There really isn’t much I can excerpt from this story that won’t trigger folks pretty fucking hard.
So the capsule summary:
Three 15-year-olds start a rock band. They’re really good. They win a local Battle of the Bands. They receive acclaim. But they’re g-g-g-g-g-g-GIRLS. So the misogynist haters start leaving crappy, abusive, and even physically threatening comments on the band members’ Facebook pages. Eventually the abuse gets to be too much for the kids, and they decide not to perform anymore.
The only thing I can tell you that distinguishes this story from the last six I’ve heard like it is that the girls aren’t accused of being “fake geeks” or “rocker wannabes,” but of contravening the precepts of Islam. The haters are imams and grand muftis rather than basement dwelling cheese puff eaters. The band, Pragash Band, is from Kashmir. There are slight differences in catchphrases here and there, and the fact that Pragash Band’s haters are part of the “Put More Clothes On” tendency of the Church Of The Patriarchy, where those I see more often in the US belong to the “Take More Clothes Off” tendency in the pews across the aisle, where the skeptics and atheists are allowed to sit.
The story seems otherwise very familiar.
If I had slightly more coding chops than I do — which is to say “any at all” — I’d put together a web-based quiz game in which you’d be presented with an odious bit of misogynistic abuse, and you’d have to guess the source: Fundamentalist Muslim Ideologue or Western Male Netizen.
It would be a really difficult game.
We could call the game “Dear Muslima.”
“Muslima Christina Barcelona”!
@Chris Clarke
*applause*
Oooh. Sting!
Priceless Mr. Clarke!
Chris:
Oh my, the hornet’s nest that would stir. Let it fly!
Caine:
Seconded!
Example # 4,897,562 why Women Can Never Win.
Mythbri:
Does that damn list of examples ever get smaller?
But! But! But! Don’t you know that if you call it “Dear Muslima” that you will start an all-out witch-hunt against the saints in our movement?! The Western Male Netizen would be deprived of any and all abilities to defend themselves against such an atrocious act. The poor, poor, weak, whiny Western Male Netizen couldn’t possibly survive such horrors.
I hope you find someone that can help you create the game.
Guessing the source? Simple. All of the above.
We manly men don’t have to pay any attention to the slightly more than half the population
who are not us. Their sole purpose it to make sure our saintly genes make it into the next
generation.
I don’t mean to diminsh what is said here, the mysogeny is clear and unambiguous. What I
cannot fathom is why it should be so? Why are so many men afraid of women?
There must be gum-chewing.
No, no, no, you don’t see the Difference.
They’re Muslims. They’re Irrational. They’re Theists. When they leave crappy, abusive, and even physically threatening comments on a website, it’s because they’re bad.
When it happens here, it’s Ironic. It’s Free Speech. It’s hipster sexism. It’s funny. Somehow. Because fundamentally Different.
Man. Fuck those not-doin’-it-for-the-lulz Muslim misogynistic acts. We atheists need to band together and stop that shit when Others do it.
And dammit, brav-fucking-o, Chris.
Speculating, but I think that its simplest, the answer is: privilege. Men have many advantages when traditional gender roles are enforced. Women stepping out of bounds threaten those roles, and thus their advantages. The men that are terrified about women are ultimately terrified of losing the status quo, either because of the benefits they gain from it, or because they are kind of pathetic, sniveling human beings who worship tradition and piss their pants if anyone whispers anything that sounds like “progress”.
Anthony K wrote:
For these assholes, now that they’ve announced (loudly and proudly) that they don’t believe in gods, the invalidity of logical fallacies used by those people who do believe in gods apparently no longer applies when they use them – tu quoque and false equivalence in particular.
krubozumo
Because like all humans, men want to be loved. This entails a fear of rejection. Thus, women make us vulernable. As such they cannot be tolerated.
By making women even more terrified of rejecting us than we are of their rejection, it stacks the deck in our favour.
By making women totally dependent on us financially in order to support a tolerable lifestyle while raising children, it stacks the deck in our favour.
The dreadful and terrible irony is that despite this, so often women will continue loving us despite our underhandedness.
We don’t deserve them.
@Tony #8
It hasn’t, in my experience. But that doesn’t mean it can’t.
Fuckdammit!
really, that’s all I could come up with on short notice…
We’re not afraid of women. We want to love and be loved back. We’re afraid of being rejected by women. This makes us vulnerable – and we cannot tolerate vulnerability, not we manly men. Eradicating vulnerability from the conception of manhood is more important than fulfilling the desire for love that made us feel vulnerable in the first place. Whatever it takes to hold vulnerability at bay is justified.
And so it all gets twisted around.
Historically the answer has been to make women more afraid of their rejection of us than we are. This requires us to make them more vulnerable, both in reality as well as in the privacy of their own minds.
