Author: Ophelia Benson

What was that about women and indecency and men are always right? That’s how it works in Saudi Arabia for sure. Saudi Arabia detained and deported a lot of Nigerian women who went there for the hajj but did it without a male relative along to make sure they didn’t fuck every man they saw. Sluts.

Since Sunday, hundreds of Nigerian women – mainly aged between 25 and 35, according to Nigerian diplomats – have been stopped at the airports in Jeddah and Medina.

Bilkisu Nasidi, who travelled from the northern Nigerian city of Katsina, told the BBC that hundreds of women had been sleeping on the floor, did not have their belongings and were sharing four toilets at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah.

She said she was part of a group of 512 women being deported to five states in Nigeria on Thursday.

With many of them now facing deportation, she said the atmosphere at the airport was not good, and the women felt “victimised”.

What, just because they took the trouble and spent the money to go to SA for the hajj which is an “obligation” according to Islam and the Saudi “guardians of Islam” (as they consider themselves) wouldn’t let them do the hajj? Pffffffff. Whiners. They’re indecent, don’t they get it? They have that filthy hole between their legs.

“We’re not happy about the situation – other than the Hajj we would not be interested in coming back to Saudi Arabia but unfortunately it is the holy land to us Muslims and we will have to look beyond the treatment and come back.”

Well that’s just exactly stinking it, isn’t it. Saudi Arabia is a vicious misogynist shit hole, but it’s “holy” to Muslims, so they have to “look beyond the treatment” which is part and parcel of Islam itself, and go back. They think they “have to” go back to the holy land of the hateful misogynist religion. It’s sad. It’s horribly sad. The religion kicks them in the face, and they still think they “have to” obey its rules and fulfill its obligations.

What’s new in Tunisia? Nothing much. Two police officers accused of raping a young woman have accused the young woman of “indecency” and a judge has hauled her into court to respond to the accusation.

Leading human rights, feminist groups and other prominent members of civil society have formed a committee evening to co-ordinate a campaign in support of the woman, including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women and the Tunisian League of Human Rights.

Faïza Skandrani, the head of the Equality and Parity organisation, told Al Jazeera that the case was an important one for two reasons: it marked the first time a woman allegedly raped by the police had taken the case to court, and it was the first time the authorities were trying to publicly shame a woman into dropping such charges.

“The investigating judge is turning her from the victim to the accused, to help the police officers get away with it,” she said. “I’ve heard about similar cases in Pakistan, but this is a first in Tunisia. Next they will be charging her with prostitution.”

It’s classic, isn’t it. Women are “indecent” simply by existing, so there’s no such thing as rape, there’s only women sucking in men with their indecency between the legs. If the woman is there to be raped, then it’s her fault by definition, even if the man had to break down a couple of walls to get at her. If she is not sealed up beyond possible access then she’s indecent and a sucker-in of men. Stone her.

Activists see the case as an important one because of the symbolism in the wider cultural battles between those who want Tunisia to maintain its position as one of the most progressive countries in the Arab world, and religious conservatives.

“This is a drop in the ocean of the problems we’ve been fighting,” Skandrani said. “Each time we close one door, they open another.”

“The revolution was about freedom and democracy, not about undermining women’s rights,” she said. “They want to build a society where women can be used and treated like objects and where the man is always right.”

Bad luck to them.

Rebecca’s gone off the whole naked calendars idea. I’m glad about that, because I was never on it, but didn’t say so, because you know, I’m a million years old, I come from that boring generation that did second wave feminism and didn’t get it about pole dancing as empowerment.

“Why don’t you make the Skepchick Calendars anymore?” Ever since I stopped producing not-quite-nudie calendars back in 2007, I’ve heard that question a lot. The problem is that I never have the 30 minutes I’d need to list half the reasons why I no longer do it. But now, I will list a few of those reasons in the desperate hope that organizations that need money or publicity or whatever will read this and make the decision to not produce calendars.

You see, in the past few days I’ve heard of two different calendar projects from within my circles: ScienceGrrl is a calendar of female scientists, and proceeds will apparently go to encouraging girls to pursue STEM degrees. New organization Secular Woman has also announced a calendar, which will feature nude atheists and benefit a cancer charity and the org’s own travel grants to send women to conferences.

I know. Really. Please stop.

Rebecca gives some background. It was partly a jokey thing at first.

