Author: Ophelia Benson

  • A living nightmare

    What a horror.

    Tony Nicklinson last week lost his court case to be allowed to have help in ending his life. He had a stroke in 2005 left him paralysed from the neck down.

    So he stopped eating, and died. That’s a nasty way to die. If the court had ruled in his favor, he would have been able to relax, knowing he could have a less nasty way to die at a time of his choosing.

    He explained this for the BBC in June.

    I have locked-in syndrome and it makes my life a living nightmare.

    I cannot speak and I am also paralysed below the neck, which means I need someone to do everything for me.

    For example, 90% of itches have to be endured because by the time someone comes to scratch it and I have laboriously explained where it is, the itch has gone. Now I just put up with them.

    Or there is the screaming frustration of wanting to make a point but knowing that the only way I can express my opinion, by the board or computer, are useless in normal conversation…

    However, all these things are physical and arguably one can learn to live with them. What I find impossible to live with is the knowledge that, unlike you, I have no way out – suicide – when this life gets too much to bear.

    The reason for this mess is, apparently, adamant refusal to think.

    Many opponents of assisted dying object because they think it is wrong to take your own or another’s life. Recently I asked such people if there was anything I could say to make them change their mind. They both replied there wasn’t.

    I even suggested to one some safeguards for his approval or otherwise. He totally ignored the question. Clearly any discussion with them is a complete waste of time.

    Much has been said about the part care plays in assisted dying and the argument is essentially that better care and more of it will expunge all thoughts of taking one’s own life.

    This was said of me on a prestigious national radio programme back in February. I invited the speaker to visit so that she could tell me to my face what I am missing. So far all she has come up with is a number of excuses not to visit. Draw your own conclusions.

    It’s a horror.

  • Tony Nicklinson dead of starvation

    He lost his High Court case to allow doctors to end his life last week, so he refused food. A horrible way to die.

  • Mercy all around

    It’s not just the Catholic church that is more concerned to protect its own sweet self than it is to prevent child sexual abuse or help the victims of child sexual abuse.

    An evangelist Christian preacher from East Sussex urged a victim of sexual abuse not to report the man responsible to the police, the BBC has learned.

    Ian Jackson told Lina Barnes he would not support her if she reported that Gospel Hall Brethren preacher Allan Cundick assaulted her at the age of 12.

    Mr Jackson, from Eastbourne, said he was only concerned for her progress.

    But Ms Barnes, 33, who sought advice from him last year, said he wanted to protect the Church.

    “Only concerned for her progress” – god that’s disgusting, not just treating her badly but also pretending to be a decent chap while doing it.

    Ms Barnes, who has waived her anonymity, said: “I’d confided a lot in Ian Jackson about what I had suffered and here was this man now telling me that I just had to be merciful to my abuser, not to involve the police, and it just caused a lot of hurt, a lot of heartache.”

    She added: “I believe he [Mr Jackson] didn’t want it getting out.”

    Ms Barnes added: “In his email, he said to me it was important that Christians keep the testimony of the Church and therefore protect the institution.”

    And not important that the institution do right by the people abused by its own employees.

    Imagine if a restaurant served you food that made you sick, and then told you it was important that diners keep the testimony of the restaurant and therefore protect the institution. Sod the institution! What about the victim?

    Last year, Ms Barnes told Mr Jackson she planned to report her abuser to the police.

    But in an email on 24 May 2011, Mr Jackson wrote to her: “I am not prepared to give you any support in relation to the involvement of the police and court proceedings.

    “I think it is a wrong decision that you have made.”

    He said: “There is a better way. ‘Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.’”

    So there should be no law enforcement at all, yeh? Just mercy all around, except of course for the people who get killed or beaten up or raped.

  • Evangelical preacher told woman not to report abuse

    “In his email, he said to me it was important that Christians keep the testimony of the Church and therefore protect the institution.”

  • Jacques Rousseau on atheism+

    We’d agree about being decent people, but not necessarily agree on how to do that.

  • Michael Nugent offers 5 ways you can help Alex Aan

    Write to him, talk to politicians, start or support a campaign initiative, keep campaigning.

