I was mean to the History Channel yesterday — I mocked them for portraying Satan as a dark-skinned man with a resemblance to Obama. But you know, that wasn’t fair. It’s not as if that show about the Bible is full of coded racist references to appeal to the yahoos of America.
Why, look here: they also include European white dudes! Racial diversity for the win!
That’s Jesus, by the way. After the Sermon on the Mount, I think he took a break to go surfing off Malibu.
Hey, we all know what atheists, gamers, tech people, and scientists have in common: underrepresentation of minority viewpoints and the presence of indignant white male gatekeepers. Now we get to add another category: wikipedia editors. In that great common resource that gets used all over the place as a quick entry to basic concepts, only 15% of the editors are women. The Feminists Engage Wikipedia project sounds like an excellent way to correct that, by educating more women in how to edit wikipedia and increase the range of contributions.
Note that this is a positive effort. No one is proposing to go in and destroy the patriarchal power structure of wikipedia or anything like that — they are simply trying to get more individuals from wider backgrounds to add topics of interest. All good, right? Exactly in the collaborative spirit of wikipedia?
You’d think so, but they’re already getting pushback. A few people are resentful and think that the initiative will lead to lots of inconsequential topics to clutter up wikipedia — how dare someone think a black feminist writer might be worthy, when we’ve got to document every episode of My Mother the Car? The guys are getting busy strategizing.
Those of you who are interested might follow Moya Bailey on her blog and on twitter…and participate!
(Thanks to Dana for making me aware of this!)
Melissa McEwan has some Advice to Atheist Men. The long list sounds very good, but I do have one reservation: none of it is exclusive to atheists or men. I think it’s more Advice for Decent Human Beings.
It’s just too bad that what is right is so rarely a political consideration.
For years I’ve been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the atheist movement, and I still am. I think it’s important for humanity to move beyond this childish and destructive crutch of superstition.
But at the same time I find myself constantly dismayed at the difficulty of moving atheism beyond the same old cliques, of making it a human movement rather than a well-off white guys’ movement. And why we can’t find room for good atheists like Melissa McEwan, who left her patriarchal church.
More than a decade later, I found movement atheism online. I was never one to evangelize my lack of god-belief, nor broadcast hatred of religion or its adherents, so that part of the movement was not a draw. But I did fancy the possibility of community around something that has been an axis of marginalization for me in some parts of my life.
I found the same inequality, manifesting in different ways.
There were precious few visible atheist leaders: The most prominent male atheists were very enamored with one another, and not particularly inclined to offer the same support to women, via recommended links and highlighted quotes and inclusion in digital salons about Important Ideas. They wondered aloud where all the female atheists are, and women would pipe up—"Here! Here we are! We’re right here!"—only to then go back to the status quo, with explicit or implicit messaging that women just weren’t working as hard as they are, just aren’t as smart as they are, or else they’d be leaders, too.
There was the exclusion from conferences, the sexist posts, the sexual harassment, the appropriation of religious and irreligious women’s lived experiences to Score Points and the obdurate not listening to those women when they protested.
In fact, female atheists’ protests were greeted much the same way with which my protests had been met in my patriarchal church. Silencing. Demeaning. Threats.
Read the whole thing. But I have to say that the closing paragraph is a real punch in the gut.
I would say I felt exactly as welcome in movement atheism as I did at my Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, but that would be a lie. No one at St. Peter’s ever called me a stupid cunt because I disagreed with them.
We will fail if we can’t change this.
What can I do better?
Haven’t you? Or perhaps you’ve all assumed the answer is obvious.
Sadly, I don’t have any surprises to spring — the answer is actually rather predictable. They’re agin’ it. They do concede that suffrage was OK, and they think it’s acceptable for women to vote — how liberal of them, and it only took them a century to come around — but all that 2nd and 3rd wave feminism destroyed the family!
So what’s the problem here?
