my questioning any
3. in my opinion, FlameEverlasting up there got it right – i’ve been a feminist as long as i can remember (thanks to reading strong women in sci-fi/fantasy since age nine – NO THANKS to the bible) – and i think any woman who really thinks about it, can’t possibly swallow the BS aimed at our gender in religious tomes – starting with blaming Eve for the fall of friggin mankind to Mary being raped while asleep by some invisible man in the sky – REALLY – i am the ONLY one in my family to have gone Atheist and my family thinks i’m crazy – i come from a VERY Catholic Indian family, where the girls are taught to be better “behaved” than the men – this obviously means shutting the hell up when you disagree on important things with everyone, especially family – i don’t care – my husband (who is Jewish), who i met in grad school, is also an atheist – he was more agnostic when i met him, now, he’s pretty full on atheist – makes my life easier – i would flat out not have married a believer
4. i do think many women atheists out there might be hiding – my very best friend in school (who was raised Catholic) was an atheist pretty much her whole life and never told me while we were in school – i didn’t find out till i told her during college sometime – i was floored – so, i do think due to the people around them, women chose to be less vocal about their non-religiosity and i think we’re trained to not “cause conflict” – i think we need to do more of that, because hiding our real selves isn’t doing anybody, least of all us, any favours
5. i don’t hide being an atheist – i won’t volunteer it unless asked, but since i hit my 30’s i’ve decided that if people don’t like me because of it, it’s their problem – i’m sick of hiding, especially because i see people under the influence doing disgusting things and i hate bigotry and exclusivity – and, i believe that religion feeds that, period the end of it, as well as constricting the ability to think freely with an open mind – that is the absolute worst thing of all, especially when it comes to the education of children
6. i actually know a lot of female atheists – i have quiet a few friends who are (some of their husbands are not) – and i find that most of them are feminists as well, which makes sense to me – the internet is a good place to find company, you’ll find more atheist women online – perhaps some are hiding from their families, but not from the rest of the world – it’s a step
p.s. bloody hell, under point 1. BOOK hoarder – like i said, i’m tired
Cerberus,
“Well, frankly yes. Posing that question is offensive.”
So you can’t even ask if there is a naturalistic component to a specific human behavioral trait with out offending you?
Too bad. I guess you will have to be offended because I’m not going to censor my scientific curiosity because it bruises your ego.
I’m completely open to the possibility that the answer might be “No, there is no genetic or physiological difference between male and females that would produce a higher incidence of male atheists.”
What I’m not open to is being told that I’m not allowed to ask the question or that I am somehow a sexist for even asking.
Also how do you figure that having a lower incidence of female atheists makes females “inferior”? There are plenty of highly intelligent believers.
You seem to be reading your own paranoid subtext into my question.
Is it your position that there are no behavioral traits where the genders differ due to naturalistic differences? Do you suppose that the fact that male and female primates of other species show distinct behavioral traits that are gender specific has no analogue in our species?
An argument of this type would be much like the arguments of Christians, and other religious believers, that humans are distinct from the “animals” and our behavior is not related to theirs.
Try to calm down long enough to formulate a cogent reply.
Oh, and if you call me Kirk Cameron again I’ll beam you to Afghanistan wearing a Burk-ha.
Kirk out.
FWIW I consider upper middle class to have household income above US250 000 a year.
ROTLFMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
being in the top 2% is not middle anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
$250,000 and above are in the top 1.5 percentile.
For those of us who don’t get their Economics statistics from Wikipedia, according to the US Census Bureau, in 2005, Upper Middle Class would be a household income of $57,658 – $91,704. I grew up in the 80’s. I expect those numbers would have been some what lower at that time, i.e. some 20 years earlier. So, yes, I grew up in an “Upper Middle Class” Household.
*http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/LearnToBudget/TheSecretToSuccessInTheMiddleClass.aspx
That was in response to #10 in the comments above:
“As I said elsewhere, my guess is predominantly white, lower middle class, university educated 20-40 somethings with a male to female ratio of 3-1.”
Not white. Not lower middle class, and apparently I’m not alone in that, considering some of the other women’s comments. Maybe we should take a poll.
I’m not lower middle class either. unfortunately, I’m not lower middle class in the wrong direction :-p
I have female friends who are atheists in that economic direction also:) Actually, I think there are plenty of us all over the place, in all walks of life. I hope!
Well sheeeeeiit! I’ve moved up to the lower middle class!!! Now is there enough class mobility to jump another lily pad? That would be awesome.
Guess that makes me middle-middle. Ok, fine then.
#172 – excellently said.
of course, the one draw back is that you’re posting less (and the rest of us who agree with you on this point). The effect is driving away female posters. And yet, men will still be confused as to why there’s less women.
But yeah, a “hurhur women like shoes” stale sexist joke is totally worth lowering the number of participating females.
I am shocked, shocked to see a misogynist stop reading at my first sentence and thus failed to see how I completely and utterly redebunked the oft debunked naturalistic explanation.
I am also shocked to see Christianists argue in bad faith, Republicans supporting laws that make life harder for minority groups, and Carrot Top being bad at comedy.
Though I think it’s a wonderful illustration. Women take the time, are completely ignored, dismissed at the first sentence and are then subjected to the oldest appeal on record to the cultural pressures we face, the attitude problem accusation.
