Uh-oh. I guess we’re going to have to shut down. The MRAs are right, and arguing against feminism/racism is a total waste of time — science proves it. It also conclusively demonstrates that the most oppressed group in America is…heterosexual white males.
It’s published in a scientific paper so I have to accept it. Oh, well, the life of a PUA totally sounds like fun.
Here we go again. Read this letter from a former member of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
It began with issue #200 of the Bulletin—all right, #199 if we want to get technical. It began with the Resnick and Malzberg Dialogues, a long-time feature of the publication. It began when two men sat down to have a dialogue about editors and writers of the female gender. How fantastic, I thought, because I, being a writer and an editor and female, had a keen interest in such things. I love reading anthologies such as Women of Wonder (and its sequel) and seeing how women impacted and contributed to this forward-looking and -thinking genre I love. I hoped they might include the women who inspired me and introduce me to many I hadn’t yet discovered.
That’s not what I found. I found a dialogue that seemed more focused on how these “lady editors” and “lady writers” looked in bathing suits, and that they were “beauty pageant beautiful” or a “knock out.” I am certain no condescension was intended with the use of “lady,” but as the dialogues went on, I felt the word carried a certain tone—perhaps that was a fiction of my own making. As I listened to these two men talk about lady editors and writers they had known, I grew uneasy. Something wasn’t right.
That sounds so familiar. But wait, there’s more!
The editorial staff (headed by a woman) vowed to improve, to seek more membership input. Issue #201 was little better—it included an article, written by another man, that told women to emulate Barbie, to “maintain our quiet dignity as a woman should.” I could not believe those words—yet there they were, in black and white. I asked my friends again—was I mistaken? Was I simply taking these words out of context? They were surprised, appalled, outraged. First at the idea that someone felt such a thing, and next at the idea that SFWA published it in the magazine which is part of our public presence.
Be…like…Barbie? To an SF audience? I’m surprised I didn’t hear the loud splat of a world-wide Picard facepalm.
So the little ladies complained and complained and complained, and then the men who started this all replied. Quit picking on us men, they said!
Issue #202 brought with it a “rebuttal” from Malzberg and Resnick, in which they used the words “censorship,” and “suppression,” and “ban.” In which they said those who complained about their article were anonymous to them, that the SFWA forum had become “the arena for difference.” Was it members who objected to “apparent sexism,” or was it a larger, darker, more hostile and threatening thing that wanted to suppress their dialogues?
In all the complaints that were voiced, there was never a call for censorship. There was never a call for suppression. There was a call for respect.
Whoa, man, deja vu. Deja vu all over the place. And really, there’s nothing special at all about atheism/skepticism, is there?
Nigeria has just passed a vicious anti-gay bill. It not only forbids gay marriage, it criminalizes organizing or lobbying to allow gay marriage, helping gays marry, having a gay club, and public demonstrations of affection by couples in public.
Lawmakers in Nigeria passed a bill Thursday banning gay marriage and outlawing anyone from forming organizations supporting gay rights, setting prison terms of up to 14 years for offenders.
…
Nigeria’s Senate previously passed the bill in November 2011 and the measure quietly disappeared for some time before coming up in Thursday’s session of the House. Under previous versions of the proposed law, couples who marry could face up to 14 years each in prison. Witnesses or anyone who helps couples marry could be sentenced to 10 years behind bars.
Other additions to the bill include making it illegal to register gay clubs or organizations, as well as criminalizing the "public show of same-sex amorous relationships directly or indirectly." Those who violate those laws would face 10-year imprisonment as well.
I helped gay couples marry by voting in the last state election; I guess that makes me a criminal by Nigerian law, liable to a ten year prison sentence.
Which brings me to a tiny bit of happy news, at least: as of next Thursday, gay residents of the Twin Cities will be able to purchase marriage licenses. Maybe we should invite unhappy Nigerians to move here? Do it quick before your government decides to criminalize visiting more liberal countries!
I tell you, I’ve been tagged in a whole lot of email conversations lately, and there are a lot of women out there who are seething with fury at Ron Lindsay…and now Greta has stepped forward to express that anger at both the content and context of the introductory talk at Women in Secularism 2.
I have a reputation as undiplomatic and blunt, while Lindsay is supposedly an objective philosopher and lawyer, quite calm and cool. To put it mildly, his reputation has just taken a major hit. How could the leader of a secular organization screw up a short introduction to a conference so badly? Apparently, he charged in with the intention of giving the attendees a rhetorical slap in the face.