So men are strong and invulnerable, and women are weak and must be protected by us manly men.
It’s so unfair. That women manage to love us anyway would be surprising if it wasn’t itself a consequence of the same human drive to love and be loved back.
(Apologies for my heteronormativity – I don’t have a vocabulary to discuss these kinds of things, a problem in itself. Mea culpa.)
@ Anthony K–its like I’m reading Sam Harris.
My only quibble — and I know it’s just a throwaway line — is with
Partly because it’s pretty close to the whole “you’re a loser who lives in his mom’s basement” thing that was a stale and outdated “rebuttal” over ten years ago.
But mostly because I think it understates the problem. Pretending that the people doing this shit are just losers who don’t have lives outside of the internet, and never see the light of day, just leads to responses that “it’s just the internet” and “ignore the trolls, they don’t matter.”
Daniel:
That’s not true. You might not be afraid of women, as many other individuals may not be afraid of women, however, fear of the other (women) has been a main pillar propping up misogyny for thousands of years. That fear has been most vividly expressed throughout the ages and in many ways, thinking hasn’t changed on that front as much as we think. You might want to read Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland. It will give you a good historical overview.
Sounded almost like a riot grrl sort of group for a moment (a genre which I’m proud to say pretty much originated in my city).
That would be an interesting game indeed. Reminds me of the “Jailbreak the Patriarchy” app.
Holy shit. Can somebody please make this game on the interwebs? I’ll promote the shit out of it.
astrofiend, I have been meaning to learn more about web development and mobile apps. A simple application like this might be something to start with. I’ll see what I can do.
Events like this really make it clear to me how utterly empty and useless the misogynistic atheist’s atheism is. Atheism is just a badge to show how smart you are. Of course, it really does break my brain that they will use examples of religious people doing these things to demonstrate the dangers of religion while simultaneously doing the same things in their own back yard. I find it amazing that they are unable to see this. Surely some of them have read this post by now, do they not see themselves in it? I find their silence to be rather telling.
I’d sooner dump the Facebook page than quit playing music. If only I HAD a Facebook page. Then the problem would be solved.
wcorvi – nope. Then they’d find your email address and send you personal messages. And find your phone number and call you and harass you. And show up at your gigs to yell stuff at you. Harassing women out of the public sphere has been going on a long, long time before there was facebook.
There are many sites that will allow you to make quizzes on the web that don’t require any coding skills – a quick google search should find you several, you could use any one of them. I don’t really think the problem is the coding part of it. It’s going back and trace back all the times you had those “wow, that would be a great example” moments, and then remember and find them again. Kind of like how you often go “wow, that was a good movie, I should get that on DVD” and then when you sit down to make your xmas/bday wishlist, you can’t remember any of them.
A quiz like this would be pretty easy to put together with google docs. http://www.quiz-creator.com/blog/2009/09/making-online-quiz-with-google-docs-1-creating-quizzes/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC1L0wpmqlY
I found this 1-minute clip of them performing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn4ZGvuObOY
They seem pretty talented! It’s infuriating to think that they are being denied the chance to develop their artistic expressions just because of a bunch of assholes find the lack of penises disturbing.
I can only imagine how many brilliant musicians (and artists, writers, scientists, philosophers…) we never knew because they were brutally silenced when displaying the first signs of intelligence.
Hi PZ – you provide the quotes, I’ll set up and host the quiz for you.
david[at]humanist[dot]co[dot]nz
Plenty of quotes here – http://www.fstdt.com/
This video encapsulates the most jarring aspect of this sick, sorry episode for me. These kids are good. Not ground-breakingly amazing, but so what? They’re good kids doing something they enjoy, and entertaining a few people into the bargain. I can’t think of anything more inoffensive and harmless.
Then again what do I know? Apparently this utterly anodyne hobby is cause for great consternation amongst the dung-encrusted masses, if the abuse these kids received for playing fucking instruments and singing in public is anything to go by. As if that weren’t abject and idiotic enough, now, because of some horrible, smelly old man, there’s actually a Holy Decree preventing these kids from performing music in public anymore!
If Islam, to you, is an excuse to prevent kids from having lives and hobbies simply because they happen to be female, then you can take your Islam and fuck off. The world has had more than enough of your shit. If that makes you feel victimised, or marginalised, or ostracised – excellent. Now you know how these kids feel. Grow the fuck up.
Apologies if it’s cliche, but that last paragraph leaves me unable to think of anything but “This is The Voice the voice of the Northern Union”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqocBbqBA7M&playnext=1&list=PLD32DE0971F3A6F77&feature=results_main
I also just now learned that The Voice was by Johan Soderberg, not – as my brain thought for so long – Steven Soderbergh. I tell you what, I was so surprised for so long to see “him” embraced by the big studios.