Catholics really do despise women

If only I’d read this information before I sent my daughter off to college! Apparently, it was a bad idea — according to Fix The Family, I shouldn’t have done it, and they have six seven eight absolutely solid reasons. (It’s so well-written: the title is “Six reasons to not send your daughter to college”, but it actually lists eight.)

  1. She will attract the wrong types of men. Apparently, the universities are full of “lazy men who are looking for a mother-figure in a wife are very attracted to this responsible, organized, smart woman who has it all together along with a steady paying job with benefits.” I think it’s nice that this web site is so egalitarian: not only do they want to deprive women of an education, but they also have nothing but contempt for the men who are getting one.

    Clearly, I’m going to have to have a little talk with my daughter’s boyfriend.

  2. She will be in a near occasion of sin. This is my favorite excuse: sex produces hormones that befuddle the female mind, making them overlook the faults in those horrible lazy college men.

    Catholic OB-GYN Dr. Kim Hardey notes that a woman is naturally very observant of a man’s faults as long as she is in a platonic relationship with him. Once she becomes sexually active with him, she releases hormones that mask his faults, and she remains in a dreamy state about him. We can see why God would arrange things in such a way so that when in a proper state of holy matrimony, she would be less sensitive to his faults and thereby less tempted to be critical of him.

    I have relied on surges of estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin to keep my wife in a confused state for years. How else would she stay with me? So this must be true.

  3. She will not learn to be a wife and mother. Yep, that’s right: we don’t offer college courses in cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, all that womanly work. So what good is it?

  4. The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup. “Like anything that is subsidized by the government, the cost of a college degree is inflated.” Wait, what? Subsidized education is more expensive? That makes no sense. Besides,

    It makes much more sense for a young couple to have a husband with a skill that brings value to the marketplace that has reasonable compensation to go along with it and a wife who is willing to be frugal especially during the early years of starting their family.

    So send the man to school to acquire skills that have value, but don’t send the woman to school because schools don’t teach skills that have value. Mmm-k.

  5. You don’t have to prove anything to the world. Women only go to school to show off.

  6. It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents. School is so expensive, you know. “So parents may avoid having more children with contraception, sterilization, or illicit use of NFP to bear this cost.” Investing in your children compromises your ability to have more children.

  7. She will regret it. In years to come, they will be so sad about wasting their most fertile child-bearing years improving their minds instead of their uteruses.

  8. It could interfere with a religious vocation. This is the most terrible one of all: Catholic seminaries will not accept you if you have a load of college debt!

And there’s more! If you watch this video from Fix the Family, you also learn that “We have a little problem with depopulation, and we need these young ladies to be havin’ babies.”

Avicenna beat me to it!

I think I’ll pass on This vs. That, too

Skepchick earlier reported on This vs. That, a poor man’s version of Mythbusters that was actually more like a reanimated version of the thankfully deceased Man Show. The creators have since turned to twitter in a manic campaign to get people to watch their awful show. Take a look at their feed — it’s spam city. I’m surprised it hasn’t been taken down already.

They sent me a couple of tweets offering a discount code and HUGE SAVINGS and urging me to watch their show. I turned them down, rudely, saying they were cheesy sexist shit. They replied.

@thisvsthatshow: @pzmyers I’m now aware you’re a cantankerous fuck. You’ll find my response to your baseless allegations, here: http://ow.ly/oMXXB

Hmmm. I find your approach enticing. Who’s in charge of your PR?

I did check out their response. It’s actually a reply to Phil Plait, who said exactly what I said, but much more politely, because he’s Phil Plait.

Thank you for the note. However, I have decided not to watch the show. I watched the trailers, and found them to be off-putting, to say the least. I know they were trying to be tongue-in-cheek, but the sexism in the trailers completelye dissuaded me from wanting to see the show. Also, the use of “booth babes” at Dragon Con (and the tweets promoting them) pretty much sealed the deal for me.

I have written several times about sexism – and sometimes outright misogyny – in the skeptical and scientific communities. I want to promote getting more young girls interested in these topic so they can grow up to be scientists, and not have to deal with institutional and cultural sexism. Given the way you promoted the show (as well as only having men as guests, apparently), I don’t see “This Vs That” as furthering this cause, and in fact would appear to impede it. For that reason, I won’t be promoting it.

That Phil. He’s a pretty good guy. Seeing his email is the only thing of worth in the This Vs. That reaction.

Hotchkiss’s (the creator of the show) response is complaining that he needs to parade around booth babes in skimpy outfits (with two of them wearing lab coats!) because it’s the only way to get his show noticed. He really wants to get more women in science.

But…when he lists his participants and advisors, they are all men. He has an excuse!

@thisvsthatshow: @futilityfiles We invited more than a dozen women scientists to appear on This vs That. ALL of them turned us down!

Yeah? I wonder why. Maybe we can see part of it in his twitter campaign.

@thisvsthatshow: @rickygervais Finally, a TV series that will help you get laid. Promise. http://ow.ly/oFWso

And he denies that he’s a sexist. Right. This is the approach that will get more women in science — tell the men that it will get them laid.

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Completely unrealistic and more than a little misogynistic

Hey! Hey! I’ll have you know I read the webcomics every morning for a bit of humor and escapism, not to have my faith in humanity shattered further and my cynicism enhanced. So I was reading Something Positive…

Oh, wait. That’s what S*P does. Never mind.

Anyway, I saw this comic and thought, “WTF?”

nightwingnaked

And it’s true. DC Comics is having a contest to give a lucky fan the opportunity to draw one page of their comic book, and the challenge is to audition by drawing a woman character naked and about to kill herself.