You’re too emotional to deal with. Well, work on your attitude and come back.
In short Kirk is worthless to deal with, but is a great illustrative example of the whys of low female membership. Would a man stay long in an organization where they were constantly arguing the same three fights over and over again just to speak? Would a man remain in an organization if a good number of women had a habit of ignoring what they said at the first sentence and constantly chided them for being emotional?
Would a man essentially be willing to put up with time-wasting shit just to be tangentially connected to something they’re interested in or agree with?
It’s something we all do, we carefully weigh what we get out of something with how much stuff can piss us off and the time commitment involved.
To whit, Ol Greg’s wonderful post @172 and Endor’s corollary @188 are really big points and illustrations of it. Women end up falling off the topics they’re really needed because those topics tend to bring in the type of obtuse man who needs to swing his dick around in order to show dominance of the filthy feminine space who end up recycling the type of arguments that burn women out.
And that’s really the cycle we’re looking at in terms of depressed female membership in most anything these days.
Klassy.
Managed to work in perceived emotionalism as a dismissal of feminist argument, a little bit of mid-east bashing, and a gendered threat (what does a burqa represent for YOU Kirk?) with enough levity to back out of it if some one calls you on it.
There needs to be a special name for the fallacy of claiming X is true, providing support for the claim that “X is not impossible,” and then pretending the original proposition has been proven.
Also needs to be a special name for the deliberate conflation of “…oh Jesus Mythical Christ, not THIS shit again…” with “La la la I can’t hear you!”
Oh, and if you call me Kirk Cameron again I’ll beam you to Afghanistan wearing a Burk-ha.
And he proves how not sexist he is by using a gendered threat.
(and yes, I am only driving by with occasional sarcastic remarks. It’s all I have the energy for lately.)
“And he proves how not sexist he is by using a gendered threat.”
A gendered threat specifically designed to highlight excessive female oppression – you know, just in case us western females start getting forgetting just how bad it can REALLY be.
We’re so lucky to live here! Why can’t we just be happy about it and let moronic sexists have their way!
@190, @192, @193
I actually missed that one first pass. I change my mind, that’s the perfect illustrative piece. Ignore argument, state rightness anyway, back up with passive-aggressive threat that reminds woman of high incidence of violence to women who speak up while simultaneously blaming it on brown people far away, while also subtly hinting that woman should edit her criticisms because “it could be worse” so shut up.
Yeah, the “I’m hurt, bring out the switchblade” impulse to being intellectually trounced is both familiar to women and also amazingly illustrative of how men keep women from rising up the ranks in subgroups such as atheism.
Sadly Kirk (Cameron) but your desire to be separated from the hideous creationist beast by dint of having a slightly more civilized stance on religion and religious freedom doesn’t really separate you as much as you’d wish on the subject of female respect and female autonomy.
My first draft of this comment included my first response to the threat, “really, uh huh, yeah, that wouldn’t have gone as well in person as you’d hope”, but really why should I stoop? Why should I have to reference violence or how things that are supposed to scare me out of action don’t because I’m completely nuts (I once cussed out a neonazi on a bus in front of all his friends…we got off on the same stop too, maybe I should have been more worried at the time…oh well)? It’s inane and furthermore the point that he tried to shut me down with that old damn tactic of relying tangentally on the terrorism against the subgroup you belong to by others is one of the oldest played by antagonistic “allies” since…ever, really. And says way more about how pathetic, fragile, and vile he is without me even bringing physical strength or insane public displays of stupidity into it.
In short, I recognize your attempt at borrowing the power of terrorism and reject its ability to affect me or my actions. Good luck next week, Kirk Cameron, boy creationist.
@191
We should probably write up a list of the continually repeated falsehoods of most of the isms so that we can just refer to them like burger recipes. Okay, it looks like that was a Creationist 17, Religious Right 42, and a Sexism 10 with a slight splash of Racism 2. Would you like to top that off with anything off the homophobia menu or is that all for today? Oh, an extra sexism 6 and 9 to go, glad to help you sir, good day to you. I’m sure you’ll totally keep your promise and never come back again.
Dearest Cerberus, can we be best friends?
Where to begin,
Cerberus @189,
I am shocked, shocked to see a misogynist stop reading at my first sentence and thus failed to see how I completely and utterly redebunked the oft debunked naturalistic explanation.
Well I read both of your back to back(#168 & #169)posts in their rambling entirety. I asked you to calm down because in those two fevered posts you completely misrepresented what I sad by saying things like, “…you continued to avoid reading the earlier points and more sternly asserted your unsupported opinion as if it was truth and that we women should simply accept as natural a state of affairs where our opinions are meaningless and easily dismissed because of shared intellectual inferiority.”
and
“And frankly, Kirk, yeah, it is unenlightened sexist garbage to argue for a natural female intellectual inferiority.”
What the FUCK!?!
Show me where I said anything like that in my two previous posts.
Oh, and then you splutter out an idiotic insult,
“In short, Kirk (Cameron), I believe you just lost. To a girl.”
I think a deep breath and a nice nap might have been in order. That’s why I asked you to calm down.
Now you start out by calling me a “misogynist”.
And then this over the top lunacy ,
“Yeah, the “I’m hurt, bring out the switchblade” impulse to being intellectually trounced is both familiar to women and also amazingly illustrative of how men keep women from rising up the ranks in subgroups such as atheism.”
