Author: Ophelia Benson

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, and the book is, in part, a protective reflex against them growing up to idolize Kim Kardashian and spend half their disposable income on depilation. It also springs from her horror at the shuffling unwillingness of many women to claim a use for feminism.

…

“Why,” she writes in a section about the agony of walking in stilettos, “do we believe that wearing heels is an intrinsic part of being a woman, despite knowing it doesn’t work?” She blasts the ironic reclamation of strip clubs as somehow empowering to women and slams actresses and models as women whose careers are built on pandering to sexist stereotypes.

That sounds radical. Watch out!

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 cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do. David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism, and his own novels bear this out, as do those of Michael Frayn and other male novelists who started writing in the ’50s or ’60s. The pre-1970 female characters are non-entities, the post-1970 ones–Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, Kate in Headlong–take up a lot of space. The very way women are perceived and noticed and thought about changed with feminism, and that would not have happened if mere institutional reform had been the only goal.

The way women are perceived and noticed and thought about changed with feminism, and that’s a good thing. It’s not better to have half of humanity perceived as just a little cleverer than the family dog.

But there are radical ideas and then there are radical ideas. One of the less helpful ones was difference feminism. The foundations of this shaky edifice were laid in the ’70s, when a popular rhetorical move was to label many usually well-thought-of attributes and tools–reason, logic, science, “linear” thinking, abstract ideas, analysis, objectivity, argument–as male, and dub their opposite female. So by a contortion that defies “male” logic, it somehow became feminist to confine women all over again to intuition, guesswork, instinct, feelings, subjectivity, and arm-waving.

If you’re going to rant and rave about feminism gone wrong, rant and rave about that. Don’t rant and rave about women refusing to be treated as inferiors; that’s the wrong thing to object to.

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 bra size, said “take off your shirt” and focused the team’s webcam on her chest, feet and legs. He leaned in over her shoulder and smelled her.

Ms. Pakozdi, 25, an experienced gamer, has said she always expects a certain amount of trash talk. But as the only woman on the team, this was too much, especially from her coach, she said. It was after she overheard Mr. Bakhtanians defending sexual harassment as part of “the fighting game community” that she forfeited the game.

Mr. Bakhtanians sounds confused – he thought he was supposed to be harassing a player on his own team?

Sexism, racism, homophobia and general name-calling are longstanding facts of life in certain corners of online video games. But the Cross Assault episode was the first of a series this year that have exposed the severity of the harassment that many women experience in virtual gaming communities.

And a backlash — on Twitter, in videos, on blogs and even in an online comic strip — has moved the issue beyond endless debate among gaming insiders to more public calls for change.

We’re doing that too!

Executives in the $25 billion-a-year industry are taking note. One game designer’s online call for civility prompted a meeting with Microsoft executives about how to better police Xbox Live. In February, shortly after the Cross Assault tournament, LevelUp, an Internet broadcaster of gaming events, barred two commentators who made light of sexual harassment on cameraand issued a formal apology, including statements from the commentators.

Even so, Tom Cannon, co-founder of the largest fighting game tournament, EVO, pulled his company’s sponsorship of the weekly LevelUp series, saying that “we cannot continue to let ignorant, hateful speech slide.”

“The nasty undercurrent in the scene isn’t a joke or a meme,” he said. “It’s something we need to fix.”

People in this scene are saying that too.

Like Ms. Sarkeesian, many women gamers are documenting their experiences on blogs like “Fat, Ugly or Slutty” (whose name comes from the typical insults women receive while playing against others online). It cheekily catalogs the slurs, threats and come-ons women receive while playing games like Resident Evil or Gears of War 3.

Men call me things.

Just as on the broader Internet, there are people who delight in piquing anger or frustration in others, or “trolling.” For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target.

“They treat the Internet like a vast game,” where offending others scores points, Mr. Toulouse said. But the standard advice to ignore the taunts (“don’t feed the trolls”) is now, in the wake of Ms. Sarkeesian’s treatment, being accompanied by discussions about “how to kill a troll.” And many people are calling for the gaming industry to do more.

Same here.

It’s uncanny, isn’t it.

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 is about 35 blogs, and he admitted “In fairness, I haven’t read everything by every author” – but then added that he didn’t have “a good impression” all the same. Brilliant. Make a sweeping rejection of an entire large blog network on the basis of a sample, and then defend it on the basis of an “impression.” Totally makes sense. So if you dislike a novel by Austen and one by Conrad and one by Anita Desai, it’s reasonable to disparage Penguin Books, because hey, it publishes all three.

