Atheism needs feminism. Heck, it needs to be more socially conscious about everything.
He also provides an excellent list of rational atheist/feminist youtube channels.
Sikivu Hutchinson
https://www.youtube.com/user/SikivuHu…Kevin Logan
https://www.youtube.com/user/ploppy111Soreta Yuki
https://www.youtube.com/user/SoretaYukiVogter Viking
https://www.youtube.com/user/VogterVi…Peach
https://www.youtube.com/user/xxxThePe…Neil Carter
https://www.youtube.com/user/NeilCart…Laughing Witch
https://www.youtube.com/user/laughnwitchThe Breakfast Club
https://www.youtube.com/user/Breakfas…Matt Dillahunty
https://www.youtube.com/user/SansDeityTheThinkingAtheist
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheThink…meridianfrost
https://www.youtube.com/user/meridian…FoxxyJazzabelle
https://www.youtube.com/user/jpkeittThe Atheist Voice
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAthei…David Landon Cole
https://www.youtube.com/user/DLandonColeCaptain Andy
https://www.youtube.com/user/andyfrom…Cristina Rad
https://www.youtube.com/user/ZOMGitsC…SweetBabyDeejus
https://www.youtube.com/user/sweetbab…Rebecca Watson
https://www.youtube.com/user/rkwatsonThe Messianic Manic
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMessi…Sincere Kirabo
https://www.youtube.com/user/sincerek…ThinkStephtically
https://www.youtube.com/user/Thinking…healthyaddict
https://www.youtube.com/user/healthya…AronRa
https://www.youtube.com/user/AronRaTheBibleReloaded
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBible…devchelle2
https://www.youtube.com/user/devchelle2The Atheist Experience
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAthei…Zennistrad1
https://www.youtube.com/user/Zennistrad1Kristi Winters
https://www.youtube.com/user/drkmwintersWildwoodClaire1
https://www.youtube.com/user/Wildwood…AtheistMinority
https://www.youtube.com/user/Minority…Philip Rose
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTrueP…carazelaya
https://www.youtube.com/user/carazelayaPhilosophy Tube
https://www.youtube.com/user/thephilo…ToriTheQueer
https://www.youtube.com/user/AwesomeR…TheSkepticFeminist
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ih…Dick Coughlan
https://www.youtube.com/user/DickDyna…VarmitCoyote
https://www.youtube.com/user/VarmitCo…Zinnia Jones
https://www.youtube.com/user/ZJemptv
I took a look at some of them (I’ll work my way through the list eventually), and unsurprisingly…their comment sections, including that of the video above by Steve Shives, are full of flaming asshats who precisely prove their point for them. Lewis’ Law strikes again!
I should probably do some more youtube stuff. I’ve tried a few times, and had to run screaming from the revolting vileness of the average commenter.
Yootoob comments sections are full of asstoobs.
I’m proud to say that one of the “Likes” to counteract the reflexive downvoting is mine. A commenter on this video noted that the video had several downvotes mere moments after being released. I. e., people downvoting it long before possibly having watched it, based on the title alone…
@#1 Lofty
It actually really depends on the videos. I know it’s a common meme that YouTube comment sections are where sense goes to die and burn in an eternal flamewar, but a lot of comment sections I go to are quite nice, actually. Probably because these videos don’t attract the sorts of people who turn comment sections into hellish nightmarescapes. Of course, Steve’s video doesn’t get that benefit, both because of its title and presumably its tags…
I really wish it was more common and acceptable to disable youtube comments on channels. They’re just the worst and offer zero value to anyone.
I agree with Saganite, a haunter of demons (#3). The quality of the YouTube comments varies with the subject matter of the video, and its intended audience.
The comments on my YouTube videos are 99.44% asshat-free, but then again, I just put up humorous songs that don’t threaten anyone’s dearly held worldviews. Were I to sing about the nonexistence of God, the mountains of evidence demonstrating evolution, or even the self-evident fact that women are people, I’m certain things would be quite different.
Accessibility note: by simply posting videos, without even a summary of what’s in them, you’re excluding a fair number of people from your discussion. If that’s what you want….
For more on accessibility: https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php
TheEssenceofThought is another good one.
YouTube comments only prove Lewis’ Law.
Why not all three at the same time?!
:)
Hey hey! I’m on Pharyngula! Top o’ the world, ma.
Thanks so much for the share, PZ. Glad you approve.
There are A LOT of very thoughtful, critical comments on Shives’ video! It is wrong to dismiss an entire comment section like you’ve done, PZ!
I will quote two comments:
First, Prototype Atheist says
Ok, obviously didn’t use the blockquote tags correctly!