  • Pakistani girl accused of blasphemy could get death penalty

    Neighborhood bullies told all the Christians to get out.

  • German rabbi charged for performing circumcisions

    The chief prosecutor of Hof confirmed that charges had been filed against the rabbi.

  • The phenomenology of harassment

    Stephanie has a post about whose is the liberty in “libertarian” on sexual issues, which follows up on a comment she made here on the temperature post.

    The proof comes when women start going after what they want.

    He wants the freedom to hit on me at any time and any place? Fine. Liberty in action. Maybe a little crass, but….

    I want the freedom to call him a disgustingly selfish piece of shit? I want the freedom to determine whether I want to deal with him based on whom he treats well and whom he doesn’t? I want the freedom to use tools under my personal control to keep him from interfering in my projects? I want the freedom to gather with people who share my values rather than his?

    That’s when I’m abusing my power. That’s when I’m “Talibanesque” or “femistazi” or “Orwellian”.

    In a comment smhll suggests this is partly a matter of not sharing the experience of being harassed. 

    Anyway, I think quite a few arguers who haven’t dealt with sexual objectification as a near constant part of their own lives had some serious trouble “getting it”.

    Due to elisions, (which I think you posted about), and inaccurate paraphrasing, and sloppy reading comprehension working in tandem, we end up in EGate debate with anti-policy-having people thinking “Men wanting to have sex with women is not misogyny.”

    I think it is difficult to put across the annoyance of sexual objectification, especially to people who desire to have more (positive) sexual attention. I think the idea is well understood by women and people who’ve done a lot of feminist reading, but I’m not sure the last year’s debates were effective at conveying this point to a more general audience.

    I think that’s an important point, and my awareness of the issue is sharpened by the fact that I had partly forgotten my own experience of harassment. Sophie Peeter’s film brought it back to me in a rush, and writing about it yesterday brought it back some more. (This isn’t like “repressed memory,” which is completely untrustworthy. It was never “repressed.”) I hadn’t forgotten the fact of it, but I hadn’t spent any time remembering what it felt like, and the film reminded me of what it felt like. Watch it and you should be able to get a sense of what it feels like.

    So now I have this awareness of the gap between knowing (or remembering) what it feels like, and not knowing. It’s a big gap. What it feels like is horrible – because you feel totally at the mercy of other people, total strangers, people – men – who simply will not leave you alone. I kept telling them to leave me alone and they just wouldn’t do it. That in itself is an incredibly disconcerting and bad feeling, at least if you haven’t grown up with it, which thankyoujesus I didn’t. You just can’t have what you want. You just can’t have the freedom to walk around outside without being hassled.

    I’ve always harped on this, you know. Always. In that sense my Paris experience wasn’t forgotten. I knew that I knew what it felt like not to have that freedom, it’s just that I didn’t have the active memory of the phenomenology of it.

    So if any of you don’t know: listen up: it is a nightmare.

    This is the exact opposite of what jeerers call “victim feminism” or anything like that. It’s helpless rage at being made a victim when you don’t want to be. It’s not clinging to victim status, it’s furious thrashing demand to be released from it.

  • As communal tensions continued to rise

    Can’t we all get along? No. Not in Islamabad, for instance, after that 11-year-old was accused by her neighbours of burning a few pages of a Koran.

    As communal tensions continued to rise, about 900 Christians living on the outskirts of Islamabad have been ordered to leave a neighbourhood where they have lived for almost two decades.

    …

    One of the senior members of the dominant Muslim community told the Christians to remove all their belongings from their houses by 1 September.

    What an oddly respectful way of wording that – it makes him sound like a prime minister instead of a thug. If some male neighbor told me to get out of the neighborhood, I wouldn’t be thinking of him as one of senior members of the community. I do wish journalists would learn to stop dressing things up in that way. This isn’t some legitimate authority telling people what to do, it’s just criminal intimidation.

    The other point of general agreement is that “the law should be followed”. Unfortunately, the law in question is Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which has a proven track record of ensnaring people on the flimsiest of evidence and being cynically used to intimidate communities or settle quarrels over money and property.