In response to my crack about “beaming you to Afghanistan in a Burk-ka.” for calling me Kirk Cameron. Talk about being able to dish it out but not take it, even when the response is a gentle jab.
Then you create more straw men per paragraph than I have ever personally witnessed by linking me to
“Creationism…the Religious Right… Sexism and Racism” What, no Nazism?
I just asked a question. That’s all. Really, go back and look.
I wonder if some pre-wired physiology is at least partially responsible for the predisposition of women to accept a “spiritual” dimension to life.
Look up the word “wonder”.
I never “asserted” anything let alone argued against your assertion that evil male dominated society has held women down and forced them to believe (or pretend to believe) in deities.
Get a fucking grip.
I don’t have any evidence that women are more “emotionally” unstable than men (nor do I believe it to be true) but you have provided ample evidence of your tenuous grip on reality.
Oh, and as far as having made a “gendered threat” you people do know that “beaming” doesn’t really exist right?
This is a specific instance of a general sort of question that has been asked so often for so long and so leadingly that, given the almost invariably negative results that have been found when people went and looked rather than just positing the affirmative, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that someone has ulterior motives for leadingly asking it YET AGAIN.
Askyroth,
As I asked Cerberus in a previous post, do you assert that there are no behavioral traits that have a genetic link to gender?
Unlike Cerberus please actually answer the question with out going off on a “I am feminist woman hear me roar” screed.
Also how is it a pejorative if it turns out that women are more prone to spiritual belief than men due to some brain process? Does this imply that women are the intellectual inferiors of men somehow?
I know some very intelligent believers and some brain dead atheists.
People accept or reject theistic belief for a variety of reasons and due to a variety of emotional needs.
As I said I never asserted that there was a physiological reason that women might prefer theistic belief more often than men.
I just asked the question. If there is evidence either way, and I must say that none of the posts anywhere I have seen in this thread present any thing but anecdotal conjecture for either position, then I would lean that direction.
No, and it wouldn’t be relevant to my argument if I did, or even if one behavioral trait that is biologically linked to sex can be produced.
Attacking “X is impossible” does not support the claim that “X is true.”
And given that the “question” has been asked, and answered negatively, in numerous permutations, why ask it here and now, especially after (allegedly) reading the posts preceding it which presented a strong case for an incompatible hypothesis, except rhetorically to imply that the answer is yes and the case is what you think it is?
You’re no more “Just asking questions” than Glenn Beck. Get over yourself.
PS: I was going to just tell you to learn how to fucking spell my name, but I thought about it, did a Google search, and tentatively confirmed that everyone who addresses me as “Askyroth” turns out to be a troll, an idiot, or both. Fascinating…
Askyroth,
Another over heated and insulting response to a straight forward question.
Glenn Beck huh?
Oh, and please show me one of the “posts preceding it which presented a strong case for an incompatible hypothesis” of which you speak.
I read lots of emotionally resonant hypotheses backed up by a lot of emotionally resonant anecdotal evidence.
Am I supposed to belief that it is true because you and Cerberus will go off on an insult laden tirade if I don’t?
One interesting theory I found on a similar thread at RichardDawkins.net (Yes, I’m sure that’s where Glenn Beck gets a lot of his ideas) is that female humans, very much like females of our closest fellow primate species chimpanzees and bonobos, tend toward more social interaction with their female peers while males tend more towards independent behaviors.
The activities of young girls tend to be more social in nature than those of boys which tend toward independence, and as a result there is an increased opportunity with girls to gain social acceptance of a belief among a larger pool of peers. As a belief is ratified by more and more people that belief becomes stronger in our minds.
So the initial motivation is genetically determined but the behavior, religious belief, is socially reinforced.
It isn’t that the males are smarter it is just that they are not exposed to as much social reinforcement as females. In some ways it reinforces the idea that society is responsible for pushing females to believe, by virtue of more social interactions and possible sanctions, but it explains the higher ratio of female believers by virtue of a physiological gender difference that predisposes females towards greater social interaction.
I’m not saying this is what I believe to be the case but it is certainly as plausible as a purely societal pressure answer.
Try to answer with out calling me names this time. I know it’s in you.
Oh, I see you couldn’t resist calling me two more names while I wrote this post.
I was going to apologize for misspelling your name but now I’m just glad it pissed you off.
Thank you for proving my point.
I’m sorry I’ll put that second “s” in next time. You’ve earned it.
Kirk,
You don’t know any atheist women because we are actively avoiding you. We see you act all ally-ish when we distance ourselves from Other Women (TM) and thus validate ourselves in your eyes–no offense at all meant to Jadehawk–and think, hey, maybe I can get through to this one; “I defer to your greater knowledge of the female atheist” seems promising.
Then you start spouting shit we’ve heard a million fucking times verbatim. Hey, I really want to know if this is offensive. Oh, it is? Well, fuck you, I don’t censor my shit for any-fucking-body. I can’t turn it off if I tried, WHICH I WON’T.
Long story short, we are out the goddamned door before we can even identify ourselves as atheist women. It doesn’t take much–I’m sure you’re convinced you didn’t say anything all that horrible, you just were asking a legitimate question, and blah blah fucking blah, but this is a conversation we’ve had before, see, and it didn’t go well then, and we can see where this one’s headed. Sooner or later someone says “feminazi” and makes remarks about panties in a bunch or shoes or burqas (oh, wait). It’s not because we have highly sensitive female convers-o-meters and extreme social intelligence. It’s like talking to YECs–same exact conversation. Same reactions. Good for you for not being the worst-behaved male we’ve spoken to, but you’re really, really not impressing us any.
