Hey, Glasgow…you can do better than this

It’s shocking but unsurprising that this sort of thing still happens, but women debaters at the Glasgow Union were openly booed — not for doing a bad job, but for their sex. Rebecca Meredith’s facebook page has the story, reproduced here because I know some of you are members of the Facebook Resistance.

Last night the amazing Marlena Valles and I were openly booed by a small number of misogynistic male Glasgow Union debaters and members during the final of the Glasgow Ancients competition for our presence as female speakers. Sexist comments were made about our appearance, and we were told to "get that woman out my my union" by a male member. Our speeches were interrupted by cries of "shame woman" and boos at mention of female equality within the context of the final. Sexism is not just something we talk about – it is something real people experience everyday. After complaining, we were told by several GUU debaters that it was "par for the course" and "to be expected" that female speakers in the Glasgow debating chamber would be booed (though several members including the wonderful John McKee supported us admirably). I have been told as a female debater that I should be careful not to sound "hysterical" as a female speaker, I have been told to defer to my male partner on analysis and economics because male debaters are "more convincing", but never have I been openly disparaged in a final merely for being a woman. I was increadibly proud to be in the final of the LSE Open with the wonderful Freddy Powell, epecially against the likes of Sam Block and Fred Cowell, but was deeply saddened to be informed by several other debaters (well meaningly) that I should be proud to be only the 4th woman to ever get there in the past 5 years. I am not proud, I am sad. Debaters should probably realise that while we all say we care about sexism, incidents like those of last night, the lack of proportionate numbers of females in competitive finals, and (most worryingly) the number of female freshers who report they have abandoned debating due to sexist behaviour or intimidation are not acceptable, and we should probably start doing things to change them.

Marlene Valles also has an account.

This weekend was Glasgow University Union’s annual Ancients competition. For those who don’t know what happened, during mine and my partner’s speeches, in opening government, we were “shame”-d and booed by members of the audience whenever we spoke about how the motion ‘This House Regrets the Centralization of Religion’ affected women (My partner spoke about Leila Ahmed and female clergy and I spoke about dogmatic opposition to contraception and Catholics who identified as pro-choice). We both realised why we were being booed: it was because we were advocating for women’s rights, speaking in the GUU. It was only when one of the men making the misogynistic comments and interruptions had the nerve to stand up in the floor debate and very sarcastically say, “The GUU has been proudly admitting women for thirty three years and we are committed to equality” when a member of the audience bravely stood up and responded in a rousing five-minute floor speech telling the entire chamber that the men who were booing us were whispering *women* after shouting “shame” at all of our points and making patronizing comments about our dresses. Her brilliant speech called them out and received a standing ovation from a large majority of the chamber and is without a doubt, the most inspiring thing I have seen in debating.

I understand the way that the GUU “bear pit” chamber works, I have spoken in outrounds at Ancients since my first year and last year, was a guest speaker for the Facist party at one of the Union’s famous Parliamentaries. I am fine with speaking to the gallery and having audience members clap when they like a point and even say “shame” when they don’t. What I’m not okay with is people interrupting speeches to be misogynistic. It is difficult to speak confidently to an audience that is booing you for the sole reason that you are a woman in a dress talking about women’s rights, especially when you are the only girls in the final (which is depressingly often the case on the Scottish debating circuit). I realize that it was only a few men who don’t usually debate competitively that were involved with the heckling. The problem was that it was the entire Union that seemed to be weirdly proud of its misogynistic roots throughout the competition. The social Friday night was a pub quiz which included the question, “In 1980 the GUU had a vote to allow women into the Union. There is an annual dinner to honour the men who voted against the motion– how many men were there?” and the two GUU teams participating in the quiz whooped and banged their hands on the table in support of the voters against.

