It worked. Read Greta, Cuttlefish, Stephanie, Ophelia, Jason, Jen, JT, Sikivu, and Maryam, to name just a few, and you’ll see that our cunning scheme to assemble a network that was a flaming hotbed of decent human beings has come to fruition.
I did have an initial plan to use our time and effort to build a skull-shaped lair in a volcano on a tropical island instead, but I guess I’m glad we went with this one first.
Jesus saw the gathering of the hordes and thus spoke “I like that.”
Freethinkers one and all.
You’re not the only reason I am here PZ but Pharangula was what got me here. And just like Jesus, I like that.
Now if we could only get Jerry to join. But maybe there would be too much cat..er..wauling.
Thanks for reminding me of my New Years resolution: to start finding ways to recruit minions for my human experimentation. And to design a uniform for them, because you can’t be a scientist experimenting on humans without having minion uniforms.
I’d think you WOULD be glad you went with this one first. Do you know what tropical islands are going for these days? ESPECIALLY the ones with volcanoes!
You don’t have a skull-shaped lair? You can borrow mine any time you want.
Not to mention all the extras, like a shark tank in your office, that a true villain needs to have.
Trouble with skull-shaped lairs on tropical islands is you don’t get decent broadband service.
Sorry PZ, but I think you made the wrong choice – I’d have definitely gone for the skulls-shaped lair.
Hmm. I may start building one in the garden.
There’s actually a couple things you’re guessing — being glad is just one of them. You may find out whether your other “guess” is wrong or not in a couple of months. Birthday. ‘Nuff said.
(Shhhh, everyone. Don’t forget your cameras. The expression on his face will be priceless…)
WHAT!? We coulda had a skull-shaped lair?! That’s it. I’m on strike til I at least get some lightning and bats every time I enter the room.
What do I see, here? Atheists working together to call out misogynists and support women who face abuse and discrimination, whatever their religion, colour or nationality, and even inside the atheist movement itself?
But, but… And here I thought those darn militant atheists, especially the GNU ones, were too busy offending moderate believers all day long, calling them stupid and crazy and Nazi-like!! Oh, my poor vision of the world, she is being shaken like a leaf!!!
Dammit ‘Tis, I’ve been trying to close the sale for ages, and you offer up a freebie at the last minute?
:)
Good luck!I hope that the misogynists are more tractable that the Creationists.
I’ve just been reading an essay by Julian Huxley – RELIGION AND SCIENCE: Old Wine in New Bottles, published in 1923.
“Many religious ideas and practices, as man’s thought clarified itself, have proved to be unserviceable, and have been thrown on the lumber-heap, or left only with the losers in the race. It is impossible for any educated man nowadays to believe in the efficacy of magic, or of animal sacrifice; to accept the first chapter of Genesis as literally true; or to believe that God has human parts and passions. But there was a time when all these could be, and were, believed.”
Nearly ninety years have passed, for heck’s sake. The losers – yeah, that sums them all up, misogynists & Creationists.
Hey folks, we’ve been slacking. Time to get our jackboots on and do some liberal-goddist stomping again.
Don’t forget your octopus shaped submarine(s)!
You’ll need them at some point I assume.
CM #11
That sale’s been pending for so long that you might as well take it off the market.
Skull-shaped lair? Shouldn’t it be cuttlebone shaped?
@Tis, fair point. Right now, I’m holding out for HAMP but the servicers are a nightmare.
If that doesn’t work out I might have to track down the guy who originally built the death ray in the hope he can fix it, even though he double-crossed me.
*looks down at hand, which is missing a finger*
You know, I’m fairly new to atheism, both in terms of finally abandoning any remaining claims to my own faith, and in terms of participating (read: lurking) in the atheist movement. So it seems to me (and I could be wrong, being like I said, new) that the atheist movement, at least as a cohesive movement, is new too. In particular I have observed a lot of dissent over how to handle a few social justice issues in the past several months. One I pay particular attention to, being both a woman and a feminist, is the way that the atheist community handles sexism.
