Somebody needs to have a little talk with the Nerd Council

Again, one of the nerds — who I’ve always considered my people — babbles away and reveals an unimaginable depth of cluelessness and privilege. Some comic book artist named Tony Harris was on a tear.

I cant remember if Ive [Note: strong dislike of apostrophes] said this before, but Im gonna say it anyway. I dont give a crap. [No? Then why the tirade?] I appreciate a pretty Gal [Weird capitalization, too. And “Gal”? Really?] as much as the next Hetero Male. Sometimes I even go in for some racy type stuff [Ooh! Daring!] ( keeping the comments PG for my Ladies sake [Because, as we all know, Ladies can’t cope with R] ) but dammit, dammit, dammit I am so sick and tired of the whole COSPLAY-Chiks [Then don’t be one, Tony!] . I know a few who are actually pretty cool-and BIG Shocker, love and read Comics.So as in all things, they are the exception to the rule. Heres the statement I wanna make, based on THE RULE: “Hey! Quasi-Pretty-NOT-Hot-Girl [I’m a scientist, give me numbers. So not 10, but say, 7? 6? What? Do you rate the attractiveness of all the girls you meet on some objective scale?], you are more pathetic than the REAL Nerds, who YOU secretly think are REALLY PATHETIC. [This is a contest: who has the lowest opinion of the other?] But we are onto you. Some of us are aware that you are ever so average [On average, we all are] on an everyday basis. But you have a couple of things going your way. You are willing to become almost completely Naked in public [SLUT!], and yer either skinny [We are going to judge you by your dimensions] ( Well, some or most of you, THINK you are [FATSO!] ) or you have Big Boobies [(.)(.)]. Notice I didnt say GREAT Boobies? [Actually, no] You are what I refer to as “CON-HOT” [Because, face it, my fans at conventions are all really ugly people]. Well not by my estimation [Tony Harris has a special term for an estimation he never uses?], but according to a LOT of average [And Tony Harris is, if anything, not average] Comic Book Fans who either RARELY speak to, or NEVER speak to girls [So far, he’s done a fine job of insulting everyone who attends comic book conventions. He’s going to be popular on the circuit now!]. Some Virgins [The only thing worse than a Virgin is a Slut.], ALL unconfident when it comes to girls, and the ONE thing they all have in common? The are being preyed on by YOU [Because the first thing a predator will do is expose herself to scorn and judgment]. You have this really awful need for attention [How awful that humans might need affirmations from others], for people to tell you your pretty, or Hot, and the thought of guys pleasuring themselves to the memory of you hanging on them with your glossy open lips [I know this is weird, but really, most women don’t find the idea of men going off and masturbating over thoughts of their lips to be particularly attractive], promising them the Moon and the Stars of pleasure, just makes your head vibrate [Shaking their heads in disgust is not “vibrating”]. After many years of watching this shit go down every 3 seconds around or in front of my booth or table at ANY given Con in the country, I put this together [Years? To put this together? A bit slow and stupid, aren’t you, Tony?]. Well not just me. We are LEGION. [Oh, right. Legions of male comic book fans are sickened by fan service] And here it is, THE REASON WHY ALL THAT, sickens us: BECAUSE YOU DONT KNOW SH-T ABOUT COMICS, BEYOND WHATEVER GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH YOU DID TO GET REF ON THE MOST MAINSTREAM CHARACTER WITH THE MOST REVEALING COSTUME EVER [I hate to break this news to you, Tony, since it may damage your self-esteem: but it doesn’t take years of Ph.D. level research and gargantuan efforts to figure out what comic book character you like, or what costume you find attractive. Oh, wait: for Tony this might be a major effort, given that it took him years to justify his rant]. And also, if ANY of these guys that you hang on tried to talk to you out of that Con? You wouldnt give them the f–king time of day.[Maybe not. Context matters. Woman in costume at a con: she would like her effort noticed. Woman walking to the bus to get to work: she has other things on her mind than being told how nice her clothes look, and would rather you didn’t harass her] Shut up you damned liar, no you would not. Lying, Liar Face. Yer not Comics. Your just the thing that all the Comic Book, AND mainstream press flock to at Cons. [What happened to the LEGION sickened by these tramps?] And the real reason for the Con, and the damned costumes yer parading around in? That would be Comic Book Artists, [Like Tony!] and Comic Book Writers who make all that sh-t up. [Actually, most of the people I’ve met at cons are there for the community.]