Prototype Atheist said:
Of course everyone should be a feminist, in the sense that men and women deserve equal rights, and that women should not be harassed, especially in a manner which makes it obvious the harassment is unique due to their sex. The problem is that some feminists are radicals. You list Laughing Witch at the end of the video. This is a woman who told me that men should completely avoid flirting with or expressing any romantic interest in women at atheist conventions because this is harassment. That’s fucking absurd, and it’s a huge double standard. She also told me after I participated in a group discussion with Kristi Winters about how to get more women involved in atheist activism that the only reason I wanted more women in the atheist community was so that I could get in their pants.
This is why feminism becomes toxic. To refuse to see this is to remain willfully blind. This isn’t an argument against feminism. It’s an argument against hypocrisy, radicalism, and irrationality.
And BigRalphSmith said:
Even with all of Steve’s disclaimers, I still feel that it is not in the best interests of atheism (as in the fight against the undue intrusion of religion in to everyday life) or feminism (as in the fight to end misogyny and achieve real equality for women) to try to bring other just causes under the atheism “umbrella”.
Atheism is atheism. Feminism is feminism. Are they both just and worthwhile causes? Absolutely.
But… we can fight the good fight on both fronts while respecting that they are very different causes with very different goals and intertwining them is unnecessary and for many, confusing.
I disagree with you, Steve. Atheism does not “need” feminism and feminism does not “need” atheism.
I think both causes are better served by not conflating them in any way.
Sarah @ 12:
I wouldn’t call those comments particularly thoughtful, they are simply the same old excuses, dressed up in a few too many words. Comments of that nature have been shredded, time and time again, here and on other fora which is more suited to extended discussion. Youtube is not a good environment for discussion, thoughtful or otherwise, and it’s more than a bit disingenuous to suggest that youtube is a bastion of intelligent, critical thought. The bar on youtube commentary is so low that it takes very little for a comment to appear to be a well thought out critique.
Sarah
re: blockquoting
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
—-
Neither of your quotes are particularly thoughtful.
The HiveMind aten’t dead!
Oh. So I should support equal rights for groups I’m not a member of, in theory, BUT if any members of that group are not perfect, or if they don’t treat me with the utmost deference, then I am entitled to stop supporting the entire group, even if that group consists of more than half of the world’s population.
Yeah, that’s super duper thoughtful. Thanks so much for that, Sarah.
(I suppose I should add a /sarcasm tag here for Sarah’s benefit.)
It’s a simple cut and paste of a list made by someone else, and PZ himself stated he has only had a quick glance at them so far.
moarscienceplz @ 16:
Hey, at least it wasn’t super-duper mean!*
*Sorry, Anne Jones flashback…
I have to agree with the last few commenters about those examples of supposedly thoughtful comments. I have read essentially the same comments a thousand times here and elsewhere, they have been addressed over and over and over again. Those comments indicate to me that the authors have either not done any reading on these topics, where they would have surely found plenty of objections to what they have written, or they simply do not care and want to write the same tired points over and over again.
From Sarah’s #12
Hmm, I wonder just why BigRalphSmith thinks feminism being a part of the atheist movement harms the atheist movement.
Hmmm. I wonder, I wonder.
Also, neither of those people understand feminism very well. They also don’t understand that what is being asked is that when atheists get together, that they not be sexist asshats towards the women among them. What is not being asked is for every single atheist to make feminism their top priority. You can still have your pure atheism movement (where I would expect you do nothing but recite “there is no god” over and over to maintain 100% purity of atheism).
BigRalphSmith apparently didn’t watch the video before responding, because he didn’t address intersectionality at all, which was one of Steve’s primary points against “Atheism is only no gods”.
Just because those comments don’t include insults, it doesn’t make them thoughtful…they are piss poor in my opinion…
And as for atheism not needing feminism…ANY movement that involves humans needs feminism. If we are going to exclude all the shit that isn’t DIRECTLY involved in atheism, there would be absolutely nothing these to call a movement, it would be pointless. You have to ADD shit to atheism to make it worth anything whatsoever…like science advocacy, separation of church and state, a means to develop a secular morality, FEMINISM….
Steve Shives’s videos are very entertaining and thought-provoking. I especially recommend his “Steve and Stuffy” videos. I like his vids.
But some might find problematic his usage gendered insults (the c-and-d-words) and body-shaming insults (a man with a small d-). He does not do that too often and I do not know if he stopped using that (I did not see all his vids, which is a shame, but time is limited), but I noticed it in some of his older videos and it came out as a false-tune in otherwise nice melody.
That is an excellent video with an important message more people need to hear and comprehend. Unfortunately, the comments on the video itself seem to indicate that most of the anti-feminists that infest atheism can’t even be bothered to actually watch the video, let alone make an effort to understand the arguments contained therein, before they go off on a semi-literate, wholly ignorant rant about the imagined evils of feminism.
