Woman is a dirty word

I left a comment at Rebecca Watson’s recent post on being objectified; I said that while I face only a fraction of the abuse outspoken women get, lately the most common insult I get is being called a mangina, or worse, a woman.

I now get email accusing me of being a woman.

Think about that. This is the horrible awful insult they want to browbeat me with; that I am a woman. Not even the creationists ever sunk to that; I think it’s part of their mindset that women are lesser beings, but they don’t use “woman” as a dirty word.

It’s bizarre; they don’t even realize that they’re confirming everything I say about sexism and misogyny by treating womanhood as the most degrading term you can apply to a man.

But maybe this will wake them up…at least, maybe it will stir the ones who don’t worship Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck chewed out Obama for having concerns about brain injuries in football.

Beck played a clip from the interview on his online show and interjected the word “girl” in between the president’s statements, before switching into a “female” voice to mock him. When Obama was finished making his rather cautious comments on the matter, Beck began his full-on attack.

“His man card has been revoked by me, and that’s saying something” Beck said. “When I’m saying you’re a girl, you are absolutely 100% girl power.” He proceeded to slam the president for getting too “philosophical” and “complex” in his answers to questions, which according to Beck was further evidence of Obama’s femininity.

Referring to Obama’s nuanced approach to the football issue, Beck continued, “You’re a full-fledged woman. I never heard anybody but a woman say that.” He explained that only women are concerned about the dangers of football and “every guy, even me, says ‘relax.’”

Taking a stern tone, Beck said, “Stop being such a chick, Mr. President. Stop it. You’re commander-in-chief. Not chick-in-chief.”

Watch the video, slimy people: it’ll be like looking in a mirror. That’s what misogyny looks like — it’s the gratuitous assumption that you can belittle someone by calling them a chick.

More professional victims causing deep rifts merely by existing

There really isn’t much I can excerpt from this story that won’t trigger folks pretty fucking hard.

So the capsule summary:

Three 15-year-olds start a rock band. They’re really good. They win a local Battle of the Bands. They receive acclaim. But they’re g-g-g-g-g-g-GIRLS. So the misogynist haters start leaving crappy, abusive, and even physically threatening comments on the band members’ Facebook pages. Eventually the abuse gets to be too much for the kids, and they decide not to perform anymore.

The only thing I can tell you that distinguishes this story from the last six I’ve heard like it is that the girls aren’t accused of being “fake geeks” or “rocker wannabes,” but of contravening the precepts of Islam. The haters are imams and grand muftis rather than basement dwelling cheese puff eaters. The band, Pragash Band, is from Kashmir. There are slight differences in catchphrases here and there, and the fact that Pragash Band’s haters are part of the “Put More Clothes On” tendency of the Church Of The Patriarchy, where those I see more often in the US belong to the “Take More Clothes Off” tendency in the pews across the aisle, where the skeptics and atheists are allowed to sit.

The story seems otherwise very familiar.

If I had slightly more coding chops than I do — which is to say “any at all” — I’d put together a web-based quiz game in which you’d be presented with an odious bit of misogynistic abuse, and you’d have to guess the source: Fundamentalist Muslim Ideologue or Western Male Netizen.

It would be a really difficult game.

The best and worst review of yesterday’s Superbowl

It fits my perception of the event. Tom Shales reviews the Superbowl, and talks about the half-time show, the pregame show, some weird interruption in the game, the announcers, and, of course, the commercials, and nowhere anywhere in there does he talk about the game. I don’t know who played or who won, and I don’t care, and neither, apparently, does Tom Shales. Football teams are just floating corporations whose purpose for existence is to scoop up specially fast meaty people, give them a brief period of pampering and unwarranted glory, and in return, grinds them up and gives them brain damage for the entertainment of the people.

And now the hype surrounding this Superbowl nonsense has grown so huge that it has completely drowned the game. I’m not going to watch it ever, and for that matter, I’m not interested in watching any football game.

Oh, the things you’ll learn about “Science” from the interwebs!

Far right wing talk show host Kevin Swanson has a few things to say about birth control.

I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

I am astonished at the specificity of that citation: “some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists”. If anybody can track down the scientific paper in which that was published, I’ll not only post the verification, but I’ll reproduced the illustrations of the uteruses with the little tiny baby graveyards in them.

For now, this is the best I can do. I’ve taught histology, we even have slides of sections of uteruses (which, unfortunately, do not have the information about whether the source was a godless fornicator on the label), and this is what they look like.

Uterus

What Swanson said wasn’t science. It’s something different. I think the technical term is making shit up.

Where have all the usenet kooks gone?

You youngsters may not recall the golden age of usenet kookdom, but back in the distant past (like, the 1990s) usenet was the medium of choice for internet chatter, and there was only the roughest of partitioning of ideas, so the usenet groups were these great egalitarian shouting matches of noise — and you could be a total nut and have just as much of a voice as the most cautious scientist. In fact, being loud and weird gave you an edge in being heard.

It was a great time for some strange people, and Charles Stross just mentioned that Archimedes Plutonium is still around, and now he has a Science Website, sorta. It’s really just a wall of badly formatted text in which he talks about himself in the third person…but yeah, that’s Archie.

One nice thing about it is that it does have the most succinct summary of the Plutonium Atom Totality Theory I’ve ever seen.

Plutonium’s claims: In late 1990, Plutonium claims to have had the realization of his Plutonium Atom Totality Theory, a theory he claimed to be the most important breakthrough in scientific history. According to this theory, the Universe is a giant plutonium atom, and the part of the universe we are able to observe from Earth, including Earth itself, is somewhere in its outer electron shells, the 5f6, and where galaxies are pieces of the last electron of 231Pu. As Mr. Plutonium calls it: where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies. 

