Author: Ophelia Benson

I mentioned this in a comment but in case you didn’t see that: CFI is doing a Women and Secularism conference in Washington DC next May 18-20.

Speakers will include (in alphabetical order) Ophelia Benson, Jamila Bey, Greta Christina, Elisabeth Cornwell, Margaret Downey, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Sikivu Hutchinson, Susan Jacoby, Jennifer McCreight, Wafa Sultan, and Rebecca Watson.

Be there.

Perhaps I will do a talk on sexist epithets…

No good. Bad. Islamists are having success in Egypt.

It is already clear that the liberal-minded parties that have been the focus of
much Western media attention are not doing well as the competition hots up…

When a protest was called in Tahrir Square late last week, it was known the
Islamists would dominate it. But the numbers brought in by the Salafists far
exceeded even those the Muslim Brotherhood could muster.

The Salafists favour an Islamic state, with Sharia law, as soon as possible,
whereas the Brotherhood has emphasised the separation of state and religion – at least for the time being.

Hundreds of thousands of Salafists came to the square – many waving the flag of Al Nour or “The Light”, the party they have established to contest the
elections.

Oh, shit.

One Westernised Cairo woman who was shocked by this show of strength said to me “I think I will have to leave Egypt”.

Bad.

[Update August 19. I’ve edited this, and I’m going to edit some of the comments. Very Orwellian; very memory-hole. Yes; too bad. I disagree with myself about much of this now, so I want to get rid of the worst of it, and thus the worst of the comments it triggered. I make mistakes. It happens.]

Sexist epithets. The subject keeps coming back. We think we’ve killed it and then it pops up again, undead. The disagreements of the past month have brought it back more robust than ever and fifty times as large.

Russell Blackford has astonished me by consistently brushing them aside as unimportant. I’m pretty sure that in one of the many epithet-discussions we’ve had here he told me he’d stopped using “bitch” because of what I and others had been saying. I seem to have lost my influence.

A lot of people whom I’d believed sensible are showing irrational streaks over this issue. E.g. it’s not that hard seeing what Watson did wrong – but some folks seem determined to protect her at all costs…

Likewise, we’ve been getting totally unnuanced discussions of insults like “twat”. I don’t actually like these, either,  as it happens, because I think there is at least tendency for them  to express and reproduce sexist attitudes …but not everything is the same, and it’s possible to tease out the distinctions analytically and dispassionately. (E.g. I’m far more worried about the use of “cunt” as an insult, because its primary meaning is still the female pudenda; whereas “twat” has lost that meaning to some considerable extent. I think that “fool” is now its *primary* meaning.)

Not here it isn’t. In the UK and Australia/New Zealand maybe, but not in the US – and even in the UK and Australia/New Zealand it hasn’t completely shed its misogynist aspect; not all women even there think it’s perfectly all right. I set off a discussion of the subject on the WMST list a year or so ago and there were a lot of emphatic comments from UK/Aus/NZ women saying hell no it’s not ok.

Anyway – this business of teasing out the distinctions analytically and dispassionately – that’s a lot easier for people who are not named by the epithets than it is for people who are. That is (I almost regret to say, at this point) a textbook example of privilege. When people throw around cunt and twat and fucking bitch and smelly snatch, they’re not naming Russell. They are naming me. I can be dispassionate and analytical about the (putative) distinctions under some circumstances, but not under all. I can’t do it when a mouthy woman is being called those things in public over and over and over and over again. I’m not dispassionate about that. I can’t be.

A Christian midwife is suing a hospital for making her wear trousers in the operating theatre…She cites a command in the Book of Deuteronomy that people should not wear clothing meant for the other gender.

Yes but even if you think that’s an acceptable reason for someone to refuse to follow a job requirement (and why would you think that?), what makes Hannah Adewole so sure that trousers have always been boy-clothing and skirts have always been girl-clothing? What makes anyone sure what clothing was “meant” for “the other gender”?

Nothing; it’s just that people associate the most prissy option in any particular situation with “what god has always meant” and pitch fits accordingly, by way of letting everyone know how pious they are and getting their names in the papers.

Well good. Good good good. The Vatican is tired of being the eternal victim and is finally standing up for itself. What a relief – I’m so sick of watching people ride roughshod over it.

The papal nuncio is set to deliver a strong response to the Cloyne Report before the end of August, rebuffing the Taoiseach’s accusation the Vatican undermined child protection guidelines…

The Vatican has been exasperated by reports claiming Archbishop Leanza was being moved to Prague in the Czech Republic as a mark of his disfavour with his superiors in Rome.

I should think so! Poor Vatican, being talked about behind its back in that shameful way. If there’s anything the Vatican hates it’s gossip.

In its response, the Vatican will point out the  weakness of Irish state monitoring of child abuse. And it will insist that the Taoiseach’s comments failed to recognise the efforts of Pope Benedict XVI to ensure bishops comply with national laws.

The Government will also be told that the seal of the confession is
sacrosanct.

And that therefore priests and bishops have every right to ignore the law and do whatever they like, so children will just have to put up with it.