Shorter Tony Harris: “Hey, girl, you don’t know as much about comics as I do, and your breasts aren’t that great anyway.”

It gets tiring, doesn’t it? I’m not even a woman, and I just want to sigh in exasperation, flip this guy off, and never hear from him ever again. I do think he’s pathetic, but not because he has deep expertise in an esoteric field…but because he’s so lacking in confidence in himself that he finds himself infuriated by the mere existence of women who dare to intrude in any way into what he considers his domain. That’s just sad.

One of the things I’ve liked about the cons I’ve attended is the openness and acceptance — people are there with diverse and sometimes weird expertise, whether it’s skill at sewing and costuming or deep knowledge about otherwise utterly useless comic book lore, and everyone just enthusiastically shares (and sometimes, over-shares, but that’s OK). You don’t have to get angry if someone has a better sense of humor than you do, or knows more about Big Bang Theory, or can wear a costume with more brio, or completely rules in the video game competition — even the most obscure niche has a place. Poor Tony Harris can’t cope with the fact that even though he may have talent as an artist, his lips aren’t as glossy as some woman he considers insufficiently attractive for his standards. He’s sickened that they don’t know as much about comics as he does, and knowledge of comics is, of course, the standard by which we should all be judged.

Well, that and the size and shape of your breasts, if you’re a woman.

John Scalzi mocks this guy, and Foz Meadows rather thoroughly dismantles him. That was a pleasure to read; Harris’s petty rant, not so much.

I’m pretty sure, though, that Mr Harris has now been appointed to this Nerd Council:

Aaaaaieee! Why did you have to tell me that?

I lived in blissful ignorance, once upon a time. And then people told me about symphysiotomy, a medical procedure in which doctors sawed through the pubic symphysis to crack open the pelvis and open it wide…to make childbirth easier. From the comments at that link:

They viewed symphysiotomy (wrongly) as a gateway to childbearing without limitation, seeing Caesarean section – the norm for difficult births – as morally hazardous, capping family size and leading to sterilisation and contraception. Symphysiotomy was promoted as permanently widening the pelvis, enabling an unlimited number of vaginal deliveries, whereas four C-sections was widely regarded as the maximum for safety.

Thousands of Irish women had this done to them. Thanks, Catholic Church, for doing your part to increase pain and suffering all in the name of turning women into better baby-making machines.

Oh, joy…there’s a documentary on the subject. It’s grim.

If you feel like going back and watching that Camp Quest video instead, I don’t blame you.

Voting while brown

Ah, those Republican poll watchers: here’s one phoning in his report on the election.

People were orderly and polite, they were helpful to one another but not to the point of electioneering, but uh-oh, there sure were a lot of non-white people exercising their rights. Just the existence of brown people voting was grounds for suspicion.

It never seems to have crossed his mind that maybe at an open civic function in which all people have an interest, he might see a different group of people than he’d find on the golf course at his country club.

Exterminate!

Oh, man, let’s hear it for JohnTheOther, that wacky MRA. He’s posted another of his unctuous screeds, this time decrying all of feminism, even the liberal/progressive/humanist kind, because he associates them with his fantasy feminism.

When you pursue your noble goals under the banner of feminism, even when you prefix it, and say liberal feminism, or humanist feminism, or sex positive feminism, you are giving cover to those who openly call for the extermination of men.

And that’s why I don’t care what flavor of feminism you practice. You’re using the same brand name as murderous, eugenics enthusiast, destroy due process sexual apartheid gender ideologue elitists for whom violence isn’t just an unpleasant option. Violence, when contemplated against children, or men, especially when doled out by state functionaries is what gets them wet. That’s the big, funded, organized and politically established collective with which you identify by name.

Wait…there’s a big, funded, organized and politically established collective of feminists who have the goal of murdering men and carrying out violence against children? I know a lot of feminists, but none of them are particularly well-funded for that activity, and none of them are getting paid to exterminate men. I know there are a few extremists out there, but the liberal feminists, and humanist feminists, and sex positive feminists are more the mainstream. Much more the mainstream. And the primary feminist sources are not making excuses for man-murder.