Does history hold a bias against women? Members of the radical feminist movement seem to think so. Radical feminism has had incredibly destructive effects on marriage and the family—and its influence has also been felt on the church. Evangelical feminism teaches an egalitarian view of marriage and roles in the church, to the point where passages that clearly teach male headship are reinterpreted, explained away, or ignored altogether. As a result, many men are abdicating or being forced out of their God-given roles as heads of their households and as leaders in the church. The negative effects of this kind of postmodern thinking have led to serious attacks on the authority of God’s Word.
They don’t really address the issues they bring up…anti-feminism is more or less a fait accompli. As you can see hinted above, they deny any real oppression of women — ladies, your role as a helpmeet is valuable and just perfect for you! The real problem is that feminism erodes male authority. And if you weaken male authority, you weaken the authority of scripture, which says that males are the authority and therefore you weaken male authority, which weakens scripture…hey! Extinction vortex! Goodbye, fundamentalists!
I wish.
Now why would feminists want to diminish godly authority? Easy. They hate men.
Most evangelical feminists would profess to believe in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, setting them apart from many other forms of feminism. However, their method of interpreting and applying Scripture leaves something to be desired. What is at the heart of a reluctance or even outright refusal to refer to God as “he” and “father”? What drives the redefinition and dismissal of passages of Scripture that promote male headship in marriage and leadership in the church? Grudem concludes, “At the foundation of egalitarianism is a dislike and a rejection of anything uniquely masculine.”
When it comes right down to it, creationist and atheist MRAs are all kind of similarly stupefied and bovine when it comes to recognizing the legitimacy of women’s right to autonomy. Why aren’t they helping me stand at the head of the church, the godly men are wondering, and why aren’t they making me a sammich, the godless ones marvel. Women are so good at performing those subservient tasks, why don’t they appreciate the opportunities to do more and more and more?
Nature made them that way. Or god did. Follow your natural/divine purpose, as revealed to me.
I can call them ‘strident,’ can’t I? They apply it to atheists all the time, and this is clearly a case where the adjective is perfectly appropriate. It’s an opinion piece by a militant (I can use that, too!) Catholic who traces the fall of America to a court decision in 1972.
This year, the Supreme Court will render judgment on the institution of marriage. Though most of us don’t realize it, the Court first did so forty-one years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that gravely wounded marriage and set the nation on a course of gradual debilitation by ruling that states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.
Oooh, marriage was ‘gravely wounded’ by that decision. It was a fairly straightforward issue in civil liberties: could the law decide that contraception could only be sold to married couples? The court decided no, it could not: even unmarried people have a right to regulate their reproduction by means other than abstinence.
Chaos then swept across the country as suddenly men and women were able to fornicate without spawning children! Yes, chaos! His word, not mine.
Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.
Having lived through that period (I started high school in 1972, so I was in prime temporal position to witness precisely all the horrible consequences), I’ve got to tell you: some kids were screwing before 1972, most were not. After 1972, some kids were screwing, most were not. There were single mothers, plenty of them, before 1972, and plenty afterwards — conveniently, during this period I worked part time as an assistant custodian in a school for single mothers*, so again I was in exactly the right place to witness the aftermath of sexual chaos.
It didn’t happen.
Also, I’ve got to wonder if the author thought his thesis through. New access to contraception led to a surge in unwanted pregnancies? Only if they weren’t doing it right. Maybe we should have coupled contraception access to better sex education.
Or just maybe the chaos was all in the author’s head.
A lot of things are obviously only playing out in this guy’s head. This is the extreme Catholic position: it’s not just that child-raising must be carried out within a marriage, but sex is supposed to be channeled towards only supporting procreation. Which is scary, speaking as an old (but not dead) guy who has put all his baby-making days behind him.
