Author: Ophelia Benson

Yes, an invitation. Get your party clothes ready, because here it is.

I’m inviting some lucky guy to do a dialogue with me, which I will publish as an article here at B&W in the articles section. The dialogue will be on sexist epithets. Are they a bad thing, or are they a good thing? How bad are they, are some worse than others, if they are bad then in what way are they bad, does it really matter, is it reasonable to think they are a bad thing, if so why?

We’ve been told lately that “we’ve been getting totally unnuanced discussions of insults like ‘twat’” and that “not everything is the same, and it’s possible to tease out the distinctions analytically and dispassionately.” We’ve been told that

the idea it isn’t possible to look at why everything isn’t the same, the idea it isn’t possible to take a different view about how a word such as “twat” functions, without being immediately dismissed as a misogynist by a mob is ridiculous (and the antithesis of anything that could be considered free enquiry).

So ok, let’s try it. Let’s have that nuanced discussion. Let’s tease out the distinctions analytically and dispassionately. I’ll take my side, and the invitation is for someone to take the other side.

The idea is to do a back and forth, say about 300 words each. It won’t go on until the end of time, but I think I won’t declare a limit now.

There are some conditions. You’ll have noticed I said a guy. I want a guy, for the same reason I would want a white if the discussion were about racist epithets as opposed to sexist ones.

It has to be under a real name.

It has to be somebody with something at stake – reputation, friends, standing as a liberal; that kind of thing. That narrows the field a lot, but it can’t be helped. It means I don’t really want someone who is already known as a proud reactionary or anti-feminist. I might settle for that if no one else takes up the offer, but I would much prefer people who don’t fit that description, because they’re the people who have been surprising those of us on the “what, are you kidding, of course sexist epithets aren’t ok” side of this disagreement. We want to understand what they’re thinking, and this will be the way to find out.

Another condition: I have editorial control. However I won’t do anything the other party disagrees with. If there’s something we can’t agree on and we can’t start over or move to a new entry, I’ll just end the exchange at that point. (I also don’t plan to edit the other party’s entries. I plan not to. I just want to make it clear that I have that option but also that I won’t abuse it; either we agree on an edit or the discussion shifts or ends.)

So there you are. Sound like fun? Email me if you have my address, use the contact form if you don’t.

I should say I doubt that anyone will take up the offer. I think the conditions will make the offer too unattractive. And that, frankly, is part of my point.

So go ahead, prove me wrong!

Update: here is that discussion.

PZ is in Oslo for a Humanist thingy. (Do you know, the Norwegian Humanists get state money. For reals. The churches get it and so they get it too. The Swedish humanists told me this when I was in Stockholm a year ago. The Swedish Humanists do not get state money. They are envious of their Norwegian colleagues.) He has won an international humanist award.

Ya! You go PZ.

PZ is one of the non-sexist male atheists. Such people are not the overwhelming majority I had thought.

Phil Molé did a Facebook note about this video clip in which Tim Gunn complains about the clothes Hillary Clinton wears and says she’s “confused about her gender.” The clip is a stupid annoying piece of sexist crap.

A woman commented on Phil’s note (Phil’s FB notes are actually articles; I’ve published some of them here; people tell him he should collect them in a book, and they’re right) and said “It has nothing to do with her being a woman.” Seriously. HC is confused about her gender, but it has nothing to do with her being a woman.

She also said “Sheesh. Pick your battles or you’ll be pissed at the whole world. This is an absolutely pathetic reach for sexism.”

“Pick your battles” – but this is our battles. This has always been our battles. Second wave feminism has always been about stereotypes and putdowns and language and mental habits. Always. We do pick our battles, and these are it. We have met the enemy and they are us.

Apparently tens of thousands of UK teenagers go to Christian youth camps every year. Really?! I thought people had better sense there.

They sound perfectly disgusting. Horrible yoof jargon is spoken, and horrible christian bullshit is pushed on the gullible young people whose brains have not fully developed yet.