Do yourself a favor and read what Cerberus said. Read Ol’Greg at 172, which sums it up wonderfully. Hell, read the whole thread. If you want extra credit, read some background on the last shitstorm over female atheists. There was some discussion of why we don’t post more on RichardDawkins.net. Hint: People on the internet are assholes, and not worth converting to a reasonable perspective. Sound familiar at all?
Also, in response to Ol’Greg at 164, I have operated for most of my life like that, and only in the past few years have I realized, holy shit, I really do have desires and goals of my own, and they totally do clash with everyone else’s goals for me. I see the same compliance in a lot of my students, especially female, especially in AP/Honors classes. A lot of them are going through the motions, and it’s quite sad, because I know now that I would have done things very differently in years past, and would perhaps be having fabulous transcendent orgasms right this very moment, if my priorities were always my priorities instead of other people’s priorities being my priorities. I do very much hope that those students find their voices as you and I have.
Azkyroth:
I think that may be putting it a little too strongly, it’s not that we have definite negative answers to many of the “questions” of the type Kirk is talking about. Maybe there won’t be, because the experiments would be unethical. Even if it’s exasperating to get asked the same “questions” over and over again, I think it’s better to point out that even if there are such differences, “genetic predisposition” does not mean what most people think it means.
—
JamesTiberiusKirk, I originally thought you were just being a bit oblivious and that Cerberus may have been a bit too harsh in #168-169 (although #163 was a model of restraint), but now it seems like a prescient response. Do you have some sort of point? Originally it seemed that you brought up the genetic predisposition as a possible explanation as to why you’ve encountered so few atheist women. But when it was pointed out that there are closeted atheist women, and that in some cultures a considerable proportion of women are nonbelievers, you just soldiered on with the genetic predisposition explanation. OK, but what are you trying to explain?
Your original suggestion was that women may have a greater predisposition to theism or spirituality. Based on your description of the model, the belief that gets reinforced in the group could just as well be atheism, or shoeism, or libertarianism. Why should we consider this to be a predisposition for spirituality?
I’m sure that wouldn’t be a big deal, if that happened we could just sit down with the Taliban and explain to them the logical problems with theism. Being male, they are pre-wired to prefer theistic belief less than women, used to thinking independently, and their beliefs have not been exposed to as much social reinforcement. So I’m sure we’d have that fundamentalism thing cleared up in no time.
Kirk #197
“Oh, and as far as having made a “gendered threat” you people do know that “beaming” doesn’t really exist right?””
——-
ha ha bloody ha
——-
Kirk,
Perhaps, you don’t know that statement doesn’t make this one…
Kirk #179 “Oh, and if you call me Kirk Cameron again I’ll beam you to Afghanistan wearing a Burk-ha.”
any more hilarious.
The whole question of whether (some) women might be more inclined to spirituality than (some) men is not just ridiculous on its face, but appears to be what anti-oppressino folk call derailing. The only purpose of asking the question here is to relieve atheist men from any responsibility to look at their own behavior when it comes to women’s participation.
“The only purpose of asking the question here is to relieve atheist men from any responsibility to look at their own behavior when it comes to women’s participation.”
BINGO. Kirk Cameron here doesn’t want to hear what the bitchez have to say. he’s got a pet theory he wants everyone to coo over. He doesn’t know any atheist women – not because he’s a 20 megaton douchebomb that women avoid, but because *biologically* women are just so gosh darn into being religious!
makes perfect sense. If the goal is to deny any responsibility in creating the type of environment intelligent atheist women avoid.
Captain, sir, I’ll put it to you this way:
None of the evidence or studies that I have read arguing for “predisposition” of women to conformity, religion, or even specific sex preference, have been compelling or even vastly supported.
If making a claim about the predisposition of women to conform to social norms, conveniently without pressure exerted by society to force them to conform (it’s all in the uterus, man) then the onus is on the claimant to show that case is anything more than the kind of idle conjecture that provided scientific proof of lower IQ in blacks as predisposition to illiteracy in the US.
In other words, you’re supporting the claim. We don’t buy it.
In order to test that at best you would have to completely socially isolate females and males fom infancy in numbers enough to observe them without their soicietally enforced values I think and ensure that none of the researchers in contact with them display social preference for any behavior. Hence my joke about the vacuum. You can’t do it. Much like proving there is no god. And yet it is a silly needling thing said often to derail any real work on the very obvious and observable external societal forces acting upon females.
And when challenged it is so easy to retreat into that old canard: “Well you can’t prove it isn’t so!”
@210
But wouldn’t pointing that out be harsh, unfair, and emotional? I mean, it’s probably got a good case for being true, but doesn’t that just make you more of a bitch in the eyes of our proper citizens? ;)
@Everybody but Kirk
Man, I love all of your responses. Really. There’s been some fantastic Molly level stuff in here and some great takedowns that I’m sure would have had more of an effect if our troll was either smarter or arguing in good enough faith to be taken aback.
To the couple of points on the level of lab testing, we can’t, but we can get some very interesting data about what is highly unlikely as a result of naturally occurring outliers and test populations.