After the final, I had six separate members of the GUU, many of whom I have been friends with for years, approach me and give the exact same apologist speech – “I’m sorry that they did that, but they aren’t bad guys and it’s just how it is here and how they are. They are only joking”. We were told that that was the GUU and that it was “part of the course” and our fault for calling ourselves QMU A. My partner and I were a composite team, as Ancients is an Open, and Ancients has a policy of only allowing serious sounding team names. QMU was Glasgow University’s women’s union and as an all-female team (one of four at a twenty-eight team competition) the description fit. Later, as I was getting a drink, one of the men who was booing us said quite audibly “Get that woman out of my chamber” as his GUU friends, who had minutes ago apologised for his behaviour, laughed along.

This is my question: Members of the GUU clearly knew that this was something that happened. They knew that certain members would boo women if they spoke about women’s rights. Why on earth were they allowed to come to observe the final and why were they not asked to leave after or at the very least, issue a genuine apology to the speakers that they had rudely interrupted with their misogyny?

The reason that I am writing this post is because at Ancients, nothing has changed over the last three years. I remember when I was a first year, in 2011, the opening PowerPoint read “Proudly admitting women since 1980” with the word ‘proudly’ crossed out. I feel so sorry for the women that debate in that Union, especially because the reasoning for why none of them stand up against it as told to me by three senior GUU women was that that is just how things are done and “If you can’t beat them, join them” which is intolerable. The sexism of the GUU isn’t quaint and it is not a tradition to be jokingly celebrated. I appreciate the efforts of members within the GUU to make it better and maybe that incident needed to happen because we were told by many senior GUU female members that they couldn’t do anything about it without being laughed down. Until this is genuinely dealt with, as the director of training for the Edinburgh University Debates Union, I would be incredibly wary of sending female first years to Ancients next year and will certainly not be attending in the future unless there is assurance that this won’t happen again.

This controversy has been more frustrating than anything I have ever encountered in debating. I have spoken on motions that I thought were beyond the pale and I’ve had people say quite rude things to me in debates but I have never seen such an abysmal response from a Union for something so clearly sexist. I cannot imagine that if the same situation happened but audience members in a large final were shouting out racist or homophobic interjections the response from the hosting institution would be “That is just how it is done here” or “You provoked them with your team name”.

I would like to thank the CA’s Pam Cohn and John Beechnoir as well as the equity officer, John McKee, for making it exceptionally clear that these comments should not be tolerated. If only the GUU would do the same.

As is clear from the comments, this behavior is not universal — it seems to be a small obnoxious minority that are doing their damnedest to create an uncomfortable environment for women, while the majority approve of greater participation by everyone. But as we’ve learned on the internet as well, assholes everywhere are really good at cloaking themselves in the defensive armor of “Free Speech!” and doing their best to create a chilly atmosphere for genuinely open communication.

Be gentle, sweet, and kind

One of these trolls — in this case, one populating the #WISCFI twitter hashtag for the Women in Secularism conference — threw out a recommendation to all the ladies out there: 8 Easy Tips to Act More Feminine. It’s not clear whether this person was being cynical, mocking, or serious, but at least we can all concur that he was being stupid.

Here are the 8 tips summarized. Please, control your temper (tips #4, 5, 6, and 8).

  1. Dress feminine.

  2. Brush up on your manners.

  3. Smile often.

  4. Be gentle, sweet, and kind.

  5. Do not use abusive words.

  6. Do not speak bluntly.

  7. Be sensitive.

  8. Control your temper.

Man, what a waste of space. I can reduce those all to just one: be submissive, pliant, and pleasant to men. At least it’s not as long-winded as someone’s civility rules, even if it amounts to the same thing.

By the way, I hope something is done about the #WISCFI hashtag before the conference. Right now it’s just a flaming ground for trolling assholes.

Oh, no, I’ve been doing it wrong!

Everyone is always complaining that the drama and controversy is ‘all about the traffic’ — that the only reason people take controversial stands on the internet is to stir up noise and get lots and lots of attention. I’ve been saying for years that it’s not true; you can get brief flurries of traffic by highlighting some infuriating topic, but it doesn’t really build an audience.

And now I learn the true recipe, and that I’ve clearly been doing it all wrong. Michael Nugent did a rough experiment to evaluate the popularity of sexist jokes, assessing the popularity of two pages with the same joke, but different photos.

