I’m a fortunate fellow. I’m spending Christmas in Madison with my wife and kids, at my daughter’s house (so I’m even luckier — she’s doing all the work!) It’s going to be a good calm pleasant Christmas, with calls back to the family in Seattle as well…and we all accept and love each other.
It does, however, make me sad that not everyone gets the full and desired consolation of family.
Michael Shermer is feeling victimized, and is now seeing persecutors under the bed, I think. He posted a complaint about Ophelia writing a post that discussed subliminal biases. It’s a bizarre and paranoid whine — apparently you’re not ever supposed to criticize a skeptic, or you’re carrying out a witch hunt.
The feminist witch hunt continues! Ophelia Benson and PZ Myers have caught me again being a sexist: Trolling through my Scientific American columns Ophelia discovered that in my October column I report on Leonard Mlodinow’s book Subliminal, in which he reports on studies that report on people’s report of how they feel about politicians based on various subliminal cues, one of which is the pitch of the voice, lower judged as more truthful than higher (although looks matter even more). Guess what? My reporting of Leonard’s reporting of the studies’ reporting of subjects’ reports makes ME a sexist! Wiiiiiiitch. Seriously. I couldn’t make this up (note PZ’s comment on my own voice!)
Go ahead and read the Butterflies & Wheels post that hurt Shermer’s feelings; nowhere does she accuse him of being a sexist. She does suggest that he seems oblivious to the fact that a bias favoring the authority of deeper voices is also going to be a bias against women, but it’s more an affirmation of his point that we have these unconscious prejudices.
As for my terrible, awful, evil comment: I pointed out that Shermer isn’t exactly a baritone himself. That wasn’t an accusation or an insult; I don’t have a deep voice, either. My point was that you don’t have to have a voice like a foghorn to be a leader.
It’s a truly delusional state he’s worked himself into, and now he’s seeing witch hunts with himself as the target everywhere he looks (probably abetted by those slime pit denizens who see every cross-eyed look and every criticism as a sign that someone is about to get shivved by the all-powerful FtB mafia, and flood twitter and blog comments with such knee-jerk reactions). It’s a shame.
But that’s not what’s got me curious. Notice what else he does? He uses “feminist” as an insult, a very common phenomenon. It has me mystified.
And if you read that facebook post, the comments are similar: mobs of people having fits over “feminists”, sounding like Republicans fretting over “communists”. Here’s a subset of the shorter complaints:
Also, don’t worry about moronic misandrists.
True feminists (those wanting equality and NOT superiority for women) do not behave like this.
Just look at what happened to Thunderf00t when he dared question the pseudo-feminist dogma.
Welcome to The hysterical totalitarian feminist left….(just ask Lawrence Summers)
The death of Hitchens and this feminist clusterfuck have ruined the Atheist community.
Skepticism (capital “A”) is over for me. The movement has been co-opted by people with an agenda. Sad.
Trying to creep feminism into the skeptic movement is total nonsense. Tea Party was bought out by social conservatives, Occupy Wall Street taken over by hippies, and now the skeptic AND atheist movement is being bought out by radical liberals. It’s a shame.
It is a shame that people like PZ Myers and his ilk are so quick to abandon reason when their feminist religion tells them what nonsense to spew.
This shit is getting really annoying. Please ban all those feminist morons from skeptic conferences. Its a dogmatic belief system not based on evidence, dismissive of evidence provided to them and generally pretty aggressive towards other people for no real reason. How can they call themselves skeptics?
(That one’s a favorite: a dogmatic, dismissive, aggressive comment declaring that you can’t be a true skeptic if you’re dogmatic, dismissive, and aggressive. Own goal!)
I have to laugh at this other non sequitur that popped up:
Pz lost his mind after he went vegetarian. I don’t know what Ophelia is thinking
Well, vegetarianism isn’t associated with insanity as far as I know, and also, little awkward fact, I’m not a vegetarian, although I have reduced my meat consumption.
But anyway, I started to realize something: I don’t understand how these people think at all — they’re completely alien. Regarding feminism with contempt is a bit like regarding science with contempt: it’s incomprehensible to me, and I’m wondering if they really understand what they are throwing away.
So let’s try an experiment. Let’s hear from some of these anti-feminists. I’d like them to comment here and explain themselves, and to do so a little more deeply than just reiterating dogmatic excuses. If you think feminism is a religion, explain why, and be specific. If you think feminism is unsupported by the evidence, explain what evidence opposes the principles of feminism. If you think it’s wrong for the skeptic movement to have a social agenda, explain what you think it should be doing that has no social implications.