Recent surveys have shown that 4 out of 10 American households are headed by a woman. Wanna watch four pampered men lose their shit over this fact? Here you go.
Juan Williams is angry — having women as the primary breadwinner heralds the disintegration of the family and something is terribly wrong with the country!
Professional Racist Lou Dobbs chimes in with some non-sequitur about abortions. Women are working and not having babies! Alert the police! Catastrophe and disaster! The social order is being undermined!
Oh, but smug jerk Erick Erickson takes the cake.
I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science, but this is liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complimentary role.
We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it is tearing us apart.
WTF?
I’m used to conservatives mangling science and telling us that their lies are true, and Erickson does not disappoint. Listening to that I turned purple and tried to blurt out four sentences simultaneously, and then my larynx exploded and my brains geysered out my ears.
It’s not true! Many species exhibit different patterns of dominance, and some have no system of dominance at all. It’s quite common for females to be larger than males, for instance. Erickson is claiming that something common in primates is a universal.
NATURALISTIC FALLACY, ASSHOLE!
You don’t get to spend your pundit career blithering about human (and American) exceptionalism and then turn around when it’s convenient to your argument to point to some monkey over there and say, “See? That’s the natural order!”
Erick Erickson is one hella confused dingleberry. Why does anyone listen to a biblical literalist pontificating about science?
Here’s the deal, Fox News. The world is changing. It’s not getting worse, it’s getting different, and I know that’s the kind of thing that makes bitter, cranky old conservatives weep into their scotch and water, but deal with it. Besides, you’ll be dead soon and won’t care any more.
And it’s not just getting different, it’s getting better — those women in the workforce are more independent, more free, and living more fulfilling lives that matter. Welcome it. And hey, how about getting off your privileged butts and making sure that they get paid the same as men, so those families and children you’re so fucking concerned about can get by?
“removed from youtube”? What the ever-lovin’ fuck? I finished watching it, at least, and it is very grim: it points out the new tropes beyond rescuing the damsel. Many games now have you witnessing the grisly death of women to drive revenge stories, or have the woman suffering such extreme abuse that they ask the player to kill them to put them out of their misery.
So it is very violent — but it’s not Sarkeesian’s violence, she’s merely describing the repetitively vicious approach taken by many video games.
The Black Skeptics have put out a call to sign a petition for Abortion on Demand and Without Apology. I signed it, so should you.
There will also be an abortion rights caravan that will be stopping in North Dakota on 1 August — I may have to make a short hop up the road to Fargo to participate in that.
So Ron Lindsay just said this on twitter:
Free inquiry. Free expression. Not only are these indispensable in our quest for the truth but they’re necessary conditions 4 human dignity
A lovely sentiment, and completely misleading. This long-running argument has never been about “free speech” — no one’s free speech has been denied, as any glance at the raging and constant torrent of abuse will show. It’s been about the responsible recognition of what kind of speech supports that “human dignity” he wants to cloak himself in; it’s about realizing that free speech as we see it in that unfettered medium called the internet is going to produce mostly noise with only a little signal; it’s about the responsibility of organizations to pluck out and amplify the good and damp down the stupid.
It really is about taking sides.
Not taking sides — pretending to have a false objectivity that values all speech equally — is actually favoring the noise. It’s the pretense that a statement on twitter like “It is honorable, noble and good to change your mind if you are wrong” from Lauren Becker has equal weight with “Get out, Amanda, you not welcome here. Take your dogma elsewhere (you too, Ophelia)” from a troll who doesn’t deserve to be named. It’s the refusal to recognize that some of the people who support the same causes as CFI have been barraged with incessant hatred for about two years now — and that that hatred has been aimed at women and the people who support women’s rights. It’s a willingness to let your organization be affiliated with websites dedicated to misogyny.
A Voice for Men is essentially a mouthpiece for its editor, Paul Elam, who proposes to “expose misandry [hatred of men] on all levels in our culture.” Elam tosses down the gauntlet in his mission statement: “AVfM regards feminists, manginas [a derisive term for weak men], white knights [a similar derisive term, for males who identify as feminists] and other agents of misandry as a social malignancy. We do not consider them well intentioned or honest agents for their purported goals and extend to them no more courtesy or consideration than we would clansmen [sic], skinheads, neo Nazis or other purveyors of hate.” Register-Her.com, an affiliated website that vilifies women by name who have made supposedly false rape allegations (among other crimes against masculinity), is one of Elam’s signature “anti-hate” efforts. “Why are these women not in prison?” the site asks.
