We can learn things from the 17th century

I was amused overall by this timeline of hysteria and sex toys, but I have to say that the 17th century entries were my favorite. So informative!

Nathaniel Highmore, an English surgeon who was one of the few doctors to publicly acknowledge that the end result of pelvic massage—the “hysterical paroxysm”—could also be described as an “orgasm,” noted that it was no easy task. He likened it to “that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.”

I’m going to have to play that game more. For practice. I’m confused though — I’m supposed to give her an orgasm by rubbing my stomach and patting my head, or hers? Or some other combination of the two motions? I suppose that trying all the permutations could be fun.

English physician Thomas Sydenham estimated that hysteria was the most common disease after fever, accounting for a sixth of all human maladies. Among women, he wrote, “there is rarely one who is wholly free from them.”

Oh, my. The poor dears. We must do whatever we can to save them!

I’ve finally figured out how to get more diverse participation in the atheist movement!

It would be good to have more people of color in the movement, so I’m going to put on blackface and write about the woes facing my dark-skinned brothers and sisters.

I shall put on a dress and makeup so I can tell everyone that I understand exactly how women feel.

And for my gay brethren, I’m going to come out to my wife and let her know that I’ve been faking my lust for 30 years.

Oh, wait, that last one is already covered, by a Christian who has written a book about pretending to be gay.

It’s nice that he means well, but it’s a rather tasteless approach. In his promotional video to raise money for the book, he tells us that the motivation for doing this was a friend, a young woman, who came out as gay and was disowned by her family…and that he treated with contempt for her preferences as well. I’d rather hear her story than about the self-afflicted martyrdom of a Christian who put on the label “gay” and then set it aside when it came time to profit. And who also uses the treatment of the gay community to promote Christianity.

No, I’m not going to do any of those things. They don’t promote diversity at all, but caricature it.

Another fundraiser!

So @rhysmorgan and @whatkatie_did are also having a fundraiser (it seems like everyone is!), this time to benefit a rape crisis organization for England and Wales. It’s called the Fuck the Patriarchy Readathon, and they’re promising to read 20 books and blog about them this month. The books are all over the place, from Twilight to Catch-22, so the reviews should be entertaining.

For his participation in this cause, the usual suspects are raging that Rhys Morgan is a “little skeptic twat” and “mangina”, so you should support him just for that. Don’t you love how these guys go out of their way to confirm our perception of them?

It’s almost always Muscle Man and Buxom Chick, isn’t it?

Here’s a kickstarter project to look at sexism in video games.

This is a project by a woman, Anita Sarkeesian, who likes video games and wants to see them improve, but as she says, “many games tend to reinforce sexist and downright misogynist ideas about women.”

Some of you will say that is an outrageous claim! Cite evidence! No, it can’t be true!

OK, evidence: she’s made a screen cap of youtube comments on her video. CASE CLOSED. It’s not just raging misogyny, it’s also screaming racism and stark raving idiocy.

I think we all better contribute to her kickstarter. The problem is worse than she made it out to be, and I think she needs a few million dollars. (Oh, and her blog is very good, you ought to read it.)

(via Lousy Canuck)

P.S. The definitive reply to asshole commenters has been created.

Atheism should be science and social justice, not science vs. social justice

I have received a couple of complaints about Sikivu Hutchinson, complaints that were also cc’ed to a number of big names in the atheist movement, which is weird. Why complain to me? Apparently my correspondent wants me to write a rebuttal to some remarks she made in the May issue of International Humanist News. Here are the offensive comments:

Engaging in science fetishism without a social justice lens merely reproduces the white supremacist logic of the New Atheist Movement.

If much of the New Atheist fervor springs from the endless culture war over evolution and church/state separation, contemporary black humanist ideology emerges from a social justice lens.

[Read more…]

A compendium of the dumbest anti-choice arguments ever

I don’t know whether it’s the content or the ghastly color design of this page. Seriously — here’s a sample of what they think looks good on the screen:

Checkmate, Pro-Choicers!

Jebus, that color combination hurts my eyes.

Oh, wait, no…it’s the content. It’s like a collection of the most ignorant arguments against abortion anyone could find — and they triumphantly present each bit of glib inanity, and follow it up with Checkmate, Pro-Choicers!

I’m not going to even try to dig into all of their idiotic cliches, but here’s a couple that represent a major pet peeve of mine — the conflation of “life” with “deserving all of the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of an adult woman.”

If we found something on Mars with a heartbeat, we would call it “alive.”
Checkmate, Pro-Choicers

Oh, sure, and then we’d let it vote, marry it, and let it own an ice cream shop in Philadelphia. This has never been an argument about what is alive or not; a fetus is alive. But merely being alive has never been sufficient criteria for giving something human rights. We don’t even need to go to Mars to find things with heartbeats that we willingly turn into Happy Meals, poison if we find them in our kitchens, or turn into pets. We are selective in the assignment of human status, and having a pulse or breathing are the very least of them, and are definitely not sufficient.

A zygote meets all of the scientific qualifications of HUMAN life at the moment of conception.
Checkmate, Pro-Choicers

How interesting. I’m always amused when I see these bozos insist indignantly that they’ve got science behind them. And what are these “scientific qualifications”? List them, please.

The problem here is that there are scientific markers we could use to define whether something is of human descent, but they tend to be fairly reductionist and don’t provide a good indication of the kinds of sociological distinctions we want to make with the word “human”: it’s not just the zygote at the moment of conception that is human, but so is the sperm and the oocyte, as are cancers and HeLa cells. And when you look at cells as being of human origin, that still doesn’t help you in the slightest in determining whether a cell has rights.