I have read almost all the posts linked above and it is really heartening to see the out condemnation of what happened on Reddit. I personally really want to be involved in atheist as a community and as a movement. But I really came to completely abandoning religion out of feminism, and my when I first started reading Pharyngula, it was about 2 days before Elevatorgate exploded. On the one hand It was inspiring to see so many people fight so damn hard for the right of women to request not to be treated in a way no one would want to be treated. But on the other hand, it was really hard to witness the shear number and intentional obtuseness of people who didn’t want to acknowledge women as having valid thoughts and feelings and rights, and certainly not as equals. Yeah there were a lot of MRAs . . . but of lot of those people weren’t. They just, as far as I could tell, thought that it was the grossest of injustices that RW requested them to “[not] do that.” And that feeling? It REALLY SUCKED!
It’s hard to feel part of a community where your basic equality is an open question, and to invest time and effort fighting for the rights of people who would be happy to deny your own. I’m happy to stand up and say, no, it is not okay to discriminate against people because they don’t believe in gods. But if I’m the only one who is going to stand up for me when its time to point out that its not okay to discriminate against me because I am a woman? How can I fight for the right to be respected even though I don’t think there is a god, when my rights and even ability to have meaningful thoughts at all are called into question. So if I have to fight those fights separately I have to go with feminism first, because who cares what my thoughts on religion are if they don’t believe I have meaningful thoughts, full stop?
If atheism is going to be a community, and a successful movement, I think we really owe it not just to the women in the movement but to everyone in the movement not to tolerate misogyny, ESPECIALLY when it is from our own. There is no morally neutral act here; not responding to sexism unequivocally sends the message that it is okay – it promotes sexism. There is no neutral ground.
Thankfully, one is I am really proud and grateful to so many awesome and clear denunciations of this sort of crap. All these posts on FTB have been awesome. To me it is the difference between feeling like I guess I’m allowed to be here, and between I actually being able to be a valuable member of the community.
Anyway, I’m not the best writer, and afraid I have produced something of a really long teal dear here, but, briefly: making noise and not backing down against misogyny, especially when it is from within the community, makes a HUGE difference, an makes the atheist community something I feel I can actually be a part of. I am really damn grateful for that, and this community has my thanks.
I don’t do Reddit, but I get the impression it’s just one big continuous online poll, and thus potentially subject to pharyngulation.
If somebody knowledgeable of the terrain there can specify the most deserving targets, perhaps the Horde could open up a few cans of whup-ass being saved for a special occasion…
Trouble with those volcano lairs is someone always stumbles into the lever that releases the eruption.
A few of the same idiots are making the rounds to each of the linked to posts. The most commonly used derail of the discussion of internet misogyny is the fucking well-worn “its the internet, what do you expect”. Fucking hell that is a dumb response to people calling out blatant bigotry.
Apparently these fuckwits think that only unsurprising instances of bigotry should be called out.
ftb makes it so easy to read all these other great people too (before the Fabulous Total Blogging plan, the only ones I was reading regularly were Pharyngula and Greta Christina’s blog; now I love having, as it were, a base camp for excursions (and alarums too of course)).
It’s OK if you don’t have a skull-shaped lair, as long as you’ve got that amazing cuttlefish throne somewhere. And a (frequently) white cuttlefish that likes to look inscrutable and be petted (bonus points if it can do the chromatophore thing in such a way as to give the illusion of being furry).
Not to mention all the paratroopers constantly dropping in from the crater rim on ropes, shooting at your minions, and triggering your nuclear reactor into a melt-down.
@you_monster
Yeah, there’s a big thing about all the sexism/racism/ablism etc being ironic and an in joke (playing the horrible internet dudebro whirlnut as a stock character or the like), but doing so as a joke only makes sense because lots of people actually do think and act that way, and as gets pointed out in talk about rape jokes the idiots who think that way can’t tell the difference and just think this proves everyone agrees with them.
Mind, not everyone at FtB is as tolerant or open to criticism as you, PZ. :)
Thanks for your comment, Night Witch.
Night Witch – yeah.
Flaming hotbed of decent human beings R us booya!!
No no no no no this is all wrong we can build the volcano lair by morning and fight misogyny by afternoon! Our movement really needs that lair! :P I joke this is great ^_^
This.
“Better.”