               ::\ ::|:: /::

                ::\::|::/::

                    _ _

                   (:Y:)

                    - - 

                ::/::|::\::

               ::/ ::|:: \::

The above is the ascii art of the 5f6 electron orbital of plutonium where the dots are dots of the electron-dot-cloud and each dot represents a galaxy.

Biographical notes In his autobiography (entitled at one point Ludwig Plutonium: the Chosen One, and claimed to be 2200 pages), Plutonium claims he started posting to Usenet on August 12 of 1993 under the name of Ludwig Plutonium. He posts and cross-posts mostly in the sci. (science) hierarchy. Other than the Plutonium ATOM Totality Theory, one of his most noteworthy announcements was that he has a single plutonium atom at the center of his brain in his Brain Locus Theory, which makes him a super genius. He claims this follows from the Plutonium Atom Totality Theory according to which thoughts and ideas do not originate in our own minds but are created in the nucleus of the atom-universe by the Nuclear entity and shot out as photons or neutrinos where the brain acts as a radio antennae forcing the new thought or action.

He was impressively persistent and consistent for many years, and impervious to all criticism and laughter. It is simultaneous sad and gratifying to see that he’s still plugging away.

She’s baaaack

Remember Republican legislator Cathrynn Brown’s bill that would have criminalized abortion on the claim that it would destroy evidence? She scurried to retract it after nationwide public shaming, but now she’s revised the bill and is trying to promote it again.

Good news! It no longer threatens women who get an abortion after a rape with a felony charge for tampering with evidence! Yay!

Now it only charges the doctor with a felony for facilitating the destruction of evidence. Progress! Oh, wait…it still criminalizes a legal procedure, and still specifically oppresses the victims of violent assault.

I guess that counts as practically no progress at all. How about the next iteration being a bill that criminalizes lawmakers who attempt to make an end-run around women’s rights to bodily autonomy?

Role models

In these times of tepid liberalism and snail-like slow progressive politics, what is a fervent and fanatical conservative group to do? Find successful role models to emulate, form alliances, and change. “40 Days for Life”, an anti-choice group, looked about in the political ecology for a powerful organization that could show them the way, and they found one.

“These guys know how to get the attention of the American people,” explained David Bereit, National Director of 40 Days for Life. “If there’s one thing we care about, it’s getting known – oh, and of course saving the lives of the innocent.”

Their new peers and colleagues? Why, they’ve teamed up with Westboro Baptist Church.

Because if any organization represents reasoned debate and broad popular appeal, it’s Westboro Baptist.

Although, actually, it’s not much of a stretch. If you’ve ever seen the clouds of spittle and waving signs surrounding a Planned Parenthood clinic, you know that their tactics aren’t much different.

Why shouldn’t women serve in the military?

This is a bizarre excuse: because the men might be demoralized by learning that women poop and sweat.

Many Marines developed dysentery from the complete lack of sanitary conditions. When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face.

Oh, horrors! Marines are psychologically delicate and would be deeply traumatized by the presence of a woman who might see them poop, or worse, might have to witness a woman pooping.

Then there’s the usual hygiene argument.

When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation’s military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?

I have big news for the Marines: women are animals, just like they are; they are hairy sweaty mammals, just like they are; in the absence of opportunities to groom and clean themselves, they get filthy, too.

I am surprised that Marines can be comfortable with the fact that other people are blood-filled meat sacks who can be blown apart and mangled and killed, but that their morale would crumble if they learned that women have sebaceous glands and colons.

Ryan Smith, the author of that piece, must be a real wimp.

Scientological syncretism

Nobody will be surprised by this at all: L. Ron Hubbard cobbled together Scientology from various bits of old pseudoscience, as well as by inventing things out of thin air.

The source calls them “lies”. This is an ongoing problem: we don’t have a good word for what these people (scientologists, creationists, Christians, Muslims, whatever) are doing. They are making stuff up, they are telling things about the nature of the world that are not only false but contrary to all the available evidence, yet they often fervently believe it all; even the scam artists have to half-convince themselves that they’re doing good. And if we call it lies, some pedant will start complaining that it lacks the element of intent.

So what’s a good word for malicious mind-fuckery backed by devout good intentions? I struggle with this all the time.

“It’s about misogyny. It’s about intimidation. It’s about silencing.”

Jane Fae writes about the realities of online bullying in the New Statesman.

…there is something disturbingly misogynistic about online bullying. Yes: blokes, male columnists, undoubtedly get it too. But it feels as though there is something far more vicious, gender-related with respect to what women have to endure.

Beard makes the point well, in a blog responding to her own online treatment. It is clear that she is no stranger to tired old jokes about her appearance – but even she has been shocked about the response she evoked, describing the level of misogyny as “truly gobsmacking”. The focus of much of the abuse is sexual, sadistic even and, she adds: “it would be quite enough to put many women off appearing in public, contributing to political debate”.

In other words, it is silencing, something I get very well from personal experience. I’ve opted out of contributing online for periods ranging from hours to a couple of weeks after being subjected to this sort of online nastiness. Not just me. Many far braver women with serious contributions to make to public discourse on violence and abuse have suffered similar: been silenced simply for having an opinion.

Yeah, the guys get it, too. I thought it was ridiculous before — I had Conservapædia raving about how fat I was, whole blogs dedicated to how stupid I was, and of course, frequent accusations of being gay — but once I got associated with feminism, the hatred reached a whole new level of shrieking. I’ve basically been declared an honorary woman by a whole new category of people, online atheists, who turn out to be worse than creationists, Christians, and Muslims. There are even more rants about my appearance, my ‘irrationality’, my sanity, than ever before.

And the scary thing is that when I compare what I get to what women activists get, I’m getting off easy.

It’s not criticism, either. It’s just raving mad hatred.