And then I stopped. Why? For some of the same reasons that I’m turned off by the current crop of calendars:

1. Regardless of the intent behind the calendars, regardless of how much fun we had making them, regardless of how empowering we found them, regardless of the racial and age diversity we showcased, and regardless of the fact that they were run by a woman and benefited women, pin-up calendars added to an existing environment in which women were seen first as sexual objects and maybe if they’re lucky they’d later be seen as human beings with thoughts and desires of their own. Back in 2005, I thought skeptics weren’t affected by the patriarchy and that misogyny was something left to the religious. In a community like that, a pin-up calendar of women would be absolutely fine. I learned that a community like that does not exist and it was naive of me to assume otherwise.

Yes. That was why I was never on it, in a nutshell, but for all I knew the fans of the idea knew better than I did.

2. Adding a calendar of men did not balance out the calendar of women. In a perfect non-patriarchal world, it would, but what I realized was that the women in the calendars were not being seen in the same way as the men in the calendars. The women were objectified on a level unmatched by those viewing and commenting on the men. This was something difficult for me to objectively evaluate at the time and was just a hunch based on my casual observations, but that hunch was confirmed last year when I had shitlord after shitlord emailing me to tell me that I have no right to complain about being groped or propositioned at conferences because I posed in a calendar for skeptics (see my filthy slut photo as the featured image on this post).

Sigh.

The SPLC takes a cautious look at misogyny on the web.

The website Itsguycode.com was launched in 2008 as a “parody website for people who take their gender too seriously.” (It is not related to the MTV Reality Show Guy Code, which had its debut in 2011). Its impresarios describe themselves as “a group of men dedicated to preserving masculinity in a society trying to be pimped by feminism”; its name was inspired by a line spoken by Vince Vaughn in the 2003 movie “Old School”: “It’s guy code. Guys don’t tell on other guys. It’s something chicks do. You’re not a chick, are you?”

Hmm. Already I want to be elsewhere.

…the articles that appear under the heading “Women’s Studies” and “Whiny Feminists” are overtly political — and grossly misogynistic. “How to Smack a Bitch” by “Matt Stone” (many of the site’s pieces are bylined “Matt Stone” and “Trey Parker,” which presumably are pseudonyms) seems more like a specimen from a sociopath’s case file than a satire — and it suggests a definition of masculinity that is troubling, to say the very least. There’s an obvious similarity to some of the woman-bashing sites in the so-called “manosphere” of certain sectors of the men’s rights movement.

…

Most of the essay consists of deadpan descriptions of the characteristics of 10 different “bitch slapping” techniques, each illustrated with a color photograph of a woman’s swollen, bruised and bleeding face: “The Classic Bitch Smack”; “the Pimp Slap” (“if your woman was working and needed to be somewhat presentable the pimp smack takes place on the left or right side of the face without causing ocular damage”); “The Johnny Wad Slap” (“for those guys who are not pleased sexually in bed … first used in the early 1970s with female porn stars”); “The Where’s My Dinner Bitch Slap”…

Etc.

The way we live now.

Eric Posner has a rather limp article in Slate, sort of saying the Feds should do something about the “Innocence of Muslims” video and sort of not quite saying it.

Greg Lukianoff writes a much more interesting piece in the Huffington Post in reply.

…lately, it seems as though we’ve gotten so used to our First Amendment rights as a country that we take them for granted and forget the deadly serious reasons why we decided that these freedoms should serve as the building blocks for our society in the first place.

I don’t forget the deadly serious reasons. Maybe that’s because I pay so much attention to places like Pakistan and Russia.

Ironically, the institutions most likely to take free speech and/or other basic rights for granted in the United States are the institutions most reliant on free and open debate: our colleges and universities.

As I have reported for years in the Huffington Post and as I discuss at length in my forthcoming book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, I have seen students on college campuses get in trouble for the mildest imaginable expression. In other cases, students suffer for their politically relevant, but locally unpopular, speech.

So it was no surprise to me that when the trailer for “Innocence of Muslims” debuted on YouTube and Islamic militants all over the globe began using it as an excuse to attack American embassies and kill our diplomats, the first prominent people to rise up and say “see, I told you we were wrong about free speech” were college professors.

First, there was professor Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania who wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that Sam Bacile (the video’s purported maker) should be thrown in jail.

I followed that last link. Guess what her field is. Religious studies.

Then, this week, similar criticism came from a much more serious source: University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner.

Posner, son of famous jurist Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, wrote in Slate that Americans foolishly overvalue free speech and that the violence committed because of the video should cause us to reconsider our free speech radicalism.

For those of us who work in First Amendment law, Posner relies on pretty tired arguments that I plan to address piece by piece in upcoming posts. But before I get too entangled in the details of what was so wrong about Professor Posner had to say, it’s important to take a step back and realize why punishing a citizen for offending a religion is so dangerous.