The people you list PZ, as well as yourself, keep me feeling a little bit of hope. I came to atheism from the other direction from many (I’ve thought about writing one of those notes about coming to open atheism but nothing I write seems good enough)and because of that I have had mixed feelings about the “group” for the same reasons I have mixed feelings about most groups where my primary concerns/interests are not necessarily the common thread. But leaving myself out of it completely, it is true that atheism needs a progressive and inclusive social wing. There are a lot of closeted atheist women out there who find more acceptance in liberal religious circles. Some times it’s easier to keep quiet about one issue when one shares a lot else and finds themselves accepted. But women can not un-woman themselves to fit in. In fact, no one with any kind of immediately recognizable difference can just “keep quiet” in order to get along if that difference is the thing that keeps them from acceptance. This is critical to atheism though from a strategic angle though, because nothing provides a blow to religious claims to moral superiority like happy healthy atheist groups, atheist families, and obvious diversity. So long as atheism can be painted as an angry-white-man thing it can be scapegoated and shunned more easily. The truth though of course, is that for many atheists it is simply an admission of non-belief and nothing else. I have always strongly supported the “new atheists” and ilk because I think this is the only way to make space for open atheism in society. However, as a movement atheism shouldn’t only be about cutting into the social norms, but also about making that little pie chart of society more accurate– and that means including atheists who may be invisible now because they’ve chosen to sacrifice one societal battle to spare themselves a more difficult one.
That 15 year old girl from the original post on r/atheism has put up a new post and if you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. The comments have been very supportive, and Rebbeca Watson can probably take credit for some of that.
One of the things that has gone largely unmentioned on the Watson side of this issue is that the original poster (TheGirl) was actually the catalyst for some of what happened there. She sexualized the thread with a reference to her own anus. It was a joke on her part, but it carried with it the taint of anal rape, or at best, consensual anal sex. Later on, in response to a troll’s comment, she replied that she was “waiting naked in a penthouse.”
My original take was that by hijacking her own thread with sexualized commentary, she opened the floodgates for the torrent of misogynist sludge that followed. Having read some of the new thread last night, I see things a bit differently now, but not in the way you might expect.
Rebecca “The Terminator” Watson, the firebrand troll magnet, serves a useful role in that, by being controversial, she forces the non-misogynist segment of the male population to deal with an issue they’d rather not discuss. She got me to see that it’s not enough to simply not behave like a misogynist. If you’re a guy and you really believe in equal rights for women, you can’t just say “I’m not guilty,” rather you have to take an active role and call out your guilty brethren. This is the source of the hate for Rebecca by the not-guilty segment of of the male population. Despite what they say, it’s not so much that they believe she’s lumping them in with the guilty, but that she’s making them feel guilty for not speaking out more.
I can say this because, while I never felt Rebecca was including me in with the bad menz, I have felt a twinge of guilt for not being more vocal myself against the misogynist hordes that infect the internet and much of society.
Having said all that, I think Rebecca’s approach falls short. Her tactic seems to be to tell the misogynist wing of the atheist movement to be nice, and let the ladies join the club. This approach is doomed to fail because the oppressor never gives ground to the oppressed, rather, that ground must be taken. This was true for both the civil and gay rights movements.
Thus, the new thread by TheGirl gives me hope in that it suggests that a new wave of feminist reinforcements is on the way, and they aren’t taking any shit.
TheGirl admits to starting the downhill slide of the original thread with her “anus” reference. She says she said it as a joke. She admits to feeding the trolls with her comment about being naked. Again, she was just joking, she says. What are we to make of this? According to Rebecca, TheGirl should have clutched her pearls, fainted dead away, and never showed her face in r/atheist again, but that’s not what happened. Just one day later, she was back online, and apparently, though somewhat surprised, mostly unfazed by all the negative attention. She doesn’t appear to have been frightened off by the experience.
If Rebecca Watson is the original feminist Terminator, the Girl is the new improved liquid-metal version… a steel reinforced, titanium shielded, teflon coated warrior. Unstoppable. Everyone agrees that we need more female representation in the atheist movement (Yeah I know what “atheist” means, just bear with me) but the shrinking violets that Watson defends can’t do it alone. They need the equivalent of a feminist Special Forces. A new breed that has evolved a natural defense to sexual misogyny. A breed that thinks sexual banter is a joke. A breed that sheds misogynist attacks the way a duck sheds water.