On the subject of inherent gender traits, we’ve got a motherlode in the existence of transpeople. Brain one sex, body biologically another, goes through hormonal therapy and the like to change their body biologically to the other sex.
Great test population for the questions of what changes in a testosterone versus estrogen body and mind. And we have test subjects who can also tell by direct life experiences what natural changes they feel in their brains or bodies. Even better, we can have educated scientists tell us by questioning those who transitioned while also biological scientists. That’s some great shit for being able to note what is likely biological versus what is likely cultural.
And well, biologists who have transitioned report that there do indeed seem to be some biological based changes. Fat and muscle masses tend to shift with hormones to new positions in the body and emotionally, there does seem to be a biological effect on two areas.
For those who are sexual to begin with, testosterone slightly increases sex drive, whereas estrogen slightly decreases sex drive, though both groups also report that the orgasms are experientially more intense with estrogen and less intense with testosterone and neither are dramatic differences, merely consistent small differences.
And there is also a slight effect on the emotional control center of the brain. That is estrogen can make it slightly harder to “bottle” emotions and testosterone can make it slightly easier.
Now, these are the shifts, none of these is some great proof as with almost everything dealing with men and women the slight biological differences intersexually is often shadowed by the range seen intrasexually. An all woman bodybuilder for instance may end up a couple of pounds max ability short a top tier male bodybuilder on a muscle group he is likely to have better mass in, but will easily be able to lift a scrawny runt man and whatever his max lifting ability is at the same time.
No one of these groups has reported any noticeable differences in regards to group dynamics. Furthermore, it is hard not to suspect that a similar effect to that which assumes women to be dominating a conversation when forced to talk at the same amount (repeated studies have demonstrated this effect, it’s real) is creating the perception that women are “naturally” more social when men and women seem to approach social interactions at more or less equal levels.
So, given we have history (men have made naturalistic claims about every minority group to explain inequity and have been proven wrong time and time again), science (transpeople show no evidence of it which makes it unlikely to be biologically based), amazing cultural studies and data(huge amount of women’s studies, sociology and psychology research showing cultural pressures effects on women, tons of herstories dictating the effect rather succinctly and how it lowers female identity as the self and how female inclusion into groups is often met with hostile response by purported allies, just overwhelming cultural evidence in general backed up by the life experiences of most every woman in western culture), and you appear to have “shut up, it’s not my fault, sexism is a lie”, someone working from the traditions of atheism whereby information is processed logically by what is most likely, I’m hard-pressed to see why they should accept your creationist in origin “But it’s conceivably possible” to be accurate in this particular case over the wealth of evidence that says no.
But yes, putting my yet another ignored debunking aside for a moment, I want to thank all the wonderful commentators who made me laugh and giggle reading through. Plus I love the social inversion of the battle against Kirk, all the women doing some great direct barbs and Kirk the male dodging and weaving in passive-aggressive “you can’t prove I wasn’t kidding, I’m shocked you read that in my statements” space. Just amazing amazing stuff overall.
And a great illustration of why it’s worth it to come back.
Je craque,
“You don’t know any atheist women because we are actively avoiding you.”
I know several. They are delighted by my company. I just don’t run into as many female atheists as male as evidenced by every poll ever taken.
“…hey, maybe I can get through to this one; ‘I defer to your greater knowledge of the female atheist’ seems promising.”
Yes, I deferred to not presupposing her personal reasons for being an atheist. That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to wonder if there is any nature in there with some of the nurture.
“Then you start spouting shit we’ve heard a million fucking times verbatim. Hey, I really want to know if this is offensive. Oh, it is? Well, fuck you, I don’t censor my shit for any-fucking-body. I can’t turn it off if I tried, WHICH I WON’T.”
Actually I asked one question and was blindsided by an overwrought profanity and insult laced screed from Cereberus cheered on by other reactionary posters.
“Long story short, we are out the goddamned door before we can even identify ourselves as atheist women. It doesn’t take much–I’m sure you’re convinced you didn’t say anything all that horrible, you just were asking a legitimate question, and blah blah fucking blah, but this is a conversation we’ve had before, see, and it didn’t go well then, and we can see where this one’s headed.”
Well it’s not a conversation I have had before and I was very interested in exploring all the possibilities. If that pisses you, and others, off how exactly is that my fault?
Hey, I even said I had no preconceived ideas on the topic but since everybody was positing the nurture angle I tossed in the nature angle. If you think there is good evidence against that explanation then go ahead and tell me what it is.
But, ya know screaming insults at me and telling me that I am an asshole for even bringing it up is first, not a good argument against it and second, probably not going to get a reply other than FUCK YOU!
I think I was rather restrained in replying with “Is even asking the question offensive?”.
Of course this was answered with another insult laden screed. To which I blandly jabbed back with a joke that seemed an appropriate reply to a knee-jerk overly sensitive feminism inspired attack.
This of course sealed my fate. I was a legitimate target now.
So if I opened up some old wounds I sincerely apologize. This really is the first time I have discussed this topic with female atheists.
windy,
“Your original suggestion was that women may have a greater predisposition to theism or spirituality. Based on your description of the model, the belief that gets reinforced in the group could just as well be atheism, or shoeism, or libertarianism. Why should we consider this to be a predisposition for spirituality?”
