It’s a lovely day out. The sun is shining. The sky is blue. The birds are singing.

That’s all I’m going to talk about from here on out.… Read the rest

Now, in one way, it is always possible just to ignore the whole thing. Attitudes, expectations, stereotypes, different rules, biases – it’s all so woolly, and subjective, and impossible to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt, so the hell with it; let’s just get on with it and sexism will wither away on its own.

But the trouble with that is, all those things have effects in the real world, that are not a bit woolly and subjective. If women are seen as

• just there for sex
• either there for sex or totally superfluous and in the way
• second best
• stupid and inept but tolerable to have around because of sex
• an afterthought
• peripheral
• the exception to the rule

then they … Read the rest

Phil Plait is another who disagrees with Richard Dawkins about the zero badness of asking a stranger for sex on an elevator at 4 a.m.

An important point that came up multiple times is that many men do not truly understand what women go through in such situations.This point was driven home when Richard Dawkins spoke up about it. Through his own words, he proved quite clearly that a lot of men just don’t get it.

And lots of other men on various other sites have been demonstrating the same thing. They don’t get that it matters, they don’t get that women aren’t a public commodity, they don’t get that it’s not all about them, they don’t get that they … Read the rest

Where were we. Rebecca Watson said about elevator guy, a student said about Watson about elevator guy, Watson said about the student at her CFI talk, lots of people said about Watson saying about the student at her talk, while, meanwhile, Dawkins said about Watson about elevator guy. Dawkins said something sarcastic the point of which was that women living under Islamic laws have things worse than Watson. This did not go down well. Lots of people pointed out, with some heat, that the fact that X is bad is not a reason to be quiet about less-bad Y, and that Dawkins was being clueless about Y, and that he shouldn’t do that because he was never going to … Read the rest

There’s been some back and forth about the term “passive-aggressive” and what its exact meaning is. I’ve been using it loosely in what I took to be the vernacular sense, not in what I took to be any kind of technical sense. On being questioned about this, I looked it up; I hadn’t realized it was technical in quite that way, included in the DSM and all. It’s a personality disorder, by gum. I thought it was just a bit of outdated descriptive psychology of the kind that Woody Allen likes to throw around – a bit of pseudo-Freudianism.

What, exactly, is the difference? What’s the difference between an official personality disorder that appears in the DSM and an … Read the rest