But that’s the Manosphere for you — completely disconnected from reality.

Here, rinse that unpleasant taste out of your mouth with a video of one of those real aggressive, assertive feminists.

Think of it as God’s bloody practical joke

Wow. I had no idea that some Catholics would go so far as to prevent simple procedures to remove ectopic pregnancies. These are conditions in which the zygote implants in the wrong place — the fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The embryo can grow for a while, but not long, before it reaches a size that ruptures the fallopian tube and causes the mother to bleed to death. The solution is easy: either surgically remove the doomed embryo before it can become deadly, or use a drug, methotrexate, that kills dividing cells to destroy it.

But no, that’s an abortion and some Catholic hospitals prohibit even procedures that would end an utterly futile pregnancy.

Yes, some Catholic ethicists argue that the catholic “Directives” preclude physicians at Catholic hospitals from managing ectopic pregnancies in a way that involves direct action on the embryo. So a woman can have her whole tube removed (an unnecessary procedure that could reduce her future fertility), but she can not have the pregnancy plucked out (as is done with the standard therapy, a salpingostomy, where a small incision is made in the tube and the pregnancy removed) and she most certainly could not have the methotrexate.

How common is this practice? Well, it is pretty sad that someone had to study it. According to a study from 2011 by Foster e. al., (Womens Health Issues, 2011) some Catholic hospitals refuse to offer methotrexate (three in this study of 16 hospitals). The lack of methotrexate resulted in changes in therapy, transferring patients to other facilities, and even administering it surreptitiously. All of these expose women to unnecessary risks, expense and are, quite frankly, wrong.

These patients who are turned away go, we hope, to less ideologically abusive hospitals, where they get treated. Imagine a country with nothing but Catholic hospitals, though: they’d be sending these women away to die.

I have no understanding at all of the logic that justifies a Catholic hospital refusing to remove a deadly embryo, but does allow them to chop out the whole organ bearing the deadly embryo, at a cost of reduced fertility. It seems somehow un-Catholic…but on the other hand, the fact that it requires twisted theological logic that ignores basic human needs makes it profoundly Catholic.

Screw those women and neuroscientists, we should let Kant make abortion decisions!

William Egginton has an op-ed in the NYT in which he suggests that neuroscience might challenge Roe v. Wade. It’s long — about 1900 words — and it’s revealing that in all the ambiguous fudging about whether a fetus is conscious, there is no consideration at all for the woman wrapped around it. In fact, she isn’t even mentioned…not once. Yes, it’s another man pontificating on the rights and privileges of the fetus as if the pregnant woman were not there. It’s astonishing how completely women vanish when they get pregnant — it’s as if some people can only see women as an incubator for the Holy and Sacred Child.

It starts out promisingly, discussing an Idaho law called the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act”, which tries to outlaw abortions by claiming that fetuses can feel pain. This is a neuroscientific claim. So Egginton asks,

So why not call an actual neuroscientist as an expert witness instead of a scholar of the humanities?

And I thought for a moment that Egginton, who I hadn’t heard of before, was perhaps a neuroscientist offering up his expertise. Alas, at the end I discover that he’s the “Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University”. He’s not making an informed contribution on the science, apparently his goal is to “criticize the hubris of scientific claims to knowledge that exceeds the boundaries of what the sciences in fact demonstrate.” So that was actually a rhetorical question which is answered by the fact that he thinks neuroscientists aren’t actually good witnesses on subjects of neuroscience. OK.

Reminder: it still isn’t an argument in which the rights of the pregnant woman are considered.

Fortunately, he dismisses fetal pain as a criterion for prohibiting abortion — not because they don’t experience pain, but because awareness of pain is not a basis for legal prohibitions. Animals feel pain, for instance, and we don’t outlaw farming and hunting. I would suggest that pain awareness is a general feature, like having a heartbeat or two eyes, that isn’t particularly indicative of a special status that demands protection (that doesn’t stop Pro-Life Across America from putting up billboards with pictures of smiling babies saying, “My heart started beating at 28 days!” — it’s an emotional appeal).