Hey, an actual insult free rational response! I completely agree that this model doesn’t propose that women are per se more predisposed to spirituality, just that their higher affinity to social interaction leads to a higher occurrence of spiritual belief due to greater exposure to social reinforcement.
Despite what others have said I never asserted that women were naturally predisposed to spirituality. I just asked the question. According to the model I found at RicharDawkins>net the increased level of spiritual belief may be an effect of the predisposition to higher levels socialization.
Like if you are a hermit you are less likely to be exposed to an infectious disease. Maybe that is why more men become atheists due to their relatively lower exposure to social situations that reinforce religious memes.
Am I now going to be attacked as a sexist cretin for suggesting that women may be more highly adapted to social participation? That would seem to be a superior trait at least as far as evolutionary survival in a social species is concerned.
It is also one observed in females of our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees.
Incidentally, you were not “simply asking” any question. That would imply that you genuinely think the answer is up for debate, while both your original post and the ones that followed argue explicitly in favor of the “tentative” hypothesis you raised. See below.
it is not the job of the oppressed to explain their oppression to their oppressors.
This information is very easily findable in research papers, popular books, etc. If you were really interested in finding the answer, that’s where you would go, not demand, with highly leading questions, that the disadvantaged explain themselves to the clueless you. because WE don’t feel like having the same fucking conversation a million times, and you’re not entitled to have this conversation.
but you do feel entitled, and so do millions of other douchebags like you, and that’s why many women (and gays, and racial minorities) don’t feel like speaking up for atheism: when every conversation devolves into having to explain the basics to some entitled clueless fuckwit, it becomes tiresome and not worth it anymore.
Given the ubiquity of the “women are more emotional” trope I wonder how they would control for effects like this?
Was that meant as a “majoritarian” generalized statement? I’m mildly curious what you think my gender is now. O.o
Kirk, if you are really just “asking a question” rather than passively-aggressively asserting an oft-debunked victim-blaming ideology, then why are you so invested in it?
I mean, you asked a question: “Does this phenomenon have a natural biological based origin?”
And we answered it. “Certainly in an infinite world, anything is possible, but a number of factors, history, evidence, and real-world experiences seem to make the chances of it being accurate exceedingly small and certainly not as well-supported than alternate theories involving cultural pressures.”
And your response? “But, you’re all mean feminazis, why won’t anyone even listen to the possibility, I’m just asking a question, the PC culture is shutting me down”.
Given that this is an atheist forum and we’re all very well-versed in the creationist tactic where they ask a question (“Is it possible for the origin of life to have a supernatural origin”), atheists give a response (“in an infinite world anything is possible, but the overwhelming evidence suggests the possibility of it occurring to be very unlikely, the wealth of evidence for evolution to be well-supported and historically accurate and overall the god hypothesis is highly unlikely”) and creationists flip out (“You’re mean stick-in-the-muds who refuse to even consider opinions. I’m just asking whether it’s possible and one of the atheists dared cuss at me with “this shit again”, eww, bad language, bad language”), I’m amazed that anyone at all found the tactic familiar or at all bad-faith.
Must of been that elusive tone that women so often suffer so naturalistically by biology.
As far as insult-laced screed? Perhaps, though I didn’t really get all that personal except for a few jabs to the ribs I couldn’t really resist, but I also tore your argument to shreds, both post-you and pre-you. And somehow, I suspect that’s the real reason that my posts are somehow now the antichrist of feminazification.
But hey, maybe you are just asking a question, introducing a never-before-considered hypothesis suppressed by the vile matriarchy of PC values. In that case, you’ve done so, it’s a bad hypothesis, unsupported by evidence, openly contradicted by life experiences and the only ethical control groups we can use and even if it were true, is highly unlikely to be so big a factor as to explain the 3:1 style ratios of male-overdominance we see in the community.
In short, science is the reason why we seem to be “dismissing” your hypothesis. Because it’s wrong, it’s old, and you’re not the first special snowflake to have tried it. Same as with the god hypothesis.
Good luck with your next hypothesis, may I recommend not trying to start by immediately discounting the life experiences of every woman who has ever lived, their social history, or the reality of sexism.
Or try arguing in good faith, I hear it’s what all the cool kids are experimenting with these days.
@217
Damnitt, that’s twice on the same thread, I’ve completely dropped the ball on gender neutralizing arguments like that. Sorry, Azkyroth, feminist men are valuable and critical allies to conversations like these and have just as much to say as women. I should know, I used to think I was one.
I’m really sorry for excluding you and others with that fuck up.
On the correction, I don’t know and again, I would hesitate to use them as any sort of naturalistic proof, especially when even when true are very unlikely to affect as much as intrasexual difference. But these are pretty much the only effects consistently described by all transpeople in transition in both directions and as such the only ones at all likely to have a biology based gender demarkation. Julia Serano has had some good work looking into it and she also cautions against affirming anything to stark from these as it’s possible some of it is due to the bias-expectations affect.
My use was merely to show that the effect responded to the troll isn’t even on this list and thus is even less likely to be biological. It mostly serves best as a sort of disproving of most of the big myths than a support to what few shared differences there are.
In general, looking at it or better yet going through it, it is eye-opening just how little changes mentally. I mean, your body does this whole massive shift in its appearance that you look at a before and after shot and go, damn, and your brain is just pretty much cooking like it did before just now with a completely different response from the culture you belong to.