Imagine if we could get the numbers of these types of women at 10 percent of the atheist movement. Imagine how much that would change the culture. It appears that the future of the feminist movement lies, as it always has, with the next generation, an Internet-hardened generation.
TheGirl gives me hope.
This. THIS. This times infinity. Night Witch: thank you so much for that whole post. It was long, yes, but so very worth it.
Seeing people learn, seeing people change for the better, seeing people call misogyny out for the bullshit that it is…it just gives me so much hope.
Might I recommend the book, “How To Be A Villain: Evil Laughs, Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More!!!” by Neil Zawacki. It is an excellent primer and gives some very stylish alternatives to skull shaped lairs on volcanic tropical islands.
Night Witch’s comment: +1
(and thank you, Night Witch, for posting it)
@006licensed2squeal:
Please do not attempt to bring context and nuance into a Rebecca Watson sanctioned pile-on. There are Dawkins books to be boycotted and 350,000-strong subreddits to be generalised about and condemned out of hand on the basis of stupid remarks from a few internet assholes.
Her original anus comment was mentioned several times, if you’d bother to read the threads about it, and most people saw it as a pre-emptive strike for what she knew was coming; better to play along as “one of the boys” and hope that shields you from too much damage. And no, Rebecca or no one else thinks she should have fainted dead away from it; the point is that she shouldn’t have to put up with it no matter what her response is. Gosh, some girls can deal with guys telling them that they want to rape her until she bleeds and cries – that’s great for them, but that doesn’t make it right for those guys to say it in the first place.
Again, go back to those comments. Read exactly what they said.
“Blood is mother nature’s lubricant.”
“Tears, natures lubricant.”
“BITE THE PILLOW, IM GOIN’ IN DRY!”
Tell me why you are defending this.
Jack Rawlinson: you are clearly one of those few internet assholes. Shall I start cleaning house with you?
006licensed2squeal tells lies:
Lying liar, why don’t you even try to mine a quote?
It did? To those who are incredibly creepy, I guess.
@006licensed2squeal:
Oh, how revealing! And how about the other common use of the anus, eh, my dear horny troll? “Bracing mah anus” could as easily have been equated to being scared sh*tless, for instance! So why not send her scatological jokes? But no. And this is why we are speaking about a rape culture: this is the first thing that comes to the mind of too many people in reference to a pretty girl pic, or to the mention of any intimate body part.
Carlie:
Sorry I wasn’t clear. What I meant about the anus comment was that I didn’t see it mentioned by the OP’s of the various posts around the web that I’ve read regarding this issue. You are correct though, I have seen it mentioned in the comments sections of at least a couple of sites.
Regarding the pre-emptive stike, are you really saying that it was OK for the girl to say something so inappropriate and stupid because she thought other people were going to say inappropriate and stupid things and she wanted to be first? Really? Is that what you’re saying?
As for the quoted comments in your post, please re-read my post. I’m not defending the idiots who said those things, not even if the original poster got the ball rolling, those types of comments were completely uncalled for. In fact, I’ll send a hundred dollars to your favorite charity if you can show me, where in my post I defended those comments. Please tell me how my referring to those types of comments as “torrent of misogynist sludge” somehow equate to defending them. It’s almost as if you didn’t read what I wrote, and instead just saw me as the enemy, because I said some things you didn’t like.
Love moderately:
I can see how you might have got the impression that I was saying Rebecca specifically said what was indicated in my post. Sorry. That’s not what I meant. My post was long enough as is, but I guess I should have made it longer to make sure I wasn’t misunderstood.
So to clarify, I wasn’t quoting Rebecca, I was merely saying that her approach seems to be to tell misogynists to be nicer to women, so that they will feel more comfortable at atheist gatherings. More than once in the past, she’s made the point that the reason women don’t feel welcome at such gatherings is because of misogynist idiots. In contrast, despite the incredible amount of assholery directed at TheGirl, in the r/atheist post, she wasn’t scared off as Rebecca suggests most women would be.
My point was that that’s a good thing and that we need more women like her who can take the abuse and keep coming… just like the civil rights and gay rights marchers who stood up to the fire hoses, dogs, and abuse from the police.