Most importantly, if you think feminism, that is equality for men and women and opposition to cultural institutions that perpetuate inequities, is irrational, let’s see you explain your opposition rationally.
This could go a couple of ways: there could be dead silence as the anti-feminists wilt under pressure to honestly explain themselves, or there could be an eruption of the usual shrieking misogyny, or there might actually be a few who try to explain themselves. If it’s the latter, the rest of you behave yourselves — pretend you’ve got a cockroach under the microscope and try to probe it to figure out what makes it work, and don’t just try to crush it under the heel of your shoe, OK?
I’m a bit curious myself. I’ve had these sorts of conversations with creationists, and it’s always like wandering through an alien world; let’s try to figure out what weird things are going on inside the skulls of anti-feminists.
It’s everywhere. Iris Classon is woman and a programmer in Sweden, and it turns out that some Swedish men are harassing jerks, too. It’s a painful read, and it all started with a nice newspaper article that published her picture and story … and of course, being a software geek and an attractive woman means you’re a target.
Don’t read it if you’re just tired of the constant drone of ugly misogyny everywhere, or just don’t want to be reminded of that familiar condition. I will highlight the summary she selected for her post:
If you EVER harass me you WILL be published on the blog, twitter, facebook and whatever media I have. I don’t back down, I don’t back of. And I’m sure my friends won’t either. And girl, if you have ANY problems with ANYBODY – please reach out to me. Now
Yeah. Don’t cross Iris Classon.
The ongoing dispute about sexism in the secular community has been settled at last by one incredibly insightful post.
Atheism is a ‘guy thing,’ I would say, like needlepoint is a ‘girl thing.’
We don’t have to consider why the sexes fall (or are pushed) into these particular roles; they just are. And with that simple argument, we’re done. By golly, we ought to make the guy who said it some kind of leader of the atheist movement. We wouldn’t want to have him wasting his time on things like needlepoint, you know.
Jezebel justifies its existence every now and then, and today is one of those days. The publication is celebrating a first instance of what will likely become a hallowed tradition, and it starts off with a post by Kate Harding wwith the people-pleasing title Fuck You, Men’s Rights Activists. I really hate when my militant friends start to pull their punches. You know?
Excerpt, with emphasis added for local interest:
So fuck you, MRAs. Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you. Fuck you for derailing threads about the victims of Marc Lépine, a man who screamed about his hatred for feminists as he murdered fourteen women and injured many others, because you also hate feminists and want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone. Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement by a man who thinks little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers if it weren’t for society telling them it’s dirty. Fuck you for whining about how unfair it is that women might wonder if you’re a rapist when you approach them out of nowhere, while completely ignoring how unfair it is that women feel the need to be on guard all the time in public. Or that if we relax and behave normally—drinking, dancing, dressing however we want—you will be the first motherfuckers in line to blame us for getting ourselves raped.
This video is going around twitter among the usual suspects right now. It’s by Reap Paden, and it’s about how I’m not a feminist. Well, it’s also about “hypocrisy…and a dream”, but it never gets around to showing either. And while it’s by a known idiot, it really is just clips of me and Rebecca Watson at Skepticon 3, with titles that say more about Paden than either of us.
Hmmm. You could argue that I’m a bad comedian, but there’s nothing anti-feminist in any of those clips…that is, unless you think that humor and joking about sex are somehow incompatible with feminism.
It gets worse, though, and Paden left it out — I did have that woman come up on stage so I could have sex with her. Of course, it was in a talk about sex and genetics, where I used a deck of cards to illustrate recombination, so it was a little less provocative than you might think — we swapped cards for a bit. Lasciviously.
And the clip with Rebecca is a bit that John the Other didn’t understand, either — it was Rebecca yanking JT’s chain, and the handler she was “abusing” was in on the joke from day one.
It’s revealing when this is the worst dirt he can dig up on us, isn’t it?
Ophelia Benson called out Michael Shermer for a sexist remark he made. Now Michael Shermer responds. Well, actually, he jinks and jitters to avoid the issue, and tries a grand distraction: “Hey, look over there! It’s tribalism!”
Here’s what Shermer was caught saying in a video discussion about why women aren’t participating as much in the skeptical movement:
It’s who wants to stand up and talk about it, go on shows about it, go to conferences and speak about it, who’s intellectually active about it; you know, it’s more of a guy thing.