…the evangelical tactics used at such camps are on occasions manipulative. Sermons at such camps often take the form of wild orations that aim to wear down the resistance of the audience to the message. Videos designed to whip up the emotional temperature of the audience are shown, and fervid calls for youngsters to accept Christ are made. This culminates in the centre point of such meetings: the altar call. After having their emotions softened, hypnotic music typically sounds out in subdued lighting as youngsters are urged to come to the front and give their lives to Christ.

And then Bacchus appears and they all go mad and beat each other to death.

Whatever the attempts to dress them in the garb of youth culture, many of Christianity’s most controversial doctrines are given a full airing at the camps. Youngsters are threatened with divine judgment, and they are initiated into the world of charismatic Christian practices. At Soul Survivor, the largest Christian youth festival in the UK, teens have been told that witch doctors can maim children by cursing them. They have also been informed that God judges us on death for our deeds and thoughts, and they have been encouraged to practise physical healings. Could the real “wicked” in Christian teen camps actually be their effects on teens’ emotional wellbeing?

Not to mention their intellectual wellbeing.

As you doubtless know, the Montreal police have finally begun an investigation of Dennis Markuze’s ceaseless flow of death threats against atheists and scientists. The petition we signed a few days ago did what it was intended to do.

QMI Agency tracked down the mother of “David Mabus,” Eva Markuze, who
confirmed that her son, Dennis Markuze, 36, is the man police are looking
for. She said her son lives with her, and is currently in Ottawa and can’t be
reached for comment.

Eva said she doesn’t believe the accusations. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “(My son) would not even kill a fly. Maybe they don’t understand his message or something.”

No that’s not it. His messages have been quite unambiguous. Jen McCreight quotes one in a comment:

I guess I don’t understand what he means by “jen we are going to exterminate you, cunt.”

She said that her son has the right to talk and tell the truth.

Not to make death threats he doesn’t.

A little light reading.

From Mark Caldwell, A Short History of Rudeness (Picador, 1999):

But perhaps the deepest and stubbornest wounds to civility are those inflicted using race and gender as weapons…

In 1996, Karen Grigsby Bates and Karen Elyse Hudson published Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times, an etiquette manual aimed at the emerging black middle class…Yet they also concede that painful throwback situations may still arise where racism survives, either in full-blown or vestigial form – and offer advice about what to do, for instance, if someone tells racist jokes, suggests a colleague would haver have been hired but for affirmative action, or behaves in any other way that suggests a continuing belief in some false or hurtful stereotype. [pp 168-9, emphasis added]

Then they all go out for a beer.

Michelle Goldberg points out that Anders Breivik’s hatred of women hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as his hatred of Islam (and Muslims in general) has.

Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety and right-wing nationalism been made quite so clear. Indeed, Breivik’s hatred of women rivals his hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it.

…

A terror of feminization haunts his bizarre document. “The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe,” he writes. He blames empowered women for his own isolation…

Castrating bitches driving men into tragic lonely corners, when they could have been so happy if only there were enough doormats to choose from.

He picked up the argument that selfish western women have allowed Muslims to outbreed them, and that only a restoration of patriarchy can save European culture. One of the books he references approvingly is Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, which argues, “[T]he rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West.”

…

…the right clings to the idea that feminism is destroying Western societies from the inside, creating space for Islamism to take cover. This politics of emasculation gave shape to Breivik’s rage. Thus, while he pretends to abhor Muslim subjugation of women, he writes that the “fate of European civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism.” When cultural conservatives seize control of Europe, he promises, “we will re-establish the patriarchal structures.” Eventually, women “conditioned” to this new order “will know her place in society.” His mad act was in the service of male superiority as well as Christian nationalism. Those two things, of course, almost always go together.

“Almost always” is too strong. Christian nationalism is probably almost always in favor of male superiority, but male superiority is not almost always Christian nationalist. We’ve been seeing a lot of the secular variety lately.