It must be catching, because DJ Grothe did the same thing yesterday.

Freethought Blogs, anyone? “@alaindebotton: The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”

Kylie Sturgess pointed out that she’s on FTB, and DJ replied

Of course I mean the bigger and more polemic blogs. Sorry for the confusion. I don’t consider you an ideologue/polemicist.

Oh of course – so it’s quite all right to disparage the whole network because “of course” you mean “the bigger and more polemic blogs” – plus it’s quite all right to disparage “the bigger and more polemic blogs” as opposed to just spelling out exactly what you mean and what you object to. Go ahead, don’t be shy – just use your platform to trash other people but keep it vague for the sake of deniability.

I keep wondering why the people who were and are in such a rage at Rebecca for misusing her position to rebuke someone lower down the chain…are so silent on the way DJ uses his position as president of a major organization to rebuke bloggers.

Kylie protested again, as well she might, and DJ replied again.

 I was guilty of generalizing, but not stereotyping per se. Your blog network is identified w/ its prominent bloggers most

Therefore it’s quite all right to damage bystanders in the effort to smear FTB’s “prominent bloggers.”

Can’t we all just get along? Obviously not.

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 out in response to the fear that someone might actually expect them to treat another human being with respect. They aren’t decent people disagreeing, they’re part of the problem. We don’t have to exclude them from these conversations; they’ve excluded themselves.

Yes them! Those are the ones we mean.

Read the whole thing.

British Olympic weightlifter Zoe Smith, that is. Sexist trolls expressed indignation and shock that she’s not dainty enough for their taste. She pointed out on her blog that their taste isn’t high on her list of concerns.

This may be shocking to you, but we actually would rather be attractive to people who aren’t closed-minded and ignorant. Crazy, eh?! We, as any women with an ounce of self-confidence would, prefer our men to be confident enough in themselves to not feel emasculated by the fact that we aren’t weak and feeble.

Which is much like what Ernest Adams said last week: good men are not threatened by strength and intelligence in women. What kind of men are threatened by women like that? I leave it to your wisdom to determine.

The economy is in the ditch, but the Templeton Foundation keeps handing out money in units of a million to finance “research” into various wings of religion.

Millions of people fervently believe in an afterlife. John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, is not one of them.

But Mr. Fischer does see the subject as ripe for academic research, and on Tuesday the John Templeton Foundation awarded him a windfall to make that happen—$5-million for a multidisciplinary investigation of human immortality.

It’s a great pity that atheism has no Templeton Foundation. I wouldn’t mind being handed 5 million bucks to investigate secular ethics or the roots of sexism or where to find the best gelato.

The Immortality Project will invite research proposals from philosophers, theologians, and scientists. Stressing interdisciplinary projects, it will award grants ranging from $100,000 to $250,000. There will also be two conferences and a Web site.

Research  proposals from philosophers, theologians, and scientists. Why theologians? Since when do theologians do research? I understand how historians of religion and biblical scholars can do research, but how can theologians? How do you do research into something that is spiritual, metaphysical, not there to be investigated?

Can I have a grant to look into it?

I’m late with # 6 in Surly Amy’s series. It’s David Niose, the president of the American Humanist Association, this time.

Extract:

The blogosphere has rarely been known for its high sense of decorum, but the vile comments recently directed toward women in the atheist-humanist-skeptic communities give us reason for pause. Occasional disagreements within our communities on various issues are to be expected, as are the fiery tempers that sometimes accompany such disagreements. Given our strong opinions and our willingness to stand up for what we believe, it would be more surprising if we went a lengthy time period without some kind of high-profile clash occurring. But still, the inevitability of conflict in no way justifies any kind of conduct, whether by written communication or otherwise, that utilizes violent intimidation. As atheists-humanists-skeptics, and as decent human beings, we need to do what we can to create an environment that reflects an understanding of the difference between healthy debate and threatening conduct, between mature discourse and hateful bullying.

 

I wasn’t as keen on him lately as I once was, because of the conspiracy-thought and the sympathetic view of Timothy McVeigh and the like…but still, he was a hell of an essayist.

Not a very good novelist, I always thought, but a brilliant essayist. Orwell was the same. Some people just shouldn’t write fiction; it’s odd when they don’t realize it.

The Times obit says I’m not the only one who thinks so.