You know what? That is a great big hairy naked sexist remark. It’s a plain assumption that men are intrinsically better suited to leading skepticism and atheism. You can’t get much plainer than “It’s more of a guy thing.”
A good response would have been to admit that he’d made an unthinking, stupid remark and that he’d like to retract it. But that’s not what he does. Instead, he argues that he really does think the split in participation is 50/50, and points to TAM as having roughly equal numbers of men and women speaking.
Need I point out that the reason gender ratios have been improving is because people like Ophelia and Rebecca Watson and Greta Christina and Jen McCreight have been pointing out the discrimination for years, and have provided lists of excellent women and minority speakers, and conference organizers, rather than doubling down and denying the problem, have been receptive and made strong efforts to correct the bias?
Oh. So I guess it’s not a guy thing, and you were wrong, Michael. It might have been cleverer of you to just say, “I was wrong, I made a sexist remark, the evidence shows that it’s not a guy thing.” A column in which he recognized his own sexism and talked about conscious efforts to improve would have been a good and respectful step forward.
But no. Instead he goes shopping for quotes from friends to show that he was right. He asked Cara Santa Maria about this issue, and she says it’s harder to find women willing to get in front of a camera on these issues, and that women atheists are often singled out as particularly brave.
Why is that, I wonder? That’s an interesting observation. Why doesn’t Shermer follow through on that? Because it seems to me that that’s an important fact: it is harder for women to come out, to be prominent in atheist and skeptical circles. We could split the possibilities into two broad categories: it’s the fault of the women — skepticism just isn’t a gal thing — or we could lay the problem on the environment of the skeptical movement. Shermer is just going to take the lazy option of blaming the women, because the alternative would require hard work by leaders of the skeptical movement to address.
And then he brings in Harriet Hall, who also makes a sexist remark.
I think it is unreasonable to expect that equal numbers of men and women will be attracted to every sphere of human endeavor. Science has shown that real differences exist. We should level the playing field and ensure there are no preventable obstacles, then let the chips fall where they may.
So sex differences are real, and we should just pretend that we don’t see sex and gender everywhere we look? This sounds so much like the argument common among clueless white people that they don’t see color. Yeah, you do. Every one of us has preconceptions about people made on the basis of sex and race. You don’t progress by pretending that stereotypes and perception don’t shape how we judge people.
Hall should know this. We see it in science, too, where women and men have initially equivalent interest in following the field, and then women are actively discouraged from pursuing the higher ranks of their discipline. We know this; there are many studies demonstrating a sex bias in refereeing papers, in promotion and tenure, in cultural attitudes about competence. You don’t overcome those by just telling everyone there is no barrier to women and men applying for the jobs in equal numbers.
By the way, I hate the phrase “Science has shown” followed by some irrelevant fact. Science has shown that men and women have differences, true: women have vulvas and breasts, men have penises and hairier bodies. Science has not shown that women have significantly different cognitive abilities. Lady brains do not lack a skeptical module that gentlemen brains have.
And that’s really the big problem here. There is no reason anywhere to think that women have less capacity for critical thinking, or that they are intrinsically more gullible and therefore more likely to be religious, or that they are less rational and so less suited to careers in science. Shermer is talking about the skeptical movement, a pursuit dedicated to fostering greater critical thinking. Why would you argue that women have less capacity or less to gain from that? Because that’s what they’re doing, pinning the blame for less participation on the women themselves.
Oh, man, then Shermer obliviously steps right into the race issue.
Benson makes a strong case that something other than misogyny may be at work here, when she asks rhetorically if I would make the same argument about race. I would, yes, because I do not believe that the fact that the secular community does not contain the precise percentage of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans as in the general population, means that all of us in the secular community are racists, explicitly or implicitly. A variance from perfect demographic symmetry does not necessarily correspond to racist attitudes. It just means that the world is not perfectly divided up according to population demographics, and people have different interests and causes. There is nothing inherently bigoted, racist, or misogynistic in the fact that the demographics of the secular community do not reflect those of the general population (in gender, in age and socio-economic class, or in height, weight, or any number of other variables for that matter), so short of some other evidence of bigotry, racism, and misogyny, there is no need to go in search of demons to exorcise.