Thus, in a well-ordered society sex and marriage go together exclusively, because the union of male and female sexual expression must be undertaken in a union that binds them in advance of the coordinated labors needed to raise the children they may bring into the world. To achieve this, a functioning society demands that each citizen channels his sexual capacities in ways appropriate to these two tasks (procreation and child-raising). That is, it demands marriage.
How about if sex has other roles? What if it’s a general social binder that brings people together in close affection? Wouldn’t that be a good thing, too?
And what if marriage isn’t such a great matrix for raising children when the two adults involved have lost that affection? Surely no one can believe that marriage is sufficient to create a healthy family environment, and knowing more than a few stable, happy couples who are not bound by formal marriage, it’s not even necessary.
So how can Catholics justify sacrificing the richness and complexity of human relationships on the altar of their narrow definition of how people must cohabit?
*Predictably, the community felt the need to isolate unwed mothers from other women their age; they might contaminate them. Also predictably, colloquial references to that school called it the ‘school for bad girls’. Further predictability: I did not tell anyone that I was scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms there after school and during the summer because every idiot would have lurid fantasies about what I was doing, when actually I spent little time interacting with the women there (I was working outside of school hours), and what little I did see were women in isolated and difficult circumstances.
This is very nice: a fellow hacked Donkey Kong for his daughter — he swapped the characters so that Pauline is rescuing Mario.
This would have been so easy for Nintendo to have done, it’s rather revealing that they didn’t.
Oh, and the gamer who did this generally got accolades from the community…but don’t read any youtube comments on the topic.
I guess I wasn’t aware of how deeply down a people could be held.
In her fearless defense of lynching victims and African Americans’ right to due process, Wells often bucked the backward conventional wisdom of the era. When she began her campaign against lynching in the late 19th century there wasn’t consensus among African Americans that lynching was worthy of a national social justice movement, nor was there agreement about the terroristic sexual politics that motivated white lynch mobs.
There wasn’t a consensus to oppose lynching? It’s a good thing Ida B. Wells was there to fight the fight.
It’s that day when we’re supposed to celebrate the accomplishment’s of women. I say “sadly,” because unfortunately there are way too many people out there who would rather sneer at and diminish women’s status in the world.
Case in point: on twitter, I ran across this lovely tweet from one of those repugnant slymepitters.
On #IWD remembered the nearly 0 wimmin – Nobels in science, highbrow art, chess GMs, great standups, but 100s of pop-culture hos #ftbullies
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Yes. Let’s remember those women.
Let’s remember Lise Meitner, Hilde Mangold, Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell — who were all well-qualified (men won the prizes for work equivalent to what they did, instead) to win a Nobel but didn’t get one.
Rather than 0 women, perhaps we should remember Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert Mayer, who won Nobels in physics; Irène Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and Ada E. Yonath in chemistry; Barbara McClintock, Carol W. Greider, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Gertrude B. Elion, Gerty Cori, Linda B. Buck, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Rosalyn Yalow, in physiology or medicine. Clearly women are not intrinsically incapable of scientific work at the highest levels. Of those whose work I’m familiar with in detail, I have to tell you that McClintock blows me away with the stunning brilliance of her abstract reasoning — I know of no other male scientist whose work is at all comparable (that of course is a matter of taste!)
The relatively lower frequency of women recieving Nobels is not something any man should take pride in; what it really indicates is that we’ve been shortchanging half the human population, depriving them of opportunities to excel. Wait — we’ve been doing worse than shortchanging women; we’ve been depriving all of humanity of the potential in those minds. This pattern of discrimination against women has hurt us all.
Let’s not forget also all the people, men and women alike, deprived of opportunities because of their race or class — deprived by the kind of endemic bigotry that would, for instance, denigrate an entire group of people as “pop-culture hos”. And it’s not just science — it was good of our petty MRA to remind us that we’ve also lost their contributions to art and theater and games.
That’s what I think of everytime some bigot crows about the absence of some group of people from some field of endeavor — it’s a reminder of all that we’ve lost to selfish stupidity.