In the opinion of many critics, though, Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays, many of them written for The New York Review of Books. His collection “The Second American Revolution” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982. About a later collection, “United States: Essays 1952-1992,” R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Vidal the essayist was “so good that we cannot do without him,” adding, “He is a treasure of state.”

Mr. Vidal’s essays were literary, resurrecting the works of forgotten writers like Dawn Powell and William Dean Howells, and also political, taking on issues like sexuality and cultural mores. The form suited him ideally: he could be learned, funny, stylish, show-offy and incisive all at once. Even Jason Epstein, Mr. Vidal’s longtime editor at Random House, once admitted that he preferred the essays to the novels, calling Mr. Vidal “an American version of Montaigne.”

“I always thought about Gore that he was not really a novelist,” Mr. Epstein wrote, “that he had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn’t subordinate himself to other people the way you have to as a novelist.”

Learned, funny, stylish, show-offy and incisive all at once – much like Hitchens, which is no doubt why Vidal named Hitch his “heir” about fifteen years ago. Hitchens used that as a blurb afterwards; he was very proud of it.

More dreck from LifeSiteNews. (This may become an absorbing new hobby. LifeSiteNews is a real swamp of nasty.)

Shock-horror: Obama wants (and says he wants) his daughters to have reproductive rights. Imagine that! He wants them not to be trapped by unwanted pregnancies if they don’t choose to be. (That’s not a tautology. Some women choose to continue pregnancies that they don’t want.) LSN wants to lose its lunch at the thought.

Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood. I think that’s a bad idea. I’ve got two daughters. I want them to control their own health care choices. We’re not going backwards, we’re going forwards.

We all know the word “choice” is a euphemism for “abortion.” And the fight to defund Planned Parenthood is all about abortion. So clear as mud, Obama was advocating the freedom for his daughters to abort his own grandchildren.

Yes – because his daughters’ bodies belong to them, not to him.

Rejoice rejoice: bigots are rushing to support Chick-fil-A from the evil creeping homoseckshuals.

Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day invites pro-traditional-marriage fans to support the fast food chain by “simply showing up and eating at Chick-fil-A on Wednesday, August 1.”

“No one is being asked to make signs, speeches, or openly demonstrate. The goal is simple: Let’s affirm a business that operates on Christian principles and whose executives are willing to take a stand for the Godly values we espouse.”

The sign-up has already surpassed 209,000 people, with 23,000 “maybes” and another 1.6 million invited.

Only 1.6 million invited? Slackers.

And now a word from the bigots. The creepy LifeSiteNews reports gloatingly that a bakery in Colorado has seen a surge in business after the owner refused to provide a cake for a gay wedding. Isn’t that heart-warming? A little piece of spiteful meanness is popular in Lakewood Colorado.

Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, told local media that this wasn’t the first time he had turned away homosexuals seeking wedding cakes, but it is the first time his stand for Christian principles has resulted in so much media attention and some death threats.

What stand for Christian principles? Where did baby Jesus say don’t provide wedding cakes to gay people who want to get married? Where did Paul say that? Who says that’s Christian principles?

The situation developed on July 19 when two homosexuals entered the shop and announced they were getting “married” in Massachusetts and wanted to order a wedding reception cake for their reception in Colorado.

Jeezis – who runs this site, Francisco Franco? These are some seriously nasty people we’re looking at.

From the About page:

3. LifeSiteNews.com’s writers and its founders, have come to understand that respect for life and family are endangered by an international conflict. That conflict is between radically opposed views of the worth and dignity of every human life and of family life and community. It has been caused by secularists attempting to eliminate Christian morality and natural law principles which are seen as the primary obstacles to implementing their new world order.

4. LifeSiteNews.com understands that abortion, euthanasia, cloning, homosexuality and all other moral, life and family issues are all interconnected in an international conflict affecting all nations, even at the most local levels. LifeSiteNews attempts to provide its readers with the big picture and the most useful and up-to-date information on this conflict.

Mm. Vicious and paranoiac. Fabulous.

The Islamists who grabbed power in northern Mali have settled in and gotten comfortable. On Sunday they stuck a woman and a man in two vertical holes in the ground, leaving just their heads exposed, and threw stones at them until they were dead. They did this in front of 200 people.

Mali’s government has expressed disgust.

“The government learned with indignation and astonishment of the stoning to death of a couple in Aguelhok by the extremists occupying northern Mali,” read a statement from the communication ministry.

“At the same time as it expresses its sympathy to the families of the victims, the government severely condemns this dark-age practice and assures that this act will not go unpunished.”

Compassion is at the heart of every great religion.