    Even though no one has yet been executed for blasphemy in Pakistan, long prison terms are common – one Christian couple was sentenced to 25 years in 2010 after being accused of touching the Qur’an with unwashed hands.

    There have also been cases of people killed by lynch mobs demanding instant punishment. Daring to criticise the law is incredibly risky and few do it.

    In 2011, Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab province, was gunned down by his own bodyguard after he spoke out against the case of Aasia Bibi, another Christian woman accused of blasphemy.

    Humans: finding absurd reasons to make each other miserable for 100,000 years.

     

     

  • Prior to each insertion

    George Galloway is certainly being disgusting on the subject of the rape allegations against Assange.

    In a thirty minute podcast, the controversial anti-war MP said it was “an extraordinary coincidence that public enemy number one, Julian Assange, somehow gets inveigled with two women with incredibly complex political backgrounds who just, at the right time, come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against him”.

    Bitchez be lyin.

    “But even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape.

    “At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.”

    The Bradford West MP suggested one of the women had claimed she invited Mr Assange back to her flat, had consensual sex with him and then “woke up to him having sex with her again – something which can happen, you know”.

    On the issue of whether this would constitute rape or not, Mr Galloway suggested that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion”.

    Well, people who don’t need to be asked before each insertion are free to stipulate that to their partners. “Don’t mind me, honey, if I’m asleep or passed out just go ahead, what’s mine is yours.” But people who haven’t made such an arrangement? They still need to be asked prior to each insertion. It’s not optional. It’s not Galloway’s role to say that it is.

  • Rape, legitimate and illegitimate

    Round 873 of “there’s rape and then there’s just getting a little frisky.”

    Naomi McAuliffe lays it out.

    Yesterday, US Representative Todd Akin reinvented female biology by telling us that we can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape”. But there is a rich history of rape being redefined to suit the occasion; whether it is former Presidential candidate Ron Paul’s concession that victims of “honest rape” can get an abortion or the Roman Polanski rape of a 13 year-old which wasn’t “rape-rape”.

    All of these manoeuvres have an ulterior motive – either to outlaw abortion in all circumstances or to exonerate an accused celebrity. What they can all draw on and feed is the belief that there is “bad rape” and “excusable-under-the-circumstances-well-not-really-very-rapey rape”. While we roll our collective eyes on the issue of abortion and say “Well that’s the Christian Right in America for you”, the defence of some Grand Men uses the same intellectual dishonesty.

    It is dishonest because it is 50 years since the sexual revolution and yet some still relegate women’s rights at the first sign of trouble.

    Don’t they though. That’s where we came in. “Uh oh – you’re saying I can’t ask a woman to hook up whenever I get the opportunity?” Women’s rights relegated! “Uh oh – Richard Dawkins thinks this is a fuss about nothing?” Women’s rights relegated! ”Uh oh –  women are saying skeptic gatherings can be shitty for women?” Women’s rights relegated! ”Uh oh – women are criticizing things DJ Grothe said?” Women’s rights relegated!

    We know that myths propagated globally about condoms which in turn contribute to high HIV/AIDs rates. We know that women not being able to insist on condom use leads to higher STI infections and unwanted pregnancies. We know that women and men should be able to insist on when and how they have sex without coercion. And yet when a woman alleges that a request to use a condom was refused in Sweden then, well, it’s not treated as a credible rape allegation.

    Assange supporters need to deploy mind-bending feats to dismiss these allegations. They need to forget everything they know about sexual rights, about sexual equality, about due process, about the rule of law and about justice.

    And they have to name one of Assange’s accusers on Newsnight, as Craig Murray just did, even though that’s…against the law.

     

     

     

  • Soraya Chemaly on Todd Akin

    Akin’s statement and philosophy are consistent with conservative’s deep mistrust of women.

  • What we say when the temperature goes up

    A little more about this one crux in Jean’s argument about two types of skeptics-about-feminism (or particular feminist claims), because I think it is one place a lot of wheels came off, so better understanding might help…at least with understanding.

