Why do I despise MRAs?

Because they are narcissistic clueless psychopaths, that’s why. David Futrelle had to ruin my morning by linking to an awful, horrible post by an MRA on Reddit (two words in combination that multiply the dreadful effect of each one alone). It’s written by a smug jerk who is busily congratulating himself on how he and MRAs in general are superior beings with a greater grasp on reality than those childlike women, who are deluded by all those glossy women’s mags they read, don’t you know.

So far, so typical. But there’s a victim here, his wife. She’s quit her job to dedicate herself full time to raising their child, and he finds her weeping on the bed, overcome with stress, and feeling trapped. The whole post is about how weak she is, and how strong he is, and how he does everything for this family.

Except…well, he’s so oblivious that he tells us all about his day.

I rise in the morning, I get my daughter up, fed and dressed, I walk the dog, I put in a solid ten hours at my work to make hundred grand or so a year, then I meet my wife and daughter at the door every evening, cook dinner for us all, bathe my daughter and put her to bed, walk the dog some more and do the dishes. I do the garden, fix anything that needs fixed and take my daughter swimming once a week. In short I do just about everything.

I helpfully highlighted the important part there for you.

This guy does nothing. His wife is on non-stop baby duty all day long, while he’s off interacting with adult human beings who do not poop in their pants and expect him to clean them up, and who speak fluently of phenomena more complex than “play with me” and “feed me”. I’ve been there; I put in full-time baby care briefly while my wife finished her thesis; I’ve been in the shoes of the guy whose wife puts her career on hold to dedicate herself to raising the family even more. Child care can be rewarding, but it’s also a huge amount of stressful work.

This guy blithely tosses all the child care responsibilities on his wife for 10 straight hours a day, then claims he does everything, and can’t understand why she’s depressed and exhausted — why, it must be because she’s been reading Cosmo. Couldn’t have anything to do with her husband being a self-centered asshole.

The kicker is in the comments, where someone suggests that he divorce his useless wife (throughout, she’s faceless and with no personality at all — just another female, weeping). He says he’d rather not, and like the typical egocentric twit, goes on to explain why and removes all doubt that he’s a creep.

I’d be very unlikely to get custody of the wee one, and the damage it would do to her would be awful, I’m sure you agree. We don’t fight and our home life is stable, so I think divorce would likely make things a lot worse for her.

I don’t stand to gain much from a divorce and I’d lose a great deal. Besides, I’m nearly forty and I have a two year old. A wild life of drinking and dating isn’t likely even if we do separate!

His response is to consider it, and to weigh the utility of a divorce. I hope this woman read this and realizes that part of her problem is that she’s married to a loveless shit with no sense of empathy, who really doesn’t love her, and gets out while she can.

Man, if someone asked me why I don’t get a divorce, my response would be a disbelieving stare and the simple statement that we love each other and don’t want to be apart.

Another familiar story

I’ve heard variations on this theme so many times now. When will we wise up?

In 2010 I went to a prestigious invite only conference in the tech world. I was, at this point, widely welcome in those rooms I’d dreamed of going in. I counted. My heart soared — it really felt like we’d turned a corner. It wasn’t just that there were more women. There were, but also they were talking. It was like pushing on a giant stone for all my life, then one day feeling it finally shift underneath my fingers.

On Saturday night I was sexually assaulted. Specifically, I was groped. I hit my aggressor in the chin and knocked him back. Despite having probably 100lbs on me, he stumbled drunkenly and barely kept his footing. “Touch me again and I’ll break your nose,” I told him. He laughed lightly, still finding his feet, and said “I like this one!” I looked at him, to catch his eye, and replied calmly, matter-of-factly “No. If you touch me again, I will break your nose.” He laughed again, but wandered away from me, looking to grope easier prey.

This is how I’d felt all my life, like my job was to not be easy prey. But this was a professional field, not the fucking Serengeti. I walked a little later with the conference organizer, a woman older then me, and of much stature in tech. I told her I was so happy to finally see women in my field. “But,” I said, “I think these incidents will be more common for a while. These guys don’t know how to behave around women.” To myself, I added bitterly, or other human beings at all.

In part, the tech community had allowed in women, but in part it had also only failed to keep them out.

I think her reaction was spot on. Fewer antelopes, more lionesses.

Telepathy doesn’t work, but it’s your fault if you can’t read my mind

So in the interest of learning more about the environs hereabouts I’ve been digging into a little of FTB’s history, and I’ve noticed that this place has a handful of detractors. (Which, you know: good work, everyone!) And there’s a little logical kink at the heart of some of that detraction that has me amused. That little logical kink, summed up in logical bullet points:

  1. People in the general community of skeptics agree that action at a distance/prayer/telepathy/ whatever you want to call it is useless at best, that mere intent in and of itself makes nothing in the physical world happen.
  2. Some of those same people strongly object to the Schrödinger’s Rapist trope first promulgated at Kate Harding’s blog, which basically says that a man’s intent with regard to his conduct toward a nearby woman is not always physically obvious.

Surely skeptics who dismiss claims of telepathy cannot logically then get angry when it’s pointed out that women are not telepathic. Surely free-thinkers who ridicule those who pray for positive outcomes without doing more to make those outcomes happen can’t then turn around and say it’s unfair for women to be wary of a strange man because he merely fails to want a negative outcome to their encounter.

And surely people devoted to dispassionate logic would never tolerate such blatant contradiction in their own minds, let alone in their movement.

