Anita Sarkeesian has a defender.
I watched a bunch of women get sliced up in video games and now I'm watching it on my twitter feed. @femfreq is just truth-telling. Deal.
— Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) August 27, 2014
I watched a bunch of women get sliced up in video games and now I’m watching it on my twitter feed. @femfreq is just truth-telling. Deal.
The anguish of the fanboys is a wonder to behold.
There are questions which do nothing but reveal the depth of misconceptions and breadth of ignorance of the questioner. I suppose that’s useful; it tells you the dimensions of the hole you need to fill in. Unfortunately, sometimes that hole is also filled with malice, and the questions will tell you that, too.
Aron Ra got challenged to answer 7 questions about feminism. From my opening paragraph, you can tell these are probably going to be really stupid questions, and they are. These are painfully bad. You can also tell from the way they are set up that the person has a huge load of prejudice against feminists, and what he’s really looking for is a set of excuses to dismiss feminism altogether, because he already knows he doesn’t like it.
And of course, he asks his stupid questions in the form of a youtube video, because that’s where you can find prime idiots to feed him his desired responses. Only he got Aron Ra.
A new Feminist Frequency video is out — Women as Background Decoration (Part 2). This one is rather grisly.
Here’s a statement on twitter:
Blogger said woman's rights over own body extend to abortion even if fetus conscious & writing poetry in womb. I profoundly disagree. 1/2
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 23, 2014
The “blogger” happens to be me, and here’s what I said in full:
I’ll put this below the fold — the story of Christine Mackinday and Jonathan Koppenhaver might be traumatizing to some. It’s about a vicious beating.
Oy, Richard Dawkins and Twitter again.
InYourFaceNewYorker @InYourFaceNYer
@RichardDawkins @AidanMcCourt I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down Syndrome. Real ethical dilemma.Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins
@InYourFaceNYer Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.
I’m fully in agreement with Dawkins that abortion is not an unethical choice. The woman can choose whether to keep a child or not, and it is perfectly reasonable, and even responsible, for her to include any information about genetic disorders in making her decision. However, singling out children with Down Syndrome is seriously problematic — it is not immoral to have a child with Downs. It is immoral to insist that a fetus with Down Syndrome should be aborted.
I recommend reading any of Michael Bérubé’s stories about having a child with Down Syndrome — he doesn’t have any regrets at all. Or you could read about how Bérubé schooled Peter Singer, and Singer did the right thing and changed his mind. He also wrote a book on the subject, reviewed in the NY Times.
We should not judge a person’s humanity by the number of chromosomes they have, or how intelligent they are, or by how close their appearance fits a particular standard.
They’ve just announced a new moderation guideline.
Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we’d all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.
We’ve actually been tightening up moderation style along these lines for awhile now, but as of today, the FArQ will be updated with new rules reminding you all that we don’t want to be the He Man Woman Hater’s Club. This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary.
There are lots of examples of highly misogynistic language in pop culture, and Fark has used those plenty over the years. From SNL’s "Jane, you ignorant slut" to Blazing Saddles’ multiple casual references to rape, there are a lot of instances where views are made extreme to parody them. On Fark, we have a tendency to use pop culture references as a type of referential shorthand with one another.
On SNL and in a comedy movie, though, the context is clear. On the Internet, it’s impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point. The mods try to be reasonable, and context often matters. We will try and determine what you meant, but that’s not always a pass. If your post can be taken one of two ways, and one of those ways can be interpreted as misogynistic, the mods may delete it — even if that wasn’t your intent.
Things that aren’t acceptable:
– Rape jokes
– Calling women as a group "whores" or "sluts" or similar demeaning terminology
– Jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it
Obviously, these are just a few examples and shouldn’t be taken as the full gospel, but to give you a few examples of what will always be over the line. Trying to anticipate every situation and every conversation in every thread would be ridiculous, so consider these guidelines and post accordingly. I recommend that when encountering grey areas, instead of trying to figure out where the actual line is, the best strategy would be to stay out of the grey area entirely.
As one of the folks who picks headlines, I can also say with some certainty that we’re not going to get everything right all the time on our end either. I’ve been trying to keep an eye toward these guidelines for a couple months now and I still make mistakes and/or miss problem taglines completely. We’re trying to make the Fark community a better place, and hopefully this will be a few steps in the right direction.
Cue blithering ninnies whining about censorship; sad pitiful people who want to complain about about how men are discriminated against, line up over there; everyone who decides they’ll never read Fark again…well, that’s fine, just go away. But I think it is a nice step in the right direction, and it’s good to acknowledge it.