It is enough to make you despair for the atheist movement all over again.
Sarah, can you explain why those comments are ‘thoughtful’?
I can say that I, personally, would not attend an atheist convention with any intention to flirt or hook up, and ANY such attention from anyone at such a venue would be incredibly unwelcome. Many men feel that they should be able to flirt with any woman anywhere, because they are a man and that’s what they enjoy doing and who cares about the person on the receiving end!
That first commenter’s reactions probably indicate that he IS actively trying to do those things, and that he is probably going to atheist conventions with a specific hope of getting laid and it very likely IS the entire reason he wants more women to attend. That makes him an asshole.
The second commenter also apparently has the ability of an apple to think things through.
So the undue intrusion of religion in to every day life doesn’t negatively affect women who are generally treated as inferior by religions? And fighting to end misogyny and achieve real equality wouldn’t be aided by removal of religion from the public sphere? So… all those abortion bills and anti-birth control measures and the ‘abstinence-only’ sex ed classes are totally 100% secular in nature, no religion involved, nope none at all?
Those “thoughtful comments” don’t make any logical arguments, so all I can really do is shrug. Laughing Witch doesn’t sound very great from that description, but who knows if I can trust the description. That commentator’s parting statement is that we should…care about how reasonable and stuff everyone in the movement is. Well duh. What does this have to do with anything? Very odd.
I’ve been a big fan of Steve’s stuff for a long time. He has an interesting range of videos, from detailed and well-considered discussions of various apologetics books (his An Atheist Reads series), to his series of vignettes involving a group of stuffed animals (The Steve and Stuffy series), to professional wrestling fanvids. He had to quit my favorite series Riffing on Mail Call because the newspaper in his town quit publishing the Mail Call feature, but the nearly 100 of them are still there and are hilarious.
He’s a good guy.
This might be the discussion of women in atheism that Prototype Atheist was talking about.
I only skimmed it for now, but I did notice that some guy (not Prototype Atheist himself) near the end of the video seems to think there aren’t “barriers” or whatever, like the problem is just caused by false perceptions that women have.
Also, here’s the video description:
This is the only woman they have on their panel, and there’s nothing about the treatment of women in atheist spaces? Nothing?
I wonder if I watched the full video if I would even find lip service to this issue.
Charly at #23…
Are you talking about Steve Shives or Richard (Dick) Coughlan? I am a fan of his, but he uses gendered and ableist slurs all the time and can be quite body-shamey. Of course, his targets include TJ Kincaide and ThunderDouche and the MRM in general. When he’s criticizing women (Jaclynn Glenn, for example), I do notice that he’s much more careful about the words he uses and is a quite a bit less shamey and tends to avoid using slurs of any kind, so it seems as if he only does it with men. Doesn’t make it better, but there it is.
I’ve yet to watch a video where Steve does similar, but I haven’t watched many of his videos.
I sort of wish Peach hadn’t been included… though I kind of never forgave her for her attack on Atheism+, and the next video I saw of hers (yesterday, in fact) was misrepresenting (misunderstanding?) Laci Green’s video about rape jokes. So… you know…
AMM #6
Seconding. It’s getting annoying to observe y’all talking about how good and on-point this video is when some of us can’t view or hear it. Besides, it’s even more annoying to see ‘obviously these commenters haven’t bothered to watch’ when some of us would if we could, y’know?
Holms #17
No, that’s not the content of the video. That list is just a footnote, though a very useful footnote.
Here’s some useful information about the video.
Video title: Why YouTube Atheism Needs Feminism (youtube link)
Summary:
It’s a 14-minute video and Youtube’s captioning seems fairly accurate so far, though it has no sentence breaks or punctuation. I don’t see any other source of transcripts, so here’s my retyping of the introduction:
That’s the first minute and 30 seconds; sorry it’s all I have time for right now.
OMG! I am ready with the popcorn for when some of the regulars wake up and spot some of the names on that list.
Christ, some of them have never even said “MRA hate group” or “rape apologists”.
Get ready to stop chewing on Sarah and disprove the demand for ideological purity in 3…2…1
*sorry Steve, your a nice guy and I like your videos but i’d just go and ya know, have a coffee or a long bath.
@NateHevens #29
I am definitively talking about Steve and not Coughlan. I cannot stand Coughlan, he definitively rubs me the wrong way. I only watched two or three vids of his. On the other hand I watched a few hunderd vids of Steve Shives and those things I mentioned stuck in the mind. Even some MRA commenters on those videos spotted it with “thoughtfull” comments about him not being “true” feminist.
But those are exceptions, as I said, not the rule, and I would have a hard time to find those exact videos. It is almost a year since I saw them and I cannot reliably remember in which series it was. I think it was in some of his “10 stupid things about”, when he was dissing republican politicians.
troll
33 is for 31
Danny @ 31:
Fuck’s sake. Provide your own entertainment, eh? That way, perhaps you won’t be boring the socks off of people.