Speaking of Kate, if you haven’t ventured over to see her new Tumblr venture about victim blaming, “Don’t Get Raped,” you ought to — and those of us who value trigger warnings would do well to keep in mind that the site, as you will no doubt have guessed from the name, is probably triggering for thirty or forty distinct things.

I need to send Kate a link to this story so that she can post it with the title “Don’t Go To Burning Man.”  That link bears a trigger warning for those of you triggered by victim-blaming colonic irrigation devices.

Mazinaatesijigan Gekinoo’amaadiwin

Free movies on the UMM campus, open to all!

Watch out for the woo, but you’ve got to appreciate the fact that oppressed peoples are expressing themselves in their own words about their lives and the destruction that has been wreaked on them.

Mazinaatesijigan Gekinoo’amaadiwin Film Series (Films with Knowledge)
For much of the 20th century, American Indian identities were shaped, at least in popular culture and public imaginations, by advertising imagery, photographs, and wild west shows. In the past few decades, American Indian artists and filmmakers have extracted their own image from these external forces, challenging the established codes of representation. The goal of the Mazinaatesijigan Gekinoo’amaadiwin Film Series is to challenge participants to examine and discuss how film impacts Indigenous culture, identity, politics, and stereotypes.

Dakota 38 (2011, 78 min., Smooth Feather Productions)
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
7:00 p.m., 109 Imholte Hall
In the spring of 2005, Jim Miller, a Native spiritual leader and Vietnam veteran, found himself in a dream riding on horseback across the great plains of South Dakota. Just before he awoke, he arrived at a riverbank in Minnesota and saw 38 of his Dakota ancestors hanged.

Finding Our Talk (2009, 72 min., Mushkeg Media)
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
7:00 p.m., 109 Imholte Hall
Every fourteen days a language dies. By the year 2100 more than half of the world’s languages will
disappear. This film examines three indigenous communities struggling to preserve their languages: The Rapid Lake Anishinaabe from Quebec, the Wahpeton Dakota Nation from Saskatchewan, and the
Guovdageaidnu Sami from Norway.

Star Dreamers, Part One: The Indian System, Featuring Filmmaker Sheldon Wolfchild (2012, 72 min., 38 Plus 2 Productions)
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
7:00 p.m., 109 Imholte Hall
By 1862, the system had brought the Dakota living on reservations in Minnesota to the brink of starvation, offering them little option other than dying of hunger in war. The system made war inevitable. his is the first of a three-part documentary series on the origins of the Dakota War.

Independent Indigenous Film & Media Shorts Featuring Filmmaker Missy Whiteman
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
7:00 p.m., 109 Imholte Hall
A compilation of short films :
Coyote Way (2012, 5 min.)
Nawa Giizhigong (2012, 7 min.)
Indigenous Holocaust (2008, 5 min.)
Neinoo (Mother) (2007, 3 min.)
Walk in Shadows (2004, 7 min.)

Speak louder, Catherine Deveny!

That Deveny…she’s always causing trouble. And good for her.

She recently appeared on a panel debate show on Australian TV, Q&A, with Peter Jensen, an Anglican bishop. Jensen is smug, smarmy ass: when he wasn’t whining that we need a respectful discussion about the issues, he was announcing that women should submit to men in marriage, that same-sex marriage is unbiblical, that homosexuality is a disease, and no, the homophobia of the church can’t possibly contribute to gay teen suicide rates. He’s one of those guys who puts on his politeness with his clerical collar, and thinks both make him absolutely right, and able to say the most vile lies with smooth confidence.

Catherine Deveny was brash, smart, and assertive, and openly atheist. She is also a woman. She spoke the truth — that the church is a medieval institution promoting homophobia and misogyny, and that the facts and an unbiased morality of equality do not support Jensen’s claims.

Guess which one got all the negative press?

…I should not have been surprised at the fall-out from Catherine Deveny’s appearance on ABC’s Q&A this week. Deveny’s opposition to Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, resulted in an onslaught of vitriolic criticism and abuse – even from those who claim to support her positions on asylum seekers, same-sex marriage and women’s equality.

Even the Australian weighed in with an editorial reprimanding Deveny and the ABC for failing to show the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney ‘proper regard’ and ‘respect’.

While the Australian characterises (or more accurately, caricatures) Deveny as mocking, crude, crass and intolerant, Jensen is ‘frank, concerned and conciliatory on homosexual health issues’. Deveny, we are told, was guilty of ‘shouting down’ the Archbishop.

Don’t they realize that the proper regard and respect to show a leader of institutionalized dogma is to turn him away at the door, and to spit in his eye every time he demands a respect to his position that he won’t show to women, gays, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised? Catherine Deveny, rather than being excesively rude, showed remarkable restraint at having to sit next to the poisonous old fraud.

But no, Chrys Stevenson documents the insults flung at Deveny — she was a crazy bitch who should shut up and brought down the whole tone of the event by dominating the conversation. What about that?

Curiously, as this was one of the rare Q&A’s where the women (Catherine Deveny, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Anna Krien) outnumbered the men, the male guests (Peter Jensen and Chris Evans) still managed to dominate the conversation 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

To the contrary of her critics, I think the other panelists were all dreary bores who said a range of things (some sensible, some odious) and Deveny was the only person who made the event interesting. But this attention that the public pays to mouthy women (even when she clearly gave everyone else a chance to speak their piece) ought to be recognized for what it is: being nice is a tool of the status quo; complaining about tone is an attempt to silence the passion and outrage of the oppressed; privilege perpetuates itself by labeling difference as deviancy.

Keep on speaking up, Catherine Deveny!

What can you do about a rebellious woman who will not submit to her husband’s authority?

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’m ready to be divisive

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.