Oh, right. That’s just free speech. Where is the human dignity, though?
It’s also about being smart enough to see through the dishonesty of thugs who puff themselves up and call harassment a right, who claim tawdry garden-variety sexual bullying “free speech”. Amanda Marcotte has the clarity of thought to see right through this game.
If it seems baffling to you that people are “into” harassment, I don’t know what to tell you. Why else would people harass? (Don’t say autism, for the love of god. People on the spectrum struggle to interpret social signals. Harassers, on the other hand, are masters at manipulating social rules and actual physical space to creep people out as much as they can get away with. It requires careful study of social signaling, not the opposite.) I got harassed on the sidewalk the other day, because that’s just part of the atmosphere of being female. I didn’t catch exactly what the guy said, because he muttered it, but what he wanted out of the situation couldn’t have been clearer. He had that sly smile, that glint in his eye that harassers get when they manage to capture their target’s attention and make them uncomfortable. It’s the feeling of power they have over you, the little jolt they get from putting a bitch in her place. Why people harass is not a mystery. It makes them feel good to exert power. This motivation is all over the Twitter rampage from the pro-harassment forces. They love drowning out useful tweets about real information with their anti-feminist garbage and ranting. It makes them feel good, like they have power. They can harass you and get under your skin and make you write blog posts about them, and then they feel powerful. It’s all of one cloth, and it’s not about unexamined privilege. It’s about being an asshole. We’re asking them to give up this jolt of feeling powerful they get from making other people sad or angry. No wonder they resent us.
When they photoshop our faces onto porn, when they call us “manginas” and “cunts”, when they flood CFI conference streams with denigrating insults to the speakers, they are not making “free inquiry”, they are not using “free speech” in a “quest for truth” or to advance “human dignity”. It’s embarrassing to see the leader of a major freethought organization making excuses for the toxic, petty viciousness from the anti-feminists that has been plaguing this movement since a woman dared to politely ask for her share of that human dignity.
This is why I’ve lost all confidence in Ron Lindsay. He can talk about human dignity, but he doesn’t have the vision to actually lead CFI towards greater support for that principle.
We need a leadership that is willing to take sides. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?
See also Secular Woman’s post on privilege.
Secular Woman has issued a formal statement on the ‘introduction’ to the Women in Secularism conference. It’s pretty potent stuff…I like it.
I look forward to the CEO’s response, which will probably compare it to a communique from Red China. A declaration of war, perhaps?
One of the talks that had everyone buzzing at Women in Secularism was Rebecca Goldstein’s. She introduced an idea that clicked for everyone — that all people have a need to matter in the world, that all of us strive to make some difference, have some effect, on others. It’s true of everyone, men and women alike, but what often happens is that women are ignored — a women has to work much harder than a man to matter. On a small scale, it happens at every committee meeting in which a woman proposes an idea and it’s neglected until a man echoes it (and then he gets the credit); on a large scale, open your history books and look at the genders of the notable names. There’s a bit of a numerical disparity.
Kameron Hurley has written an excellent essay on these narratives that make women invisible, ‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative. She’s coming at it from the perspective of a SF/Fantasy writer who has noticed all the lazy tropes we expect from our stories: the hero is a man, or if she’s a woman, you either get the novelty of her doing ‘man-like’ things (and isn’t it unfair that we tie those activities to gender?) or she’s constrained to stereotypical women’s ways. “Woman” is a synonym for “Other” so often.
If women are “bitches” and “cunts” and “whores” and the people we’re killing are “gooks” and “japs” and “rag heads” then they aren’t really people, are they? It makes them easier to erase. Easier to kill. To disregard. To un-see.
But the moment we re-imagine the world as a buzzing hive of individuals with a variety of genders and complicated sexes and unique, passionate narratives that have yet to be told – it makes them harder to ignore. They are no longer, “women and cattle and slaves” but active players in their own stories.
It’s a wonderful read, go read it.
Another recommendation: she references The Women Men Don’t See by James Tiptree. It’s online! You can read that, too! It’s a story that will make you think. You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator…this one features the irrelevant narrator, a man who comes along for the ride and really doesn’t understand anything that’s going on, because he can’t see the real protagonists as anything but a couple of women.
The theme resonates with me in so many ways. It’s not just feminism, but atheism and science that demand that you open your eyes and see the world as it really is. Every time we break out of our preconceptions, we gain.