Waving a flippant hand in the direction of undefined “scientific qualifications” is useless. Tell me what the specifics are, and I promise you, I can shoot them down one by one. How do I know that? Because the people who put these lists together are ignoramuses, every time.

(via Pandagon)

Real Scientists™ don’t let the evidence get in the way of the theory

David Sloan Wilson amuses me outrageously. He accuses me of not thinking scientifically in an astonishing glurge of pettifogging pedantry. You see, he’s peeved that I have said that the deleterious effects of patriarchal religion on women are obvious and that arguing that religion is beneficial to women is ridiculous, so he’s going to set me straight on how to think like a real scientist…that is, apparently, like someone who is divorced from pragmatism and reality.

Myers the ideologue thinks that he can demonstrate the harmful effects of religion on human welfare with a single word — WOMEN. Here’s how a scientist would set about studying women in relation to men. The first step would be to ask what evolutionary theory predicts about male-female relationships and how the predictions are borne out in nonhuman species. [I…what? The first thing a scientist should do is look up the theory that will tell him about the relations of men and women? I would have thought that the first thing we should do is measure the relative status of men and women.] That inquiry would show that sexual conflict is common in the animal world and that the kind of sexual equality that has become a virtue in contemporary western society evolves by genetic evolution only under special circumstances.[OK, I understand that comparative ethology can be useful…but it doesn’t answer the question of the actual status of men and women. That sexual conflict occurs does not mean we should not oppose it] Among the great apes, gibbons are monogamous, bonobos form female coalitions that resist domination by males, and males boss females around in all of the other species (and most other primate species). [I notice we still aren’t talking about humans] None of this variation can be explained by religion. [Yes. Because humans have religion and those other apes don’t. “Religion” is the variable in question, and we’re pondering how it affects human society; you can use data from other primates to show that religion isn’t the only factor that affects sexual relationships, but that’s not the question.]

The second step would be to see if variation in male-female relations within the human species can be explained by the same evolutionary dynamics that explain cross-species variation. [Nice of him to consider our species finally] For example, it is likely that in both cases, the ability of males to control resources needed by females will result in sexual inequality. This is one reason why agricultural societies are more patriarchal than hunter-gatherer societies — regardless of their religions. [That there are many factors that affect the relationship of the sexes in a species is not a point under contention. The question is whether religion does harm, or is a moderating factor to limit the damage caused by biological predispositions]

To measure the effect of a given religion on sexual inequality, that religion should be compared to the other cultural forms (religious and otherwise) that existed at the same time and place, such as early Christianity vs. Roman pagan society, early Islam vs. the many Arabic cultures of the region, or Christianity vs. scientific views about sexual equality in Britain during the Victorian era. I won’t try to second-guess the result of such an inquiry, but I do know this — it isn’t self-evident. [Or, rather than trying to calculate from theory the effects of a welter of complex phenomena, we could cut to the chase: are women oppressed by their society? Does religion act to oppose that oppression, or justify it?]

Myers and other new atheists seem to think that their action-oriented agenda doesn’t leave room for such scholarly footwork, but the reverse is true. Scholars who remain in the Ivory Tower can make mistakes without hurting anyone. [This was my very favorite part!] Those who leave the Ivory Tower to make a difference in the real world need to be extra careful, lest they hurt people on the basis of faulty theory and information. Humility is called for, which is the very opposite of ideological braggadocio.

I love that last bit. It’s an admission that David Sloan Wilson sneers at that dirty complicated real world; we’re supposed to sit in our ivory tower and calculate whether religion has a deleterious effect on women.

Rather than condescendingly telling us about evolutionary dynamics, I’d like Wilson to get specific.

How does depriving girls of an education benefit women?

How does raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children benefit women?

How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

How do honor killings benefit women?

How does stoning rape victims benefit women?

How does female genital mutilation benefit women?

How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

I’m just asking about women here, but I could also say that the attitudes fostered by religion-based misogyny also do harm to the well-being of men — these are deep, wide-spread, endemic problems that poison whole cultures, including our own.

I would also not argue that these problems are solely caused by religion: atheists can be misogynists, too, and history and culture shape individuals in many ways. But these are cases where religion validates and reinforces the oppression of women; secularization and liberalization (more liberal religions are less damaging than conservative, dogmatic ones) reduces the harm done. The question is not whether religion is the only force that does harm, or even the force that does the most harm, but whether religion does more harm than good. I suggest that Wilson open his eyes to the tangible, measurable harm done to women in the name of god, rather than closing them to the real-world data that makes his theories superfluous.

You know, while he sits in his ivory tower trying to ponderously calculate whether women are being hurt, women are actually being hurt.

There is no blacklist

The latest uproar from the misogynist mob is over a rumor that there is a secret list of people who won’t get invited to conferences. There is no list. There are petty people who think calling someone ugly is reasonable behavior, people who have not yet grown out of junior high school. There are personal preferences, as well.

For instance, I will not participate in any conference in which Abbie Smith is a speaker. If I’m invited, and later discover that she is also invited, I will politely turn down the offer.

I could find myself spending a lot more time at home, which wouldn’t be bad at all, except that she doesn’t get invited out that often, and her coterie of slimy acolytes are virtual non-entities, too. It is a positive aspect of the growing atheist movement that it tends to be progressive, egalitarian, and not particularly supportive of shrieking over-privileged children.

Now I have to stroll out to a bäckerei for coffee and pastries.