…the joke with the sexist photo has received more than 43,000 likes and 24,000 shares.

But the exact same joke has also been posted on a different Facebook Page, without the sexist photo, and has received only 53 likes and 18 shares.

Taking into account that the first page has nearly four times the audience as the second page, that means that the joke is 200 times more popular when accompanied by the sexist photo.

Well, you can’t really make that kind of quantitative measure: traffic growth isn’t usually trivially linear. But clearly if I want more traffic, I have to stop promoting minority issues and begin pandering to social dogma, so I’m going to have to make a few changes around here.

The Monday Metazoan is going to become the Monday Meat Market, in which I post a photo of a bikini clad woman and encourage people to comment on her appearance (Send in your pictures! Or better yet, pictures of your ex-girlfriend!). The Wednesday Botanical will be the Wednesday Flower, where flower is a euphemism for female genitalia: we’ll be showing off gynecological closeups. We’ll still keep the squid around, sort of, for the Friday Cephalopod, but now it’ll be Tentacle Rape Friday, with nothing but hentai clips.

I know it will be tough on the regulars, and many of you might depart and never look back, but hey, 43000 ‘likes’ on one lousy joke? Think of the money! And all I’d have to do is throw away my self-respect and spend the next few years hanging out on the internet with assholes.

That’s how you get lots of hits on the internet. I’ve just been wasting my time calling out religious nonsense and sexism. (Hmmm…I could also suck up to religious people, there’s a big traffic base.)

Not to mention the excessive reductionism…

Wow. Talk about major failure. A new study out correlates levels of Foxp2 with levels of vocalization in rats: basically, male rats squeak more than female pups when they’re stressed by separation from their mothers, and mothers tend to rescue the rat who squeaks the loudest. They then found higher levels of Foxp2 in males, and also found that reducing male Foxp2 levels in male pups with siRNA also reduced vocalizations. So far, so good; looks like a reasonable and interesting experiment. Then they extended it to humans half-assedly, finding that 4 year old boys have lower levels of Foxp2 in their left hemisphere (the side that largely controls speech) than 4 year old girls; they could not do the siRNA experiment in human children, obviously.

And that’s where it goes so, so wrong. The researchers assumed that women talk more than men, four-year old girls have more Foxp2, therefore their results conform neatly to what they observed in rats.

You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there’s a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a "language protein" in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven’t been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

The only problem here is that that statistic is false, and men and women talk at about the same rate. Oops.

female-vs-male-word-counts

This is so unfortunate. There is evidence that girls on average learn to talk a little earlier than boys, and that would have been a safer correlation, especially since they’re describing different levels in young children. That interpretation is still fraught, though: they haven’t worked out cause and effect, they know nothing about how Foxp2 mediates this vocalization difference (and we don’t even know if it’s a direct effect on vocalization; it could also modulate a stress response), and in humans, we don’t know if different socialization pressures could be causing differences in the expression of this gene.

This is why scientists are supposed to be cautious in their interpretations. Especially when trying to explain human behavior, there’s far too much temptation to push the results to fit stereotypes as a kind of unconscious validation.

Maybe the counterbalancing would ease back pain?

This is how Sony is advertising some new gaming gadget. Somehow, I don’t think they’re trying to appeal to women gamers.

sony4breasts

I also don’t think plunking the female form down deep into the Uncanny Valley like that is going to appeal to most well-adjusted males.

The other trope on display that I see a fair bit: showing just the torso while cutting off the model’s face. That’s one I sometimes see with male models, too — there’s nothing quite like obliterating the most expressive part of the human body to completely objectify your subject.

Where’s the solidarity?

Atheists are publicly chastised by Naima Washington.

solidarity

It is a sad fact that people of color, particularly African American nonbelievers, are alienated within the secular community. Among the ‘faith’ communities, even those with the most racist and sexist doctrines, continue to do whatever it takes (and make no apologies) as they aggressively recruit and make space in their communities for people of color. Based on their disinterest in any recruiting efforts, the leadership of the secular community is apparently very proud of the fact that they, on the other hand, have few people of African descent in leadership positions as well as very few members. While there is no genuine intent or concerted plan to change this situation, many attempt to explain this phenomena by claiming that black folk are just too addicted to religion; otherwise, those of us who aren’t addicted to religion are either nominal or closet atheists, and therefore, need not be taken seriously. During the past 25 years, I belonged to many secular organizations; it was indeed a challenge to remain in them.