    To rehearse the claim again:

    The respectable skeptic may be on board with all substantive feminist goals, but they lean very liberal on sexual issues and libertarian-ish on rules and codes. They may also have distinctive positions on purely empirical matters, like how often harassing incidents occur, and what the impact is of discussing them at blogs. Their views on what will advance the status of women may also be distinctive. It strikes me as inflammatory and distorted to accuse these people of misogyny, or even of being anti-feminists.  Even if some of these people dress their views in provocative clothing, underneath it all they do not have troubling attitudes toward women. 

    One (I didn’t go into this in yesterday’s post) – a skeptic who leans very liberal (in the sense of free-to-X) on sexual issues and very libertarian on rules and codes can seem to be bordering on misogynist, or if not misogynist at least rudely indifferent to what other people want, which, when the other people in question are women, is hard to distinguish from sexism (if not misogyny).

    I’ve had arguments about this. I had some with James Onen of Freethought Kampala, and (as I think I’ve mentioned) it was kind of a friendship-ender (which I considered unfortunate). He’s adamantly libertarian about when and where it’s ok to ask a woman for sex. I tried to suggest a sufficiently absurd example, but he was consistent – yes, he would simply go up to a woman at a supermarket and ask her to come home with him.

    Ok here’s the thing about that: that describes life in places like that neighborhood in Brussels in Sofie Peeters’s short film. It describes my experience in Paris at age 17. It describes life in Cairo. It describes places where women (young desirable women) can’t go out in public without being pestered by men demanding sex. It’s hellish. Absolutely hellish. I pointed that out to James, and he was content with it.

    That feels sexist to me. It feels like men saying “what I want is more important than what women might want.”

    So that’s one part of the problem. There’s not a clean break. There’s not a place where you can think the skeptics are just talking about principles of liberty as opposed to their own inclination to be able to demand sex whenever they feel like it. It feels hostile and callous.

    So that all by itself makes it very very hard to think of that kind of skeptic as an ally really but there’s just this disagreement on this one thing.

    The other I did mention yesterday, but I’ll go into it a little more. It’s this business of the way the sexist jokes or taunts or allusions come out when tempers rise.

    It’s this: if that’s what happens when tempers rise, then you have to think that means something. If I started using anti-Semitic epithets when I got angry at a Jewish friend, that would mean something. Men who suddenly lapse into what looks startlingly like very ordinary bar-room jeering at women when they get angry at perceived feminism…well they kind of give the game away. They kind of reveal that they are at least a little bit misogynist. So I can’t join Jean in her confidence that “underneath it all they do not have troubling attitudes toward women.” I’m not at all sure of that. I wish I were, I wish I could be, but I can’t and I’m not.

  • Republican party tries to back away from Akin

    No money for the Senate campaign, he is told.

  • Austria Freedom Party condemned for Nazi-like cartoon

    A caricature of a banker with a hooked nose, wearing Star of David cufflinks? Yes, that’s Nazi-like.

  • If women have choices

    What do you do when women attain not only equality but, in some areas, numerical superiority?

    Well if those areas are things like doing most of the domestic work, or low pay, or getting hassled in the street, you do nothing. But when those areas are desirable things like university education?

    You slam the door on them, so that they won’t have any numerical superiority any more. You make sure there won’t be more women than men graduating from universities by not letting so god damn many women in in the first place.

    In Iran,

    36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be “single gender” and effectively exclusive to men.

    It follows years in which Iranian women students have outperformed men, a trend at odds with the traditional male-dominated outlook of the country’s religious leaders. Women outnumbered men by three to two in passing this year’s university entrance exam.

    Senior clerics in Iran’s theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.

    Yes, that is a worry. Always. If women have choices about what to do with their lives, many of them will not get married very young, many of them will not start having children very young, many of them will have one or two children instead of five or ten. Some will not get married at all, some will not have children at all. That’s how it is when people have choices – many of them will decide for themselves what kinds of lives they want to have. (Many, not all. Some will do the expected thing, or submit to pressure, or make mistakes that commit them to lives they never actually chose to have.)

    Theocrats, naturally, think that’s an outrage. They think god wants people to have the kinds of lives that god thinks they should have, and they also think they know that, and they also think they know that what god wants should be binding on humans.