It really is an amazing intellectual experience for seeing the differences biologically and culturally.
Azkyroth,
Just because I threw in some anecdotal evidence in support of the hypothesis doesn’t mean that I favor that hypothesis.
Notice where I said I was “just thinking out loud”?
I didn’t realize that the thought police were about to bust me for crimes against femininity.
Don’t fuck with the captain! After all, he is only asking questions!
oh fuck off Kirk. your persecution complex is as tiresome as that of any christian I’ve ever seen. there is no “thought police” and your hyperbolic use of “crime” is fucking pathetic.
you can think out loud somewhere else. you can even think quietly to yourself. you’re not entitled to become fuckwit #92348562087 to have his “innocent” questions answered only to reject/ignore the answers because you don’t approve of the tone.
Also continuing on myself in response to Azkyroth, the differences aren’t actually on the level of emotion. Both groups feel the same level of raw emotion, it’s about external effect (not even internal). Basically a man is slightly more able to repress say the outward action of crying to internal emotion of being sad, despite being still well, sad. Whereas a woman might be slightly less able to repress that external expression. Both are still sad, both are still having their mental processes affected by the mental state in question, just one is externally provable and so is culturally dismissed as “more emotional” because of it and because women are not valued. (Also reminds me of pregnancy and the debates surrounding it, where a woman and a man were needed to have sex to produce this, but the woman is the only one carrying around physical proof and thus gets most of the “slut-shaming” by the sexphobes)
So if it was to be used in a proof, it’d be more like, men and women are equally emotional, women are just more honest about it.
But yeah, in general, not enough to put anything in stone, merely another datapoint in how few things are even possibly gender separated especially on an intellectual and mental level. It’s like asexuals don’t prove how love and lust really work on a biological level merely that the existence of asexuals who fall in love proves that love and lust are two separate phenomena that are not critical for each other.
Cerberus,
“Kirk, if you are really just ‘asking a question’ rather than passively-aggressively asserting an oft-debunked victim-blaming ideology, then why are you so invested in it?”
I am hardly “invested” in it. I have already move the conversation to a different model that posits the idea that women are predisposed to higher levels of social interaction and that religious belief is just a side effect of that superior innate trait.
And for what it’s worth I’m not invested in that one either. I’m just discussing ideas.
You seem quite intent on maligning my motives. Maybe you should try being a bit more objective. It is possible you know that you can’t make sweeping generalizations about my character and intentions based on a couple of blog posts.
@220
Oh good, given that your such a good faith arguer and this is a totally earnest statement, you have absolutely no investment in the hypothesis being WRONG WRONG WRONG, constantly disproven, having zero datapoints in support and thousands against.
Indeed you’ll be pleased because now you would have learned something new and you got to witness a theory you had absolutely no personal investment in or belief in savagely shredded by those more capable to do so.
I congratulate you on what must logically be a fantastic day for you. After all, you have absolutely no investment in this theory, don’t even believe it to be true yourself, and are merely intellectually curious. Right, Kirk?
Why don’t you tell us just so happy you are to have this theory mercilessly shredded in front of you so we can share your glee?
Cause otherwise, one might expect you were arguing in bad faith using a really obvious method of bad faith actors who want to think of themselves as clever and we both know that such a tactic would be beneath you.
it’s not
racismsexism to say thatJewswomen arebetter with moneybetter at social interaction, because it s a good thing!you’re fucking clueless. you’ve been repeatedly told that there is no evidence whatsoever that there are such pronounced “natural” differences between genders, and that it’s actually not even true that women are “better at socializing”, they’re just more visible at it (confirmation bias and all that); but you still whine that we’re thought-policing you, that you “just” want to have a conversation, and that we’re too emotional to have a conversation anyway.
Fuck off. Your “innocent” questions are nothing more than betting the question of “it’s not our societies’ fault! it’s natural, you see!”
pathetic.
Jadehawk,
Take a pill.
oohhh, great comeback, sexist scumbag. got something more substantial?
…
yeah, didn’t think so
@224
Indeed it is possible, however we are going by what seems most likely based on the long dataseries of people who make arguments like yours and whether or not they turn out to be bad faith actors or earnest good faith arguers. Now, this is hardly a 1:1 ratio, so let’s see if you are a minority outlier. Go for the gold.
And your new theory, also debunked by the same factors. Switching the reason from negative to positive doesn’t change the fact that the effect fails to show up on transpeople, fails to be supported by history, hell, even fails to be supported by a biological experiment into the effects of testosterone on cooperation and fails to incorporate or deal with the wealth of available research showing social factors being more likely. Also fails to account for why most social subgroups tend to be dominated by men including atheism if men are more socially minded. Wouldn’t they be seeking out various clubs and conventions by social nature and wouldn’t men be less likely to dominate organizations owing to their natural aversion to traditional organization? In any respect you care to examine it, the hypothesis is flawed and untenable.
So, luckily for you, you are equally uninvested in this new argument and will be just as happy to abandon it in the wake of overwhelming wrongness.
Perhaps, I might recommend, just as a suggestion, the well laid out cultural explanation for female representation in various subgroups including atheism rather than trying to argue that atheism is some natural phenomenon that’s conveniently sexually segregated.
Given that you are so obviously a good faith actor trying to find the truth.