Allow me to interrupt and give my explanation of why punishing a citizen for offending a religion is so dangerous.

It’s because religions have a special kind of power, and we all need protection from that power. Everything about religion should be optional, because otherwise, it’s coercive and tyrannical beyond the dreams of ordinary secular institutions. Respect for religion or religions or any one religion should never, ever be made mandatory, because we need to be able to say No.

…if we start punishing people in the United States because they’ve offended the beliefs of people of other faiths, we will have put the United States government in the role of enforcer of a religious norm.

Pre-cisely.

It’s become easy for American academics, elites and contrarians to scoff at the universal values of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from imposed beliefs. But while America may be almost alone as a nation in being relatively purist about these doctrines, this does not mean we are wrong. A nation and even a world where it’s safe for people to believe as they choose–or not to believe at all–is one worth aspiring towards.

Damn right.

Am I wrong to find this funny? A Catholic priest kicking the yoga people out of his church because it turns out they didn’t mean just Downward Facing Dog and Upside Down Candelabra, they meant “spiritual.” Or not, but they could have. You couldn’t be sure. You know how people are. They say it’s not spiritual, they say they just want to strike poses and watch the pounds melt away, but underneath, they’re plotting to do spiritual.

Instructor Cori Withell from Hampshire said her yoga and pilates classes at St Edmund’s Church building in Southampton were cancelled with 10 days to go.

Father John Chandler said that the hall had to be used for Catholic activities, and he banned it because it was advertised as “spiritual yoga”.

…

Ms Withell, from Eastleigh, said the church accepted the booking two months ago and she paid £180.

She was called later and told that yoga was “from another religion”, so she could not have the hall.

A separate pilates class she had booked was also cancelled.

Ms Withell said she did not use meditation in her classes, just exercises.

She added: “As a nation we have an obesity epidemic. I was trying to bring some exercise to the community and coming across blocks like this is frustrating.”

Yes but consider. There’s nothing about Jesus stretching in the bible. If Jesus had wanted people to bring some exercise to the community he would have said something about it while one of the stenographers was listening.

Ravindra Parmar, president of the Vedic Society Hindu Temple of Southampton, said yoga was “a form of exercise” and “not a religious type of activity”.

He added people were welcome to practice yoga exercises at the temple and said he felt “a little let down” because of the work the Southampton Council of Faiths does to “get all the faiths talking to each other”.

Ahhhhhhh yes talking to each other, but not doing yoga. There’s a difference, my friend.

It’s a day for bad lines, innit. For two bad lines in particular.

One is

In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.

The other is

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Pretend for a moment that you don’t know where they’re from, who said them or promoted them, in what context.

They’re just bad. On their own, with no further context, they’re bad. On the face – prima facie.

The word “savage” used as a noun is just stupid, and sinister. It borders on taboo, in the way “nigger” is taboo and “bitch” ought to be taboo but isn’t. It’s a relic of colonialism and it just reeks of ignorance and domination. Sorting people into civilized and savage has a terrible, blood-soaked history.

As for the second line – the concept of “slandering” a historical or quasi-historical human male called by his fans “the prophet of Islam” is meaningless outside Islam, and people who forbid us all to “slander the prophet of Islam” are trying to impose a religious edict on all people.

Two bad lines.

Now for the context and who said them and why. The first is perhaps even worse in context. The second is less terrible in context but it remains a wretched choice of words.

You already know the context. The “savage” line is from a poster put up in ten New York subway stations by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative. Mona Eltahawy has been arrested for spraying one with purple paint. The context does nothing to make the ugliness of the wording look any prettier.

The “slander” line is from Obama’s speech to the UN.

It is time to leave the call of violence and the politics of division behind. On so many issues, we face a choice between the promise of the future, or the prisons of the past. We cannot afford to get it wrong. We must seize this moment. And America stands ready to work with all who are willing to embrace a better future.

The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons. The future must not belong to those corrupt few who steal a country’s resources – it must be won by the students and entrepreneurs; workers and business owners who seek a broader prosperity for all people. Those are the men and women that America stands with; theirs is the vision we will support.

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims.

Yes; yes; no. The third para goes off the rails. Yes sometimes vandalizing images of Jesus is done as incitement and a kind of ethnic cleansing, but not always. Separate the two. Don’t make it a matter of forbidding attacks on images or prophetic reputations; make it a matter of incitement and violencem. Separate the two, Barack.

I would say more but Popehat got there first, so why bother.