There is some effort to incorporate black Americans into atheist organizations; it’s not an active antipathy, but more an oblivious neglect. To make atheism relevant to black Americans will take, I think, structural changes: we need to openly recognize that issues of importance to the black community cannot be set aside as non-atheist issues.

It’s that nagging gate-keeping problem again. We need to realize that atheism and skepticism are universal ideals, not narrow ways to address a particular subset of questions. And it really is all about the questions: too many atheists think atheism is simply the answer, without doing the hard work of negotiating the human problems…and they get defensive when anyone tries to tell them that there are many concerns out there — social justice, feminism, black civil liberties, to name a few — that belong on the godless table. The current infighting that some people are moaning about is actually an example of the resentment of those holding the status quo: how dare we suggest that atheism has implications beyond just disbelieving in god and religion? How dare we try to expand the scope of atheism when we haven’t eradicated religion yet? How dare we suggest that the way to expand our base is to also consider the more pressing concerns of other people beyond our traditional white middle class conventionalities?

And so we watch the opportunities pass by, because our current constituencies simply don’t comprehend that women or black Americans or any other second-class group might be interested in something other than talking about how stupid the Bible is. Sometimes silence is as self-defeating as hostility.

When African American atheists attempt to expand their visibility and participation in the secular community by organizing with other nonbelievers—especially those who have been historically ignored by the leadership of the secular community—to publicly celebrate their freedom from religious dogma; when we ask everyone in the secular community to celebrate along with us, and we set aside one day out of the entire year to do so, there’s a problem! Last year, some very intelligent and insightful atheists declared efforts to organize a Day of Solidarity for Black Non-believers as segregation! Those same people are otherwise dead silent about the segregation, hostility, and alienation directed towards black atheists within the secular community year-round.

I didn’t see anything local to Morris happening on the Day of Solidarity (this Sunday, the 24th). I checked Minnesota Atheists to see if they had plans to honor the day this weekend, and no, they have nothing. Again, it’s not because their is an antipathy to black issues: it’s more of an absence of awareness. And hell no, the problem isn’t the black community, it’s the existing atheist community that seems unwilling to reach out.

Can we fix this? I don’t know. We might all start by looking locally to see if there are any Day of Solidarity events going on around you, and join in.

Jacquelyn Gill has a good question

From Jacquelyn’s fine blog The Contemplative Mammoth, a bit of context:

You’re enjoying your morning tea, browsing through the daily digest of your main society’s list-serv. Let’s say you’re an ecologist, like me, and so that society is the Ecological Society of America*, and the list-serv is Ecolog-l. Let’s also say that, like me, you’re an early career scientist, a recent graduate student, and your eye is caught by a discussion about advice for graduate students. And then you read this:

too many young, especially, female, applicants don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know or that cannot be readily duplicated or that is mostly generalist-oriented.

I’m not interested in unpacking that statement beyond saying that “don’t bring much to the table that others don’t already know” is basically a really sexist way of saying that they female applicants “are on par with or even slightly exceed others.” There is abundant evidence that perception, not ability, influences gender inequality in the sciences– it’s even been tested empirically.

What I am interested in is why other people in my community don’t think those kinds of comments are harmful and aren’t willing to say something about it if they do.

And then the question:

After the sexist comments were made, some did in fact call them out. This was immediately followed up with various responses that fell into two camps: 1) “Saying female graduate students are inferior isn’t sexist” (this has later morphed into “she was really just pointing out poor mentoring!”), and 2) “Calling someone out for a sexist statement on a list-serv is inappropriate.” Some have called for “tolerance” on Ecolog-l; arguably, more real estate in this discussion has gone into chastising the people who called out Jones’ comments. These people are almost universally male. To those people, I ask:

Why is it more wrong to call someone out for saying something sexist than it was to have said the sexist thing in the first place? 