Unfortunately, Egginton then arbitrarily replaces “pain” with another amorphous concept, “personhood”.

Those wishing to abolish abortion believe that “the fetus is a ‘person’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” If, as Justice Harry A. Blackmun continues in his opinion in 1973, “this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” If a fetus is a person, in other words, then it is not a potential human life at all, but is a fully human life deserving of full legal protection, and abortion must be murder and punishable as such. The intent of current fetal pain statutes is, clearly, to infer from the ability to feel pain on the part of a human fetus — if it can be established by neuroscience — a claim for actual human life or full personhood.

Reminder: it still isn’t an argument in which the rights of the pregnant woman are considered.

But then, in an interesting twist, Egginton uses the idea of defining personhood as a bat to pound on anti-choice activists. It would be a big mistake, he suggests, to let scientists define what a person is, because, basically, scientists are reductionist jerks, and science “can tell us nothing about the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, or the origin of human freedom”. He’s wrong. There is no god (and those humanist types can’t even freakin’ define this entity, let alone provide evidence for it), the soul is a ridiculous concept, and freedom is an interesting cognitive illusion and a political idea. He can cite Kant at me all he wants, but science has made great progress in explaining the nature of the universe and ourselves to the point where we definitely don’t know all the answers, but we know enough to constrain the wide range of possible answers to something that precludes the primitive guesses of uninformed old philosophers and theologians.

So Egginton isn’t really making an anti-abortion rant: he’s making an anti-science argument. Interesting.

When science becomes the sole or even primary arbiter of such basic notions as personhood, it ceases to be mankind’s most useful servant and threatens, instead, to become its dictator. Science does not and should not have the power to absolve individuals and communities of the responsibility to choose. This emphatically does not mean that science should be left out of such personal and political debates. The more we know about the world the better positioned we are to make the best possible choices. But when science is used to replace thinking instead of complement it; when we claim to see in its results the reduction of all the complexity that constitutes the emergence of a human life or the choices and responsibilities of the person it may develop into; we relinquish something that Kant showed more than 200 years ago was essential to the very idea of a human being: our freedom.

Well, I was trained as a neuroscientist (I’ve since drifted towards developmental biology), and if I were made dictator of the world, I can tell you what I’d say: “personhood” is not discrete and absolute, so no scientist will be able to declare a black & white switch from non-personhood to personhood (although the reverse is easier: we call it “death”). I would also say that even if we could measure it, “personhood” is a matter of degree and also is a criterion like “pain”: it’s not something we can use as a logical bludgeon to deny abortions. Even the one neuroscientist Egginton cites in his article, Antonio Damasio, talks about degrees of consciousness in animals. So much for the demonization of scientists. We are aware of the limits of our knowledge; it’s unfortunate that professors of the humanities don’t seem to be similarly aware of the boundaries of their domain.

Oh, and if I were the dictator of the world, I’d look into the eyes of the teenager who faces the sacrifice of her dreams if she bears that child, the eyes of the woman whose fetus carries a birth defect, the eyes of the victim of rape, and I’d say…”Your choice — do what is best for your life. It’s your life that matters.” That overrides all other considerations.

I’m a little surprised to learn that humanities professors don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing. Maybe we should exclude them from future deliberations on these matters.

Are the Australians passing us by?

It’s a big problem. Americans have to be #1 in everything, yet there those Australians go, fighting back hard against sexism after the shock of the Gilliard speech a short while back. I insist, you must read this letter from a woman television newsreader—it’s excellent. Read all the way through to the conclusion — it’s very Australian.

I may have gotten some odd looks from other people hanging out at the airport gate when I snorted out a laugh.

Wheeee! <BOOM!> Here we go again!

Oh, this is going to be spectacular. Rebecca Watson just published a very good article about sexism in the skeptic community in Slate, and the comment thread there is already off and running with raging hemorrhoids whining at her. Expect it to spread further.

Her closing paragraph, though, explains why we have to revisit this again and again.

I also believe that old line about sunlight being the best disinfectant. Ignoring bullies does not make them go away. For the most part, the people harassing us aren’t just fishing for a reaction—they want our silence. They’re angry that feminist thought has a platform in “their community.” What they don’t get is that it’s also my community.

Zap! Light up the whole goddamn place!