Author: Ophelia Benson

Wow. Just…wow.

Took in Richard Dawkins doing a reading, question-answering, and book-signing for his most-recent publication tonight, in a sold-out theater at the U of Toronto…The theater contains around 600 seats, and of the 80 people I counted, about two dozen were women. That’s approximately 30%. By comparison, Ophelia Benson was carping yesterday about women only comprising 20% (i.e., 4 out of 21) of the speakers at the Atheist Alliance conference. I say that the latter figure is within engineering/experimental accuracy (or whatever confidence interval), especially since the speakers at any conference should be from at least the top 20% of the professionals in it; and unless the conference is a Celebration of Womynstruation, you’ll already be “scraping the bottom of the top of the barrel” to get to within 10%, in caliber and quantity of work.

Wow. Because he (Geoffrey Falk) doesn’t know that – at least I’m pretty sure he doesn’t, because he doesn’t show that he does, and because I don’t, and because I think it is not obvious from the whole list. That was my point – not ‘hey why just Dawkins and Coyne and Dennett and no women’ but ‘hey why those 17 men and only 4 women’ – given that the men farther down the list aren’t such obvious candidates as Dawkins and Coyne and Dennett. It’s not remotely obvious that all 17 men on the list are ‘from at least the top 20% of the professionals in’ atheism – whatever that would even mean (atheism not being much of a profession, as far as I know).

And, of course, it’s also not even faintly obvious that ‘you’ll already be “scraping the bottom of the top of the barrel” to get to within 10%, in caliber and quantity of work.’ It’s merely assumed that that’s the case. We talked about some of the Name female atheists who could have been invited; some Name female atheists are in fact bigger Names than some of the male atheists on the list. We now know that the AAI did invite some Name female atheists who didn’t accept, such as Taslima Nasreen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Katha Pollitt. We also now know that it’s possible to lobby to be invited to these things and that it’s possible that some of the men on the list lobbied to get on it. What we don’t know is that under 10% of all high-caliber high-productivity atheists are women.

As an indication of how blinded people can be by their twisted little half-wit ideologies, I doubt that the question of racial representation on that panel has even occurred to Benson. But really, if she’s not happy about women being a mere 20% (translation: less than half) of the speakers at Ye Olde Convention, she should be just as unhappy about the races not being proportionately represented, even independent of their actual contributions to the field. (“Meritocracy? We don’t need no steenking meritocracy!” No, what they want is “fairness,” where every group gets the same rewards, regardless of whether or not they’ve worked for them. You can see how such people would be strongly attracted to socialism/Marxism, no?) Otherwise, you see, she’s a racist bitch.

Except that that’s just what I didn’t say. I think we decidedly do need stinking meritocracy, despite the psychic and other drawbacks to meritocracy. One reason I loathed the Bush presidency was because it was so wildly defiantly insanely anti-meritocratic; ditto the Palin candidacy. One thing I love about Obama is that he never plays dumb – he never spits in the eye of the meritocracy that got him where he is. No, I don’t want automatic numeric “fairness,” and I never said I did. But I think wild disproportion needs some explaining.

As for all the other nonsense – one, women are half the population – so if they are under-represented, that is not a small issue. Two, I have no idea what the racial makeup of the list is, so any disproportion there might be didn’t jump out at me the way the male-female ratio did. Three, of course, it’s my ox that was being gored – but then I did say that. Yes, I fight my corner sometimes. So?

That lively contribution to the debate led me to an earlier intervention that was also quite…sparkling.

Falk challenges some post about representation in desert island discs (I didn’t read it) and then goes on…

I wound up on that utterly insane posting indirectly via Ophelia Benson’s slightly less nutty feministing about how only four of the twenty-one speakers at the upcoming Atheist Alliance International conference are women. They certainly could have invited her. Female, atheist, two cogent (if not particularly page-turning) albeit co-written books to her credit, no taint of the sin of “white male privilege” (though still not purged of the sin of being white—and thus inherently privileged—in general; not that I can recall her ever owning up to that obvious issue, as basic consistency would demand).

Three books! Not two; three.Co-written, but three.

The 4/21 number is obviously not “Because there are no atheist women.” But when you’re talking about the upper echelon in the field, i.e., the people who’ve published the most high-quality material … are you certain that more than ~20% of the best in the field have tits? (Benson barely does; but I digress.) Are you sure that the one-in-five number isn’t just the product of, you know, meritocracy?

Fascinating, isn’t it?

I was talking just the other day about how quickly and how easily a lot of men fall into sexist taunts the instant a woman disagrees with them or they disagree with her. Well…I wasn’t making it up. (No, I haven’t the slightest idea how he thinks he knows.)

He goes on to discuss my intellectual limitations, which is fair; he points out that I’ll never have a Big Idea, which I certainly agree with. I’m at most a commentator of some kind, I’m certainly not an originator. Then he raises an interesting question.

