From the Daily Beast this time. Emily Shire writes that #YesAllWomen is a good thing BUT it is not a perfect thing. Worryworry.

#YesAllWomen has led to an outpouring of simultaneously enlightening and disturbing examples of common-day occurrences of female harassment in theworkplace and world of dating. These, in turn, have inspired a number of men to tweet out their support and recognition of the dangers and double standards that misogyny has wrought.

However, #YesAllWomen also transformed a highly disturbed, socially isolated college student into a figure somehow worthy of legitimate discourse about the serious issues of misogyny. While it is inspiring to see positive conscious-raising tweets about the female experience come out of a national tragedy, there

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Sarah Ditum wonders why there’s an expectation of privacy for misogyny but not for the women who are its targets.

Public life is full of men with manifest habits of misogyny, but whenever this is challenged, one excuse is reliably rolled out: that was private, it doesn’t affect his job. Men, it seems, are the champions of doing two entirely contradictory things at the same time.

That’s been the consensus around Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore’s misogynistic emails. And yes, they were misogynistic – not just a bit sexist if you looked at them funny, not “private banter” (as the headline of India Knight’s Sunday Times column described them), but absolutely misogynistic: Scudamore discussed women’s breasts, described women as

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I wrote a public Facebook post in the middle of the night to express my middle of the night feeling of horror at the state we’re in. I’ll put it here too, because this is the state we’re in and it is horrifying.

——————–

I’m beyond appalled, horrified, staggered. I don’t have the words to name my thoughts on the fact that we know racist violence when we see it – we don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that white guys dragging a black guy behind a truck to kill him is not about racism. We don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that Matthew Shepard was not beaten to death because of homophobia. Why THE FUCK are we … Read the rest

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Dave Zirin in The Nation:

If a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist does not make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women, I am not sure what will.

Just what I keep thinking, as it becomes clearer and clearer that a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist will on the contrary make a lot of us bristle with outrage at the very mention of misogyny in connection with Elliot Rodger’s adventure. It appears that nothing will  make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women.

It does not take any sort of genius to draw a line in between the weekend’s shooting, the torments faced

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There’s an Elliot Rodger fan page on Facebook that keeps returning after people manage to get one taken down (with great difficulty because Facebook is Facebook).

Facebook has removed fan pages for mass murderer Elliot Rodger, but new ones keep popping up — including one that targeted a woman who alleged its creators have harassed her for years.

Using one misogynist campaign in the service of another misogynist campaign. Enterprising.

Facebook has since said earlier versions of the pages were removed.

A man claiming to be behind the page, an Internet radio host who goes by the moniker Wild Goose, told QMI the “page was set up [in] order to rustle the jimmies of feminists around the world who are

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And in Pakistan…

A Pakistani woman has been killed by her relatives outside Lahore High Court for marrying against their wishes.

Police said 30-year old Farzana Bibi died on the spot after being attacked with bricks and sticks.

…

Farzana Bibi’s parents accused her husband, Muhammad Iqbal, of kidnapping her, and had filed a case against him at the High Court.

However, she testified to police that she had married him of her own accord. Police said the couple had been engaged for a number of years.

As she arrived at the court building for a hearing, police said about a dozen family members pulled her aside and began to attack her and her husband, who managed to escape.

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Originally a comment on How dare you treat Rodger’s murders as political?

What’s funny is that saying ‘don’t politicise the issue’ *is* politicising the issue. Here’s my word on the subject, from my tumblr:

It’s quite simple, really. Whenever something happens in the ‘real’ world, whenever people get injured or killed due to neglect or human malevolence, there is always a cavalcade of gainsayers admonishing everyone not to ‘politicise’ the tragedy (at least whenever it’s a tragedy that can be lain at the feet of white men). Whenever there’s a shooting, the NRA falls all over itself to say that anyone who might propose reasonable gun control measures is ‘an opportunist’ who should be ashamed of themselves for taking … Read the rest

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Oh yes.

Tobias Buckell and John Scalzi on Twitter:

Tobias Buckell ‏@tobiasbuckell  10h

I love how the phrase ‘no politics’ always comes from someone swimming in politics… just of their own brand. So little self-recognition.