Jadehawk-
It’s just the matriarchy sapping his precious bodily fluids. Certainly you can see that and sympathize. It can’t be easy when women secretly run the world through their control of banks and the media. Now, wait, that’s the jews. Don’t you see how hard it is to keep it all straight?
It’d be so much easier if the matriarchy would stop trying to castrate his manly arguments with their feminizing evidence, real life experiences, and carefully considered arguments and history lessons. Do you know how limp that can leave a he-man warrior for justice?
It’s like eating vegetarian quiche and receiving a pedicure at the same time, can’t you appreciate the horror of what he’s going through? He’s being mocked…by GIRLS!
I mean can you imagine anything more horrible, more vile than that?
That is what all the sexist fuckwits say. Stop being one. Close your mouth.
@229
fixing my typo, should read “if women were more socially minded”.
Not that it really matters as Kirk is more likely than not a bad faith arguer and also seemingly one of those particularly annoying libertarian types that believe that anything to do with society or culture or the mind in general is somehow the same as non-existant or otherwise neutral, when that isn’t the case.
But I figure I might as well correct myself anyways.
@231
That’s cruel.
He obviously needs to think aloud because that’s the only way for him to process the information. It isn’t easy being an interemediate species, especially with all the homo sapiens running around mocking them with their increased frontal lobe stuff.
And here we are taking that small little bit from him. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
Are you quite sure about that? What exactly did you read on the Dawkins site? Do you have a link?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2758377/
Note that they did not find great differences, but the theory and the observations both point to males being more social.
Male chimps tend to band together into gangs much like male humans. I would propose that as social. Looks like something has already been posted to that effect. What exactly do you mean by “social” though Captain K? Because we are social creatures in general, forming cooperative groups to meet objectives. But do you mean functioning as a social group or do you mean “nicer and more accommodating” when you say social?
The things you are saying are very sexist whether you realize it or not. It really would be helpful to pin those things down in your head.
For instance, it was appropriate to lash out against women arguing with you by threatening (albeit jokingly) with them facing worse consequences. The reality is that women can and will. That threat is real in this world, and yet you would rather ignore it and retreat into your comfort zone as beaming is not really possible. No it is not, but in that very statement you are admitting the real troubles that women face and profiting from them. If you weren’t, if sexism wasn’t real, you wouldn’t have that threat to make. Surely you can see that.
Gaoooooo!
Also, god dammit. I just wanted to make a little sign of solidarity, but I accidentally see there’s some jackass OH NOEZ THE POOR MEN-type. After reading that incredibly ill thought out joke of yours, let me just say this:
Fuck you, and the pretend starship you came in on, you overgrown manchild.
Hmm, very few is now the same as several, who are apparently delighted by your company but not delighted enough to date you (“I should have looked for atheist girlfriends in the UK.”). To be fair, I’ll note that very few is closer to several than none, as I stated. It still doesn’t discard the very real possibility that your sexism is driving us away before you even know we’re non-theists.
You’re quite mistaken if you think the burqa comment is the first legitimate cause of overwhelming feminist hostility. It certainly didn’t help, but the above instance of a reverse-sexism claim is the first time you made yourself a target here. And, overly sensitive? really? At least try to be creative.
The other lovely ladies and gents have been quite thorough in their responses, so I’ll only add that, yes, it is your fault that we’re offended by your “exploring all the possibilities.” It would be your fault if you offended into a roomful of POC by walking in shouting racial slurs. Proud female atheists, like male atheists, like to think that our atheism is a reflection of our ability to think rationally, and it shouldn’t be a huge jump even for you to understand that suggesting that women are more prone to religiosity is dangerously close to suggesting a lack of rational thought among women (or at least a trend toward irrationality). If you really and truly were innocently “exploring possibilities,” which none of us think you were, then it would STILL be your responsibility to follow that thought to its logical conclusion and realize, hey, that might be construed as sexist and offend people.
Hey Kirk, when you’re just “thinking out loud” and a bunch of people whose existence you’re thinking about tell you that your thoughts are a) offensive; b) not productive to the topic of conversation; c) actually part of the problem that makes our existence harder? The respectful thing to do is to STFU and listen, not whine about how a bunch of overemotional women hurt your feefees by not showing you proper deference.
You guys are hysterical.
In both meanings of the word.
No. We’re just right.
You guys are hysterical. In both meanings of the word.
We have uteruses that wander about our bodies?
hys·ter·i·cal (h-str-kl)
adj.
1. Of, characterized by, or arising from hysteria.
2. Having or prone to having hysterics.
3. Informal Extremely funny: told a hysterical story
Numbers 2 and 3 apply.
Again, what a sexist fuckwit says. And you aren’t funny. Just sad.
Dumbass, I gave you the original definition. That was given as the reason that women were ‘oh so emotional’.
awww. sore loser much?
You folks seem to have a very low threshold of tolerance when it comes to people asking questions.
Even if the question was as ignorant and offensive as some of you seem to claim your malevolent and churlish responses are so over the top that I am amused by their disproportionate venom.
Are you really that offended and outraged that it requires this level of vituperation? Was the question that much of a threat or insult?
Before one of you jumps in with an accusation that I am whining let me say that I really am amused more than anything.
It’s been interesting.
Sorry to have bothered you guys.
Smartest thing you have said in several days.
Damn, that was educational. I am proud to be among the women atheists on this site.