You really should read Jonathan Eisen’s response to a quantitative biology conference invitation that listed 25 male speakers and organizers, and one lonely woman. See? All kinds of geeks turn out to be unthinkingly sexist.
I wondered how this could happen, and then I saw that the first two organizers are named Ditto and Hasty. Well, of course then.
Pat Robertson was asked that question. His answer was simple: you’ve got to stand up to her, and oh, how he wishes he could announce on television that you should beat her.
Well, you could become a Muslim and you could beat her. … This man’s got to stand up to her and he can’t let her get away with this stuff. I don’t think we condone wife-beating these days but something has got to be done.
How clever! To simultaneously advocate domestic violence while distancing oneself from it, and at the same time get in a little Muslim bashing! Who says Pat Robertson is senile? He’s not — he’s just evil.
But he’s wrong. You don’t need to be a Muslim to beat your spouse; we’ve got relatively few Muslims here in mostly lily-white Minnesota, and we’ve still got a tremendous number of domestic violence cases.
One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. 1 One in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape.
An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.
The majority (73%) of family violence victims are female. Females were 84% of spousal abuse victims and 86% of abuse victims at the hands of a boyfriend.
And then there’s this juicy statistic: in Minnesota alone in 2006,
5,295 battered women and 5,131 children used
Minnesota emergency shelter services.
Were they all Muslim? Hey, Pat, maybe you can crack a joke about how those 5,000 women and children have learned a little something about submission and respect.
I can understand how the strain gets to people. I’m a white guy; I’ve got it easy. I do get a steady stream of hate-mail and vituperative noise in my in-box, but I’ve been getting that for 20 years (usenet gave me a leg up on most of you) and my skin is pretty damned thick by now. But what gets me most right now is shame. Embarrassment at being associated with some of these ‘skeptics’ and atheists — a painful shame at being male. Even the polite ones who think they’re making a rational point make me cringe. Look at this little note from JoeNietzsche:
PZ, you’ve clearly misrepresented the function of his “forms in triplicate” argument. What he is doing there is called exaggeration for effect. No one, not him, his readers or anyone else actually believes this is what anyone at FTB would demand of him. He is simply making the point that obtaining consent would ruin the moment. Social interaction is messy, even the deeply conscientious sort. Now, I had no dog in this fight but this, along with your stream of ad homs, have made up my mind. :(
My nonexistent freakin’ deity. “Obtaining consent would ruin the moment.” For whom? How oblivious can you get?
I can understand why Jen is taking a break. These assholes are exhausting. It’s not just the vileness, it’s the godawful stupidity of people who otherwise claim to be on my side. They aren’t. I’m on the side of humanism, of men and women, for science and the environment, for equality and justice, and I’m against the troglodytes who make excuses for treating women as ambulatory receptacles for their “moment”. Screw ’em.
So one thing we can do is let people cycle back away from the front and take a little R&R, and then those of us still on the line can follow Rebecca Watson’s suggestion: double-down, everyone.
I suspect that if everyone steps up and speaks just as loudly as Jen did, there’s no way the assholes would have enough time in their day to bully all of us. But I get that not everyone can do that. I can do it, though, so until everybody steps up, I’ll just try to be twice as loud in the hopes of acting as some kind of asshole lightning rod.
Battle on, horde!
Holy crap. Via Ophelia, Marty Robbins brings up an interesting point: some of these assholes show a greater level of obsession than Dennis Markuze. Look at the pile of stuff one jerk, “Elevatorgate”, compiled in one day. Get help, Chris. You’re sick.
OK, I’m neck deep in work, and I browse Freethoughtblogs for a little light relief, and what do I find? Cuttlefish tells me this ghastly (but familiar) story about a man who murders his ex-partner and children because she spurns him. Then Stephanie has another horror story about the nightmare a woman suffered when she dared to tell a man “no”.
I think I’m motivated to go back to the books now.
One thing we do have to move beyond is this provincial idea that sexism and harassment are just a consequence of a few jerks within a new movement: it’s not. It’s widespread. I think atheist culture is actually better than the norm, but the outside world acts as a giant reservoir and buffer for the creeps to flourish…and it allows them to be legitimately surprised when anyone stands up to them. They get away with it everywhere else, so gosh, atheists must all be prudes and wilting lilies.
So once again, we get another tale of violated boundaries, this time from the gamers. I’ve put it below the fold in case it’s triggering, but one thing I found notable about it is how the woman involved is wracked with guilt and shame afterwards, and actually experiences a lot of doubt about her part in the incident. She is totally blameless. (That does not stop a few of the commenters for blaming her anyway, of course.)
A populist voice speaking for progressive causes? Can we elect him to the presidency?
Michael Nugent does it again: he has compiled a list of 1,000 Women Speakers Worth Listening To.
There goes every conference organizer’s excuse that they couldn’t think of any.
The Republicans want you to think he is a fringe candidate, a wacky loner who just said something outrageous. But when you look at the voting record of Minnesota's Republicans, it becomes really clear: they all vote almost exactly as Todd Akin would on every abortion-related bill that comes up.
It’s really rather stunning: Democrats and Republicans are extraordinarily polarized on this issue. With only a few wobblers, Democrats vote for issues that give women reproductive choices, while Republicans vote against them. If you don’t think there is a bit of difference between the two parties, just look at that one issue.
By the way, about those wobblers…they aren’t, really. If you look at the detailed voting records, you find that there are a few Democrats who are actually stealth Republicans — they consistently vote more like a Republican on women’s rights issues. One of them is, unfortunately, my own state representative, Collin Peterson. I never vote for him, and I can never vote for his Republican challenger, either. Can we please get a real Democrat to run for that office and topple him?
They just can’t get it right. The latest eructation of idiotic error comes from Tennessee, where Stacey Campfield makes shit up about STDs.
Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) falsely claimed on Thursday that it was nearly impossible for someone to contract AIDS through heterosexual contact.
“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community,” he told Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a radio program on SiriusXM OutQ. “It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”
Do they have to take a Stupid Test to be admitted to the party? And score somewhere in the range of a flatworm?