John Scalzi @scalzi

.@tobiasbuckell “MY politics aren’t REALLY politics, you see! They’re just plain COMMON SENSE!”

Oh yes. That “I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about trying to spin tragedy for political purposes” from earlier today is a classic example. “Your view of this is political, while my view of it is from a distant point in space where politics no longer exists.”

 … Read the rest

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Oh no, feminist writers stirring up moral panics – someone call – VaculaMan!

Justin Vacula The Daily Mail is over-the-top with its headline, too, calling him the “Hunger Games Assassin.” I guess we can be outraged by tabloid publications. I’d rather not.

Anyway, to recap and follow up on recent comments, I think that focusing on misogyny and people like Valenti/Macrotte/SPLC representatives talking about this as being part of a “war on women” or “proof that misogyny kills” is as silly as people saying women who kill their male sons by microwaving them being “proof that misandry kills” or a “war on men.” It’s just much more complex and it’s really no surprise, unfortunately, that the SPLC and feminist writers

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So…this too is “spin” for “political purposes,” yes? Or not.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

“What’s so wrong about hating? Its just evolution, and how their chemicals react to such things.” Are you really that stupid, or pretending?

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

Sorry, it seems my sarcasm needs spelling out. It’s usually aimed at Western liberals who patronisingly excuse atrocities as “their culture”

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 23

What is especially depressing is that the demand comes from STUDENTS. http://bit.ly/1jC25ge  Pathetic, brainwashed little twerps.

Demand for Iranian actress to be flogged, because formally kissed on cheek by President of Cannes festival http://bit.ly/1jC25ge 

It’s all so frightfully political! How cruel that is!

Or is it? I haven’t seen … Read the rest

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You may think The New Misogyny (as, I’m told, David Futrelle calls it) and the harassment and threats and sometimes plain old violence that go with it are a problem, but there are those who think the problem is instead noticing the link between misogyny and harassment—>violence.

Steve Zara @sjzara

That video seems thoughtful and describes real problems for women, but I think the leap from masculinity problems to murder is too much.

Miranda Celeste Hale @mirandachale

@sjzara What angers me re: that video & the hashtag &Valenti’s op-ed etc. is the cruelty of the women who think this tragedy is about *them*

Steve Zara @sjzara

I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about

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Apparently the anti-feminist crowd have only just discovered Leonard Shlain’s ridiculous book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. That’s odd because it was published in 1998; I remember finding it in a bookstore and skimming through it and laughing a disdainful laugh. That was before I had a blog to do my laughing on!

There’s an article about it on this Amazon-linked site.

Shlain frames the premise:

Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. . . .

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Update: oh and there’s also PZ’s account. So that’s two non-anonymous sources.

Slime pitters are all agitated, asking me in unapproved comments if I have a source for the non-anonymous allegations of Shermer’s sexual harassment. I’m pretty sure I’ve already posted this, and I’m not here to do homework for the slime pitters, but all the same – here it is again.

Jason. Last November. Carrie Poppy and the Nay-sayers.

Carrie Poppy has been extraordinarily well-placed in some of the bigger scandals regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault recently, in having been employed as communications director for JREF and having resigned after six months due to, let’s say, philosophical differences with DJ Grothe, president of the organization.

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Sasha Weiss at the New Yorker on #YesAllWomen. She first reads Rodger’s “manifesto”:

The first half of the manifesto is lucid and reflective—we see glimmers of a happy boyhood and an affectionate, curious personality—which makes his spewings of misogyny and hatred in the second half even more chilling. He wanted to abolish sex, thereby equalizing men and ridding society of women’s manipulative and bestial natures, and to lock women in concentration camps so they would die out. (“I would have an enormous tower built just for myself, where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” he wrote. “If I can’t have them, no one will, I imagine thinking to myself as I oversee

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In that same post of Futrelle’s he does a quick review of Twitter assholes explaining away any connection between the actions of Elliot Rodger and the popular sport of misogyny.

When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.

But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video

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More shit news, via the BBC.

Prominent Libyan journalist Meftah Buzeid, known for his fierce criticism of Islamist militias, has been shot dead in the city of Benghazi.

He was the editor of the Burniq newspaper and had regularly appeared on television challenging the rise of such groups since the 2011 revolution.

The choke hold gets tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter.… Read the rest

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