Salty Current:
Really, you don’t think a 15 year old girl talking about bracing her anus isn’t a sexual reference? Are you saying that she might have been referring to something else? Like what? If it had been a guy telling her to brace her anus, would you still think he wasn’t making a sexual reference? And even if she realy was refering to being scared, don’t you think dragging her anus into a discussion about atheism was a poor choice of words? Given what I’ve read from her, she seems like a bright, well spoken individual, so the anus reference was unlikely the result “keyboard panic.”
Irene Delse:
You might be right, just as a guy’s invitation to Rebecca to accompany him to his room for coffee was really just about coffee. Sure, it might have been, but unlikely. Also, when TheGirl made her followup post last night at r/atheist she made no mention of being scare shitless. She said she made the comment because she thought saying “anus” was funny. In fact, by her comments, she seemed amused by the whole thing in the way someone might be amused at watching apes sling shit at each other at the zoo.
Look folks, I’m not looking for a fight, so I’ll say it again. Rebecca Watson serves a useful role because she gets people to talk about important issues that they’d probably rather not talk about. Go read the new post at r/atheist and you’ll see what I mean.
If I’ve given anyone the impression that I’m a Rebecca hater, please be advised that that is not the case. As I’ve said though, I think her approach has it’s limits, and that young women like TheGirl who aren’t frightened off by the misogyny found on the Internet and at atheist gatherings are just what we need to reach the tipping point where there are enough women in this movement to change the culture.
Now does anyone here really have a problem with that last paragraph?
Of course I don’t. She said herself that she meant “Bracing myself” but threw in anus because she’s 15 and 15-year-olds find the word hilarious. People talk metaphorically about saving their own asses and CYA efforts and the like all the time. Anal sex or rape would never have entered my mind from her making that remark in that context.
A mind that would read a 15-year-old girl saying “Bracin’ mah anus” in a nonsexual context, go to anal rape, and then blame the girl for having sexualized the discussion is a scary mind indeed.
You’re a loon. A creepy loon.
It’s not not-OK, that’s for sure. It’s understandable for any marginalized person, particularly one who’s 15 years old, to try to use that tactic to buffer themself against abuse.
So what you mean to say is that you were just making shit up. I see.
If there’s a reason that “her approach seems to be” anything, you fucking well ought to be able to provide a quote that indicates why it “seems to be” this or that.
You are still making claims which you are failing to cite evidence for.
These are lies:
And you have not tried to show any evidence for your case. You are a liar.
Yes, that’s part of the why. You will admit this if you aren’t a liar.
Here again is another lie. Why do you believe you can lie and get away with it? Why do you believe you don’t need to cite anything to support your claims, liar?
And guess what? Those marchers also told people to stop being racists, stop being homophobes.
Yes, the problem is that you are a liar for suggesting that Rebecca Watson believes that women who aren’t completely turned off from atheist spaces ought to feel completely turned off from atheist spaces.
What she has indicated, instead, is that it’s perfectly understandable that many women are turned off from atheist spaces, and therefore atheist spaces need to change.
You are a lying liar.
I can’t believe anyone would actually ask this question. Like reasonable people would agree that a 15-year old girl should totally have expected that using the word “anus” on an atheism discussion board would naturally lead to comments about violently sodomizing her, so she totally shares part of the blame. It’s like we turned over a rock the past several months and revealed the most repulsive organisms of the atheist community. I wish they’d go find another rock.
love moderately…sigh… either I’m a poor writer or you’re a poor reader… perhaps a little of both. I’ve tried to explain myself, tried to show where I support Watson and where I think the limits of her approach lie. I’ve also tried to show support for the young girl, while justifiably criticizing her choice of words. I might be right, I might be wrong. Same goes for you. Nevertheless, I won’t call you a liar, or a creep (I’m lookin’ at you Salty).
Perhaps if you two can understand why you feel such blind knee-jerk hatred toward me, a semi-anonymous guy trying to look at this issue objectively, you might be able to understand why those commenters on r/atheism reacted in such a hateful way. It seems reactionary hateful responses can be found whereever you look on the Internet.
You two have a safe New Years.
O victim! Thy name is 006licensed2squeal.