That is a really good question.

[Updated to add:] Apologies to Jacquelyn for misspelling her name at first. Need moar coffee.

Are we sure Karl Rove isn’t an agent provocateur?

It’s as if he’s happily digging the Republican party’s grave. His latest effort is masterminding a plan to scuttle Ashley Judd’s interest in running for the senate against Mitch McConnell by ridiculing Judd as a woman.

One can say that he is an equal opportunity smear artist, but there is a context and a history to Rove’s anti-Judd salvo. He routinely resorts to anti-woman insults and insinuations that cut deeper than his usual attacks – characterizing women in politics as having stereotypically negative female traits (subject to hysteria, too emotional, weak and weepy, bleeding heart, flighty or frigid, and lesbian).

On mainstream women’s issues, in the last year alone Rove claimed that Democrats “worship at the altar of reproductive rights,” compared President Obama to a “third-world dictator” for requiring insurance companies to cover birth control, and sneered at the White House’s priority to ensure equal pay for equal work as evidence of “unapologetic liberalism.”

I enthusiastically endorse the Republican Party’s plan to throw away the votes of half the country. Although, you never know — maybe they also have a cunning plan to end women’s suffrage, so it won’t matter. And then once they revoke the Emancipation Proclamation and have every brown-skinned family labeled illegal immigrants and deported, they’ll have a lock on politics. And then won’t I be sorry I encouraged Rove.

You don’t get to be “over” rape

Oh, great. Ben Radford has put his foot in his mouth again. Radford has announced that he is “over” rape, that he doesn’t like the “One Billion Rising” efforts by Eve Ensler because she abuses statistics, and that he’s going to beat up a whole bunch of straw feminists. You can tell he’s got all of his ideas about what feminists believe from listening attentively to anti-feminists — it’s rather like reading an anti-evolution rant from someone who has got all of his information from creationist web sites. It tells us nothing useful about the subject under discussion, but it’s extremely revealing about the critic’s personal biases.

Ophelia has already set all of his straw on fire, but I have to mention that I agree with him on one thing: this One Billion Rising stuff leaves me cold, for reasons that Natalie Gyte articulates so well. Radford’s reasons, though, are classic hyperskepticism. Ensler has said that one in three women will be raped, violated, or beaten in their lifetime, which is where that “one billion” number comes from. Radford objects! It’s not true!

The correct statistic is not that one billion women will be raped in her lifetime (as Ensler said in an interview on Democracy Now!), nor that one in three women “will be raped or beaten” in her lifetime (as Ensler states on the One Billion Rising web site), but instead that one-third of women “has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused” in her lifetime (as referenced in the study linked to on the web site). “Otherwise abused” includes “homicide, intimate partner abuse, psychological abuse, dating violence, same-sex violence, elder abuse, sexual assault, date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape, stranger rape and economic abuse.” All these are serious, legitimate problems, but not all of them are physical beatings or rape (nor even involve men). This is important because mischaracterizing the statistic as reflecting women either being “raped or beaten” harms victimized women instead of empowering them by not reflecting the true diversity of forms of abuse.

You know, when someone tells me that statistics are being distorted for a cause, I imagine someone misrepresenting the data with exaggeration or understatement to bias it in a prejudicial direction. I don’t consider simplifying for a public interview while keeping the core numbers accurate to be using “misleading statistics to support their social agendas.”

One billion women have been victims of “homicide, intimate partner abuse, psychological abuse, dating violence, same-sex violence, elder abuse, sexual assault, date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape, stranger rape and economic abuse,” confirmed by statistics that Radford cites. One billion women. Radford’s hyperskepticism is so fierce that he objects to Ensler using 3 general words — raped, beaten, violated — instead of 26 more specific words, but is willing to overlook the horrific truth that she is correct and one billion women will suffer for their sex in their lifetime.

Maybe it’s a good thing he’s over complex social issues; from now on he can stick to the easy stuff, like debunking bigfoot stories, that are apparently at the upper limit of his intellectual capacity.