This comment says it all:

“I’m a sequential art student, and I find it a bit appalling that the requirement for panel 4 is essentially drawing a female character committing suicide naked,” said one commenter, Seairra Willett, in response to DC’s announcement. “The sexualisation of suicide is something I will not be putting effort into for a talent search,” she added. Many agreed. “This has to be the most repulsive thing DC Comics has done in a while,” said Rae Grimm. Others pointed out that the week of September 10th is National Suicide Prevention Week, but the main thrust of the response was that a strong female character was being reduced to a sexualized nothing, and put in a situation that is, at best, unpleasant.

As any true fan of the comics knows, this is an impossible scenario. How will she stuff herself into a refrigerator after she’s dead?

Brain dead

You know what, guys? I’m really worn out. Wednesdays I’ve just got back-to-back-to-back teaching — I talk and coax students into talking for about 3 hours straight — and I’m planning to vegetate for a while. Maybe a glass of wine and a really bad movie, and then early to bed.

You don’t need me for anything, do you? Just talk among yourselves, in your best Boris Karloff voices.

Oxford in August — be there

I’m hoping to be able to make it to the World Humanist Congress next summer — I’m at the stage where I’ve convinced myself I must go, but am still moaning at the expense. Maybe if you guys all buy lots of copies of The Happy Atheist I’ll be more comfortable with swinging it; or alternatively, if a lot of you tell me you plan to be there, the pull of good company will sway me further.

Although…have you looked at the speaker roster? Grayling, Pullman, Singh, Edamaruku, Igwe — whoa. I need to go to this. I am desperately seeking something to bring aspiration and inspiration back to atheism, and this looks like the place.

Also, a vacation in England and Scotland is rather attractive.

You can study the past scientifically

One of the most common rhetorical games creationists play, especially those influenced by those frauds at Answers in Genesis, is to erect a phony distinction between historical science, which they claim is not a science, and observational science, which they claim is the one true kind of science. It’s a way for them to deny claims of events in the past having any credibility unless there is a direct, eye-witness, personal, written account (a restriction they blithely ignore when it comes to things like the first five days of the creation week, or the life of Jesus, which is all by second-hand accounts).

So it’s always useful to collect good summaries of how you certainly can evaluate claims about the past, and how science can legitimately study historical processes. John Wilkins adds some more arguments.

To deny that we can know the past in any sense is not science. It is in effect an admission of failure, but we need not be so pessimistic. For example, we know Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions. We might not know how they were dressed or if it was raining that day, but we do know it happened. Likewise, we know the earth is 3.85 billion years old since the surface hardened. The evidence is there, supported by experimental observations.

‘private re-homing’

America, home of all those anti-abortion fanatics, has developed a bit of an international reputation.

The failure to keep track of what happens after children are brought to America troubles some foreign governments. So do instances of neglect or abuse that become known. Often cited is the case of the Tennessee woman who returned a 7-year-old boy she adopted from a Russian orphanage. The woman had cared for him only six months when she put the boy on a flight to Moscow in April 2010. He was accompanied by a typed letter that read in part, "I no longer wish to parent this child."

Late last year, Russia banned adoptions by Americans amid a broader diplomatic dispute. Other nations, including Guatemala and China, have also made the process more difficult. As a result, the number of foreign-born children adopted into the United States has declined from a peak of almost 23,000 in 2004 to fewer than 10,000 a year today.

Read the whole thing; it’s a long, multi-part exposé of shameful abuse of adopted children and terrifyingly bad government oversight. It seems that once you’ve brought a child over from a foreign country, or adopted one from American agencies, it’s fairly easy to renege on your responsibilities: using a short legal document, you can grant power of attorney for the child to just about anyone, and just hand them over, a process called “private re-homing” — it’s easier to swap a kid with a stranger than it is to adopt a pet from a shelter.

There are active bulletin boards on the net in which parents can, for instance, talk about their troublesome adopted child and ask if anyone would care to take them off their hands. Guess who loves those boards? Pedophiles and serial child abusers, of course. The deeper you read into that article, the more disgusted you will become.

Parenting is about commitment and responsibility. It’s a disgrace that the many adoptive parents who know that and do right by their children have to live with a system that also tolerates flibbertigibbets and attention-seeking frauds who want validation as a parent and contemptible sex offenders. This is a situation in which tightening up regulations and oversight can do no harm to the truly caring parents, but can also keep children out of the hands of creeps.

Oh, those secular ethics

In case you’re interested, DJ Grothe will be speaking at the Midwest Philosophy Colloquium on the University of Minnesota Morris campus next week. I can’t attend; it’s scheduled at the same time as one of our HHMI student research events.

He’s speaking on secular ethics.

By the way, of no possible relevance at all, I’m sure, Grothe is threatening legal action against Women Thinking, Inc., and is holding up publication of a survey on vaccination outreach, because he doesn’t like that someone reported a bad joke that he made. Which he denies.

Secular ethics in action!

Man, am I glad I have a good excuse to not attend that talk. I’m going to enjoy celebrating students’ summer research instead.

Oh, yay! More examples of secular ethics!

Consciousness raising needed

There is a petition asking Richard Dawkins to retract his trivializing of victims of sexual abuse. I’m really not interested in a retraction; he’s a smart guy, I’d rather see him have a conversation about these issues, and come to a better understanding of why people find his statements repugnant.

If you sign it, please leave a comment asking him to think more deeply about the position he’s taken, and to try to understand why people care about what he says.