Seriously, you’re disgusting. There’s nothing objective about what you’re saying, as love moderately has so ably demonstrating. You’re making shit up because it suits your misogynist ass to do so.
The point is not that misogynists should be nicer to women, by the way. The point is is that we (meaning those of us who are not misogynists in the atheist community, which would exclude you) should be meaner to misogynists whenever they show their misogyny, to the point that they either go away or stop being misogynists.
So… you know. Fuck off.
errr, demonstrated, not demonstrating. You get the point.
Preemptive strike: the reason it’s clear that you’re a misogynists is that you think it’s understandable to make rape threats. Period.
I’ve had coffee within the last couple hours, so it must be that you’re a bad writer.
But what you haven’t done is cite anything from Watson which might demonstrate that the limits of her approach are actually where you imagine them to be.
Well, let’s see. The reason I’m reacting to you like this is because you’re making assertions, and failing to cite any evidence in support of those assertions.
I’ve seen no indication that atheist trolls on reddit were responding to this 15 year old with regard to any uncited assertions she made, nor would they be justified in using sexual harassment even if she had made uncited assertions.
So no, I do not understand why you think there’s any parallel, except perhaps this: you are not well practiced at critical thinking.
that’s some weapons-grade delusion.
1)you’re not facing hatred, not even close (no one even mentioned porcupines yet), much less any knee-jerking.
2)you’re not being objective.
I have a nice smelly rotten porcupine right here, ready to go. I’m not above admitting to feeling a smidge of hatred for someone who thinks it’s “understandable” to make rape threats against a teenage girl.
I’ve just read this thread.
He is now.
As a woman who has been kept away by the rampant misogyny in the atheist community, I am not a fucking shrinking violet, you piece of shit. I am a woman who has had to put up with too much misogynistic shit, too many rape threats and rapes carried out, too many times demeaned as a “bitch” or a “slut,” with too much to do to dedicate her mental energy to putting up with more. Women who have the privilege or resources or willingness to be able to “take it” despite what it is are free to do that, but until they and everyone else calls it out for what it is, they’re not helping me. Women who think rape threats are a joke are not my allies, and I don’t want them in my movement until they get their heads straightened out on that.
@006licensed2squeal, from your #48, after reading your posts I agree with LM, and by implication, your own point about you being a bad writer. For apparently you didn’t mean what you wrote but we have to be psychic to actually know what you meant which appears to be the opposite of what you actually wrote.
As to her ‘anus’ comment, this old fogey took in the sense of ‘clutching my buttocks because there’s likely trouble coming me way’. I.E. pre-emptively preparing herself for the worse as, to me anyway, clutching ones anus has nothing to do with sex but with that old trope of responding to fear by filling one’s pants. I didn’t see it at all as sexualising her comment until the apologists for misogyny turned up. Perhaps society has moved on to where any such comment containing the word anus is a sexual comment, yet anecdotally, evey one of a wide age spectrum I asked, saw the comment in the same way that I did above.
Plus, I don’t ‘hate’ you, though I do feel a degree of contempt for you, and not only for your poor communication skills.
wsm…, jdgng by th thsnds f rpls t ll ths thrds thr y mngd t bt ll th mysgnsts lst tm r tht 90% f thm r n hldy. plnnd? my ss.
my gss s rthr tht rbcc md pblc fl f hrslf (gn) nd tht PZ s lyng t try t cvr hr stpdty p (gn).
h, nd mst rmmbr nt t wrt stff lk ths bcs lds f grls r gnn cm hr nd tll m tht ‘m nt gttng nymr pssy…., bt wh n rth wld wnt t fck thm nywy?
Oh, seriously, people? If you’re going to take your dog for a walk, that’s fine, but to leave a pile of dog shit in the comments is just rude. Bring a little baggie or something. Fuck.
sr…, PZ xpcts s t blv hs ls…. f y wnt ppl t blv yr ls mk grls nly frm…
thy blv ny sht y tll thm… my fvrt s tllng thm tht ‘m lwyr nd thy lv tht…
fncy tht…, prtndng t prctc sch pthtc prfssn gt’s th lds sprd gld vry tm…
whn thy stp bng s shllw nd chsng ftr ft cck wth ft wllt ‘ll stp shwng thm my wllt.
[Banned. –pzm]