    So they move to stunt and truncate the lives of women, and to take choices away from them, so that they will revert to marrying young and having children young and often, because of their lack of choices.

    Under the new policy, women undergraduates will be excluded from a broad range of studies in some of the country’s leading institutions, including English literature, English translation, hotel management, archaeology, nuclear physics, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering and business management.

    The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.

    Shirin Ebadi has written to Ban Ki Moon and to Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights.

    Ebadi, a human rights lawyer exiled in the UK, said the real agenda was to reduce the proportion of female students to below 50% – from around 65% at present – thereby weakening the Iranian feminist movement in its campaign against discriminatory Islamic laws.

    “[It] is part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena,” says the letter, which was also sent to Ahmad Shaheed, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Iran. “The aim is that women will give up their opposition and demands for their own rights.”

    …

    However, the science and higher education minister, Kamran Daneshjoo, dismissed the controversy, saying that 90% of degrees remain open to both sexes and that single-gender courses were needed to create “balance”.

    Because if women ever have more of a good thing than men do, that’s “imbalance.” This principle does not hold true in the other direction.

  • Iran bans women from 77 BA and BSc courses

    Mullahs are concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.

  • There will be unicorns in Ecuador next

    I’m watching this episode of The Point  on atheism.

    The first item was a clip of James Randi, who started by saying there are two kinds of atheist, those who say there is no god, and those who say they can’t find any evidence for god. My version of the second one is different: it’s that I don’t know of any good reason to think there’s a god. That includes evidence, but it’s more than that.

    Seen it?

  • Underneath it all

    Jean Kazez has a good post on the backlash against feminism today. She warns against exaggerating the size of the backlash specific to atheism, and says the issues boil down to skepticism about various claims. She then makes a distinction between two types of backlasher.

    The respectable skeptic may be on board with all substantive feminist goals, but they lean very liberal on sexual issues and libertarian-ish on rules and codes. They may also have distinctive positions on purely empirical matters, like how often harassing incidents occur, and what the impact is of discussing them at blogs. Their views on what will advance the status of women may also be distinctive. It strikes me as inflammatory and distorted to accuse these people of misogyny, or even of being anti-feminists.  Even if some of these people dress their views in provocative clothing, underneath it all they do not have troubling attitudes toward women. 

    The second group is another matter. These are people who are seized by a desire to attack women when there’s the least hint of a question about male behavior at blogs and conferences. The notion of codes being imposed on their behavior sends them into a rage.  These are the people whose existence you have to find surprising … and very disturbing.  At the very least, they’re seriously lacking in empathy. Some of them even seem to feel an awful lot of hatred. I don’t know how numerous they are, but too numerous–and their ranks seem to be growing too.

    She thinks it’s important not to treat group 1 as enemies, because they’re not, and because doing so inflames group 2. I’m not sure about that second claim – I think group 2 are kind of self-inflaming. But the first one is right. But there’s a problem…

    It’s the bit about the provocative clothing. Let’s call it provocation, for short, so as not to confuse it with the more familiar meaning of “provocative clothing,” which is obviously not what’s meant.

    When provocation is repeated enough, or strong enough, or done at a turbulent enough time…Well it’s a problem. Endless jokes about coffee and elevators at a time when Rebecca Watson is being systematically trashed don’t seem like just casual harmless jokes – in fact what they feel like is, precisely, buried misogyny coming out of hiding. Maybe that’s not what they are. But how is one to know? By the same token, swapping jokes and taunts with group 2 also feels like misogyny coming out of hiding. Calling disagreed-with feminists Feminazis and Femistasi does too. So does endlessly tweeting and retweeting blog posts by people in group 2.

    Group 1 doesn’t come across as quite as different from group 2 as Jean describes them. Now, this is in large part because they started small but took flack anyway – in short, they got pissed off. They got pissed off so they threw in their lot with group 2. They’re now quite entangled with group 2, although they’re certainly not identical with it.

    So, I see what Jean is getting at, but I don’t know what if anything can be done about it at this stage.