And I still really doubt that she would have ever figured out what a menace Islam is—or maybe even that multiculturalism doesn’t work—if it didn’t disproportionately affect her (female) group negatively. Sure, Islam, theocracy and Sharia law are against every principle of classical liberalism; but if those (or socialism, or communism) benefited women, and helped them get even with the (esp. white) men who’ve had it so easy and been so privileged for so long…

And that’s where it ends. Well…yes, and? If…then what? If Islam, theocracy and Sharia law benefited women, then they would do vastly less harm than they do as things are, so my opinion of them would be very different. And? I mean, if Nazism hadn’t had such a thing about Jews, then Nazism would have been very different, and so would people’s opinions of it be. There would still be other things wrong with Islam, theocracy and Sharia, but there would be fewer such things, and they would be less savage. I would still be opposed to them, but things would be different. Falk says that if things were different then they would be different. Well yes, I quite agree, but I don’t see that as suspect the way he apparently does.

He may well be right about his first point. But there again – my ‘(female) group’ is after all half of all humans. That’s a lot of people being ‘negatively affected’ (I would just say harmed, it’s so much blunter and simpler).

Woof.

Melanie McDonagh doesn’t want to hear that old dreary stuff about the Catholic church, thanks all the same.

The old gibe, that anti-Catholicism is the antisemitism of the left, looked like being given a new lease of life.

Is that an old jibe? (I don’t get out much.) Well if so it’s a very stupid one. Leftish anti-Catholicism is about real actions and commands by the Catholic church and its clergy. It’s substantive – it’s about something. What is anti-semitism ‘about’? Catholicism has a lot of substance to get to grips with. It has a hierarchy, and a state, and a long history of official actions and institutions (the inquisition, the index, wars, corruption – little things like that). It gives us its official thoughts at frequent intervals. It applies pressure to governments and politicians. It is an institution. It has power. It runs schools and orphanages and charities, and it doesn’t always run them well, or kindly. Is any of that true of ‘semitism’? No. Some of it (though not much) applies to Judaism, but ‘semitism,’ no. So McDonagh’s ‘old gibe’ is not worth much.

What’s to say about Africa and Aids? Except that if the pope were as omnipotent as people make out, he’d be able to make individuals subscribe to the whole package of Catholic teaching on sexuality, on fidelity within marriage and chastity, not just condoms. I’ve never quite been able to believe in Catholics – Africans or otherwise – who are so scrupulous that they couldn’t possibly use condoms, but will resort to prostitutes.

But that doesn’t explain why the pope is trying to get people to obey his instructions not to use condoms. And it ignores the obvious fact that men don’t want to use condoms anyway and the ‘church teaching’ provides a handy excuse. Has McDonagh never heard the term bareback? If not she should pay more attention, if she’s going to write about the church and condoms. And she doesn’t explain why a slow nasty death is the appropriate punishment for people who don’t ‘subscribe to the whole package of Catholic teaching on sexuality.’ And she doesn’t explain why people – mostly women – who don’t have sex with anyone but their husbands should be punished for their husbands’ sex lives combined with refusal to use condoms; nor does she explain why children should be included in the punishment. She explains pretty much nothing – she just makes a smug crack and lets it go at that.

Woof.

Allow me to make a banal observation: it can be very hard to know how one is coming across, just as it can be very hard to know what other people mean by how they are coming across. It’s all just very difficult! Which is just as well, in some ways – we don’t want to be totally transparent – we don’t want our every gesture and intonation to be unambiguous and indisputable, like 2+2=4. We want a little flexibility, some shading, some room to maneuver – some doubt.

But in other ways it can be tiresome. We may misunderstand other people, and they may misunderstand us, and that’s not always helpful. I’ve just read the Zoë Heller novel The Believers; one of the main characters is a woman who started out in her youth being interestingly and amusingly irascible, so that people would say ‘get Audrey in here to talk to that jerk, she’ll soon sort him out’; but forty years later it dawned on her that what is charming in a young woman is repellent in an old one. That realization wasn’t as poignant or whatever it was supposed to be as it could have been because Audrey is so exaggerated – she is always bad-tempered and rude and just plain unpleasant, she is always on one note and not particularly amusing on that one note. But still – she does stand for something. One can think one is simply being forthright and clear, and then discover that to other people one is being mean and a bully and much too aggressive.

Especially, of course, if one is a woman. It’s a very familiar trope of second-wave feminism that what is seen as leadership and decisiveness in a man will be seen as aggression or ball-breaking in a woman. But that doesn’t mean no woman can possibly be too aggressive. It may however mean that a woman who thinks she is more indignant than aggressive will be surprised to be told otherwise.

This becomes all the more complicated when what the woman is irritable, or indignant, or aggressive about is itself something to do with her being a woman – when she reacts with hostility to a sexist jibe, for example. It may be that she reacts with hostility to sexist jibes on principle, as well as out of actual hostility. She may think that sexist jibes shouldn’t just be ignored or laughed off or brushed aside. We talked about this last month, but of course new occasions are always arising. So…women are kind of stuck, frankly. Damned if they do damned if they don’t. Stuck with sexist jibes if they don’t, seen as aggressive if they do.

Well no, that’s not entirely true. One can be skilled at calibrating one’s response, one can be firm but fair, and so on. But…sometimes one just wants to bark when yet another sexist taunt comes along. So one does. Woof.