Errm, yes, actually, it does mean that. Secularism itself shouldn’t be an issue for just us white folks; it’s a universal concern. The grand issues that we put front and center in our various movements — atheism, skepticism, science — really are concerns for every human being. It’s all the associated baggage that we drag in that makes us implicitly racist — we talk about White Men’s Problems all the time, we always, as white people, address the grander topics of skepticism and atheism from the narrower perspective of our particular cultural biases.
White men aren’t really all that concerned about our male children having a very high likelihood of being thrown in prison for minor drug offenses; we middle class white folk are not so concerned about economic disparities as the poor people who can’t afford to attend a conference; male organizers aren’t as aware of the problems of finding child care as women, who are saddled with most of the child-rearing obligations, are. These are implicit biases in our views. This is racism, classism, sexism.
Seriously, every one of us is racist as fuck. We can’t help it.
But denying it makes it worse. And being conscious of our biases and giving other voices a chance to speak is how we make it better.
For years, I’ve been saying that the way to make conferences and the movement as a whole less biased towards male concerns is to ask women what matters to them, and to listen and respond, rather than telling the little ladies what they need to hear. It’s the same with race. If you’re white, you’re racist, and you’ve typically got little appreciation of the experience of being black; so instead of saying, “I’m not racist, how would you like to speak on our panel about Bigfoot hunting and UFOs?” you just ask black people what’s important to them, what they’d like to talk about, what are skeptical/atheist issues of concern in their community?
Shrugging your shoulders and saying that there is nothing wrong with our values being different than those of the black community, or the Hispanic community, or those of women is an open admission that you aren’t working under the banner of Secularism, but under the banner of White Man’s Secularism. You are making an implicitly sexist/racist remark when you blandly insist that what ought to be a truly catholic movement to improve humanity is just fine if it somehow fails to engage the concerns of non-white non-male people as much as it does us.
I could go on at length about Shermer’s other complaint: that the “invectosphere” called him names. He doesn’t get to complain about that at all with respect to Ophelia, who has been under a ferocious invective assault for the last few years; that he complains about being called a “jackass” is pathetic and feeble when you compare it to the non-stop abuse Ophelia, Jen, Greta, Rebecca, and just about every woman participant in this argument gets flooded with online. And he especially doesn’t get to complain because right now his comment section is full of the very same people who obsess over these women and who spew the most disgusting sexist insults at them…and they now see him as a fellow hero fighting against feminst tribalism.
Ryan is considering the sexualization of the female body in geek art, and like all of us people with Y chromosomes, my first thought was, “But what about the meeeeeennnnzzz?” (if you’re reading this aloud, as I’m sure you do, be sure to put a good nasal whine into the phrase). Fortunately, my question has been answered, because Jim Hines and John Scalzi are using SF book covers as guides for posing sexily.
You might not want to click on that link if you’re the sensitive sort.
Scalzi is always willing to indulge in these kinds of stunts, and I’m thinking that a truly malicious sort of person could send him SF and comic book covers that would land him in the hospital with severe spinal injuries and broken ribs and shattered legs. Because, you see, this is what happens to us poor, weak, pitiful men when we try to keep up with those infinitely flexible creatures made out of rubber bands and balloons called “women”.
For instance, did you know that all gay men are slender metrosexuals with effeminate mannerisms and an obsession with show tunes, like these two men getting married in Washington state?
Jeez. Give me a few more years and that’s what I’ll look like…some of you may be rising to object and say I look like that now. Actually, I might just have a Harley-Davidson t-shirt somewhere in the pile, and I might even have a cap like that.
Maybe we should try to put away that world where manliness and femininity are stultifying, narrowing boxes we put people in.
This sounds so familiar. It’s an account of feminists being harassed and vilified on twitter and blogs, with misogynists creating multiple twitter accounts to insult, photoshopping photos to degrade, trolling and labeling and sneering at women who speak out.
What is disappointing is that no one will view this as violence against women. No one will say that this is cyber harassment. No, if these women even dare to call this cyber harassment, they will be called attention-seekers, whiners, immature. Every time a woman is attacked, and she fights back, she is the one who is vilified. No one will see that someone made a rape threat to a woman, but instead, they will say, look at her foul language, look at how rudely she is speaking. Is one really supposed to cheek-kiss someone and smile sweetly when they’ve issued rape threats to them? No wait, I forgot. If someone makes a rape threat, you take it like the good little woman that you are.
It’s taking place in Pakistan. You would think the people in the West who do exactly the same thing would feel a little shame at the company they keep, but I don’t expect that level of self-awareness from them, unfortunately.