Danny @ 31 is so boring, that I’m far more willing to go and do *chores* than check this thread for comments anymore. Chores while *cramping*. Because physical pain is better than the mind numbing boringness of Danny. Ta!
Danny Butts: you will not intrude upon a thread with the sole purpose of sowing discord. Fuck off.
Charly @ 32:
Well, everyone learns and changes. It can be really difficult to change in this particular area, I’ve mentioned before that it takes a concentrated effort to completely lose a word like b!tch, in thought and language. It still pops up in my head often enough, but I’ve managed to keep it silently there, rather than saying or writing it.
@Caine #38
I know. I canot purge gendered insults from my mind and speech, because in my native language every insult is gendered. But I can purge ableist, elitist and sexist insults and I have to check not to carry habits from one language to another – and I know exactly what you mean when you say that it takes a concentrated effort.
But there is a difference between a slip of the tongue/mind and a punchline of a scripted and edited video being “he is a c-t”.
However Steve Shives makes excellent videos on the whole and in addition to his entertainment vids I particularly enjoyed and I recommend his dissings of christian apologetics literature. When I stumbled upon those I remember thinking “Oh my, these are good, I hope the author does not turn nout to be another thundering asshole”. Luckily he did not so I had quite a few hous of entertainment for long winter evenings as a background to some hand work (like perhaps needling or painting :))
Uhm Sarah, I watch Laughing Witch, and I pretty much doubt that she would tell me, or Steve or any other feminist that the only reason we want more women in atheism, is so that we can hit on them. The commenter pretty much wants us take his side in an argument with Laughing Witch that he had without anyone else being present and take his word for it that she’s a radical feminist, when that’s not visible from the content that she puts out. And her supposed comments pale in contrast to the sexism going on in Youtube Atheism, yet based on that anecdote, it is more important to reject a mix of feminism and atheism, than to acknowledge that feminism is needed based on how bad women are treated in that community. The harassment of women in that community is unbearable, but stop right there, a dude’s feelings got hurt, when a woman told him that he better shouldn’t hit on women at conferences in an argument they had that he doesn’t give any context to. That’s clearly the more pressing issue. Dude’s anecdote just debunked that feminism is important, and everyone is supposed to believe him, cause of course, he’s a dude.
I watched the video with captions on, and they were surprisingly not totally horrible as youtube auto-generated CC’s go. Still, there are issues, such as whole blocks of text missing where speech gets hurried, and the constant interpretation of “atheists” as variants on the word “eight.”
Picking up where Pytrexx left off @ 1:30, the next portion of the video, until 3:38, paragraphs and punctuation added where I thought appropriate:
Next bit, from 3:39 to 5:18, ending right before he begins talking about humanism:
I’mma take a break to eat and rest my brain. If no one else picks up the ball I will see what more I can get to later on.
Many thanks to Pteryxx and Onamission5 for the transcript!
Some points:
* There are a fair number of women who don’t believe in God but don’t want to call themselves atheists. Because why would they want to be identified with a group that has contempt for them and their concerns?
* Intersectionality. It’s not just women who atheists alienate. Atheists of the Dawkins variety have managed to alienate African-Americans by ignoring racism and attacking one of the main institutions that have historically helped African-Americans resist racism. Heina has described how atheists alienate ex-muslims.
Also, this stuff alienates not just members of oppressed groups, but their allies.
Unfortunately, I have the impression that a lot of people become atheists because they see it as a way to make a virtue of being an asshole.
Hey, folks. Thank you to Pteryxx and Onamission5 for transcribing my video! Because I’m a little slow sometimes, it didn’t occur to me until just now that I could just copy-paste my original script, which I follow in the video verbatim, to provide a complete transcript for anyone who needs it. Since Pteryxx and Onamission5 have already done such a great job, I’ll start right where Onamission5 left off:
“Sarah” is so thoughtful and engaged. Look at all this high value back-and forth! All the discussion and nuance between “Sarah” and those who responded to that first post. We’re all being enlightened by this meaningful dialogue. “Sarah” is no selfish drive-by commenter with nothing valuable to contribute. Clearly “Sarah” is a person whose judgement we should trust concerning thoughtful content. Let’s all really spend a lot of time in deep contemplation of everything “Sarah” has to offer. We should really read and think about it deeply about “Sarah”‘s words. Hasn’t “Sarah” shown the same courtesy same for our words?
More concisely: fuck you, “Sarah”.
Steve Shives, thank you! It’s great to read this, and thank you and Pteryxx and Onamission5 for the transcript (really good for those of us who can read it more easily than we can go and watch/listen).