They’re talking about the “don’t mention the religion” problem at the Freethinker, too. Barry Duke Mentioned in the last paragraph of the post.

Last year, the British government’s Forced Marriage Unit investigated more than 1,400 cases of forced marriages, most of which occur in Muslim communities. Britain is home to more than 1.8 million Muslims, most from Pakistani roots.

But that’s the Freethinker, not the BBC or the Guardian.

 … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The parents of Shafilea Ahmed have been convicted of her murder. There is much admirable refusal to excuse them because that’s “their culture.” All very well, but something is missing. Their “culture” is condemned; tradition and values and traditional values are declared non-exempt from competing values and from the law…but something is missing.

Consider what the judge said, according to the BBC.

On sentencing, Mr Justice Evans told the couple: “A desire that she understood and appreciated the cultural heritage from which she came is perfectly understandable, but an expectation that she live in a sealed cultural environment separate from the culture of the country in which she lived was unrealistic, destructive and cruel.”

Consider what the Guardian editorial… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sexual harassment? What sexual harassment?

When Sofie Peeters moved to Brussels for a film degree, she found herself confronted with a depressing problem almost every time she left her front door. Walking around her local neighbourhood, the mixed, working-class district of Anneessens, at any time of day she would be greeted with cat-calls, wolf-whistles and jeers of “slag” and “how much do you cost?”

Sick of wondering whether it was her fault for wearing particular clothes, she made her end of year film on the topic, armed with a hidden camera to record the street harassment.

You can see a short clip which shows how bad it is.

The student film, Femme de la Rue, a shocking account of

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So there was this girl of 13 in Pakistan. Her parents took her to a pir to evict some djinns that had possessed her. Well any parent would. A relative had recommended the pir.

 “He told me that the pir was an expert in evicting djinns and did not charge anything for his services,” [her father Manzoor Hussain] said.

What could possibly go wrong?

Hussain said the girl was tied to a charpoy and burned with a heated iron rod. He said the pir had poured red chilli powder on parts of the girl’s body before burning them with the rod. He said the parents were made to leave the room after midnight. “He told us to wait outside. He

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Soraya Chemaly on girls turning anger into depression.

To become a woman, especially a woman of color, in our culture is cognitively dissonant, and girls respond differently to that experience. Girls, like boys, feel fully human, but culture tells them that they are not. Even the most privileged girls, those that can afford doctors, psychologists, good schools excellent teams, etc. etc. get this message. Sometimes they rebel, sometimes they compartmentalize, sometimes they agitate for change, sometimes they bury their heads in the sand, sometimes they conform, sometimes they get angry. Sometimes their anger is pathologized instead of given free expression because we’d rather call it anything but anger.

I think it took me an exceptionally long time … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Iiiiiiiiiit’s Brendan! Pissing on Caitlin Moran this time, but recycling his stupid trope about how contemporary feminists are just like Victorian women passing out on the drawing room floor.

Remember when feminism was about The Sisterhood? About women clubbing together to stick it to The Man, patriarchy or whatever they were calling the system that kept them in a state of social subjugation?

Those days are gone. Today, if Caitlin Moran’s wildly successful feminist tract How To Be A Woman is anything to go by, feminism is less a universal club and more a bitchy sorority, made up of well-connected women like Moran who consider themselves better, more spiritual and more “real”, than other women, than lesser women, than what

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There’s a Catholic archbishop in Germany who’s fed up and not going to take it any more. He wants a blasphemy law, and hurry up about it.

“Those who injure the souls of believers with scorn and derision must be put in their place and in some cases also punished,” said Bamberg Archbishop Ludwig Schick on Wednesday.

He said there should be a “Law against the derision of religious values and feelings,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported.

And men in purple beanies. A law against the derision of that is seriously urgent.… Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Caitlin Moran’s book sounds like a good read.

There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s “How to Be a Woman,” an invective against backsliding attitudes toward feminism that, this time last year, every woman in Britain seemed to be reading. There is the stand it takes against bikini waxes. There is its protest against the pornography and stripping industries. Above all there is its deployment of sweary British slang to remind us, in this era of manufactured outrage, what a truly great rant should look like: rude, energetic and spinning off now and then into jubilant absurdity.

Well that’s certainly always been my view of the matter!

Ms. Moran, who is 37, has two young daughters,

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Twitter discussion of skeptical feminism caused me to go look at one of the first things I wrote for the ur-B&W, the website not the blog. It’s an “In Focus” article on “difference feminism” with a collection of resources at the end.

I started with a defense of a certain kind of radical feminism (which is not to be confused with the term ”radical feminism” as currently used by the troll-crowd, who don’t know what they’re talking about).

Second wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective behaviour. Ideas about

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So is all this trashtalk about women just a big joke, something to take for granted as part of life in gaming, the Internet, sport, business, computer programming, uh…everywhere? Or is it just more of the same old shit and something to get rid of?

The latter, according to the New York Times.

When Miranda Pakozdi entered the Cross Assault video game tournament this year, she knew she had a slim chance of winning the $25,000 prize. But she was ready to compete, and promised fans watching online that she would train just as hard as, if not harder than, anyone else.

Over six days of competition, though, her team’s coach, Aris Bakhtanians, interrogated her on camera about her

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Zinnia reports a slightly rude introduction to life at Freethought Blogs. She didn’t realize, when she joined, that there would be people bouncing up every few minutes to squawk “FTB!!” in feigned alarm/concern/disgust. (We’re going to have to make it a policy to warn people about this before inviting them to join.) She doesn’t mind, though; it’s a good jerk-filter. There’s that random person on Facebook, and then there’s…

the national executive director of CFI Canada. Who announced on Twitter a couple of days ago

reading freethought blogs just gives me a headache. I have yet to find a single post in it’s [sic] entire history which was even remotely readable

I pointed out to him that FTB … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Part 7 in Amy’s series: Matt Dillahunty.

Matt’s piece has the considerable virtue of being specific – of actually saying what the problem is.

He notes that a lot of people are just confused or uninformed about these issues.

Unfortunately, there’s also a vocal contingent of extremely hateful people who aren’t willing to honestly engage in the discussion and they’ve been venting – if not simply trolling. When there’s an expressed concern, or a proposed solution to a concern, they frequently respond with cartoonish arguments loaded with fallacies but the more disturbing responses simply include hateful threats of rape and violence.

These individuals are beneath contempt. They’re not just misinformed or mistaken, they’re malicious little thugs who are lashing

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)