Now, about Reddit…
Dawkins spoke at #whc2014 this morning, in an interview with Samira Ahmed. Ahmed held his feet to the fire a bit, and grilled him on the recent rape comparisons on Twitter. Unfortunately, he made the same justifications all over again. Basically, his argument was that his critics are:
Irrational, incapable of grasping the lucid logic of his argument.
Emotional, driven entirely by a visceral reaction to rape.
Suppressive, unwilling to discuss the issues calmly. They never discuss some topics, like rape and pedophilia.
He received resounding applause from a receptive audience, and he would have deserved it if there had been any truth at all to his claims. There isn’t.
Most of us understand the logic of “X is bad, Y is worse” not being an endorsement of X. To argue otherwise seriously disrespects your opponents (I would not be surprised if some individuals fail to get that, but they aren’t representative).
When you are making an intentionally emotive argument, as Dawkins admitted, you lose the privilege to complain that your opponents have an emotional reaction. As he knows, some subjects are inherently threatening and are appropriately dealt with using a strong emotional component…not to reject logic, but to recognize the motivation that drives the importance of the topic.
This one is extraordinarily aggravating. Feminists talk about rape all the time. The flip side of that complaint is to suggest that they’re reveling in victimhood and should just shut up about rape. You can’t win!
It’s not that you aren’t allowed to talk about rape, but that you have to include some sensitivity to the fact that certain groups, such as men in prison and women in all situations, are particularly at risk and have a much deeper interest and awareness of the magnitude and impact of the problem, and that if you are outside those categories, you need to tread with great caution. It is especially galling when the outsider assumes they know best how to address the issue, because logic.Patronizing logic.
Honestly, women have been wrestling with this deep problem in our culture for a long time. It was a bit like something else I’ve experienced: having a creationist march up to me and accuse scientists of never ever considering problem X with evolution.* Yeah, we have, and with more knowledge and evidence than you’ve got, guy.
Another problem is context. We’ve been dealing with political figures, like Todd Akin, who have been using an artificial hierarchy of wrongness of rape to argue for placing the blame for some rapes on women…on the victims. This is, as Dawkins would say, completely illogical, and I’m confident that Dawkins himself is not thinking that way. But people who have been threatened with rape know full well that the world is not logical — if it were, they wouldn’t be worried about other people violating their autonomy. Vulcans don’t rape, and rapists aren’t logical, so reducing a life-threatening issue to a simplistic logic problem is illegitimate, and we also know that irrational people will abuse any hierarchical ordering of crimes to justify policies that do great harm.
Zero points to Team Dawkins on this issue. He hasn’t grasped the critics’ arguments at all, and is still hammering away with this irrelevant logic, logic, logic complaint.
One point for defining humanism as atheism plus an ethical stance, which is pretty much what Atheism Plus is all about.
One point, maybe, for clearly announcing that he is a feminist, and further declaring that it is self-evident that everyone should be a feminist. I reserve the right to adjust that score if he’s talking about a Christina Hoff Sommers kind of faux feminist.
Generally, it was a good talk with lots of red meat for the godless, but it had that big disappointing chunk in the middle where he addressed criticisms with misperceptions of the critiques.
*Curiously, we had an example of that in the Q&A. A fellow got up to the microphone and announced that he was a medic, and that genetic scientists had never considered the problem of the number of genes — that they used to think there were hundreds of thousands of genes (factually wrong: when I was a genetics student in the 70s, my prof, Larry Sandler, told us the best estimate was a few tens of thousands), and that we’d never dealt with the reduction in the number of genes in the HGP. There aren’t enough genes to make a human, he claimed. He was getting ranty, and couldn’t manage to state a question, so he was unsubtly dragged out of the building.
That was an appropriate response. I wonder if he’s at a pub somewhere right now, regaling the other patrons with a fanciful tale about how Dawkins was unable to process his logical argument, got all emotional, and had to silence him?
I have just learned that while I am thousands of miles away and unable to assert my authority in the home, the feminists are undermining my power. Radical feminists are sharing tips on how to open jars without a man. We have to nip this in the bud. I’m afraid I’ll get home now to discover the locks changed, and my wife laughing triumphantly inside while opening jar after jar with her feminine little hands.
What possible purpose do I have in this relationship if she’s no longer dependent on my massive masculine mitts? Feminism, you’ve gone too far!
