The Auckland University Students’ Association’s Womenfest started today.

They have this note on their Facebook page for the event:

★ ★ ★ NOTE ★ ★ ★

Following the recent comments on the Womensfest schedule, and consultation with members of the trans community at the University of Auckland, we have made the decision to cancel the ‘Vagina Cupcakes’ and will not be continuing with ‘Pussytails’ at our ‘Reclaim Shadows’ Closing Party. We have also decided to disable posts on this event, after the invasion of the previous event by people seeking to make it unsafe for the trans and queer community. Anyone who wishes to engage with AUSA constructively on Womensfest are welcome to contact us at wro@ausa.org.nz.

So there you go. Feminist women aren’t allowed to talk frankly about their bodies at the Womensfest event.

Salman Rushdie on the Je Reste Charlie project.

It is important that we take a stand. That we stand firm. That we say: This is the world in which we want to live. And in order to live in this world, it must be all right for these cartoons to exist. We must not try to apologize for them. We must also not try to excuse the attack on Charlie Hebdo, by showing understanding for the attackers. Stand firm! If we want to live in an open society, then the acceptance of such cartoons is part of this. What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form as such doesn’t exist. The form of a cartoon demands disrespect. Satire requires us to make fun of people, to laugh at them. Whoever they may be. The more powerful they are, the better. Stand firm! This is what it’s all about. It is important that we say today: This is the boundary line. It may not be erased.

However, there is a combination between a mood of appeasement and political correctness in the air currently, especially on the left. This was demonstrated recently, when the writers’ association PEN wanted to honor the Charlie Hebdo magazine for its courage in fighting for freedom of expression – and a number of writers protested. Many of them found the assassination in Paris terrible, but honoring the survivors they found to be self-righteous, moreover it would hurt the feelings of Muslims. There it was again – this but. I found it strange that this attitude had now been articulated by left-wing writers. I knew many of them, I was friends with some of them – Peter Carey or Michael Ondaatje for example. Following the publication of my novel “The Satanic Verses” and everything that followed, I had to listen to similar accusations to those which are today being expressed towards Charlie Hebdo. “Rushdie knew exactly what he was doing”, it was often suggested, “he was provoking deliberately.” Or: “He only did it to become rich and famous.” The bulk of these accusations at that time came from people who were politically on the right. Today, it is the left-wingers who are making almost the same allegations about the satirists at Charlie Hebdo. I think that this is a strange development.

The people at Charlie Hebdo didn’t and don’t like every single cartoon. They dislike some of them. Imagine that!  Jean-Baptiste Thoret told Salman that at the PEN gala.

Jean-Baptiste Thoret told me something very significant that evening: “If people don’t like our cartoons, this is something we can discuss. Perhaps I don’t even like them myself. In our editorial office we were and are constantly arguing about what we should publish and what we shouldn’t. We never all agreed. Every one of us always disliked the half of what we published. It is not a question of whether or not you like the cartoons. If you don’t like them, then come here and tell us. On that one specific detail that you don’t like, perhaps I’m on your side. Or perhaps not.”

Every one of us always disliked the half of what we published. But they didn’t shun each other for liking or disliking half of what they published.

Deeyah Khan has a human rights award from the University of Oslo.

Deeyah Khan has shed an important light on women’s rights and freedom of speech. Her own story serves as a powerful example. As a young Norwegian-Pakistani musician in Norway she experienced being threatened to silence by conservative forces in the Pakistani environment and had to leave Norway at the age of 17.

– Giving Deeyah Khan this award will shed light on the situation of women and women’s rights, but also on a highly acute situation concerning young Muslims’ affiliation with radical Islam and extremism, says Inga Bostad, head of the award committee.

In 2012, Khan received the prestigious Emmy award for best documentary for her film Banaz – a love story about the British-Kurdish woman Banaz who was killed by her own family in a honor killing. Khan has recently released the documentary, Jihad: a story about the others, about young British Muslim men who join violent and extreme jihadism. In this film, Khan sets out to find out why the jihadi message has such an alluring hold on these young Westerners.

In January this year, she organized the World Woman conference, which focused on women, art and freedom of expression. Among the participants were Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. In 2007, Khan contributed in founding the Sisterhood institution, which assists young Muslim women in finding their own creative and artistic language.

– There is a distinct feminist trace in Khans work on freedom of expression. She has taken the initiative to found a number of organizations and institutions that aim to create awareness about women’s situation and their rights, says Bostad.

Khan is currently living and working in London.

The award ceremony is on Tuesday, 17 November 2015, at 1800 in the Old Festive Hall in Karl Johans gate, with subsequent reception for the Laureate.

Congratulations Deeyah!

Speaking of pope Fluffy – Richard Kreitner asks why the hell he’s canonizing Junípero Serra.

Born in Spain, Serra arrived in Spanish-held Mexico in 1749 and quickly set about working for the Inquisition, citing by name several natives who refused to convert to Christianity; they were guilty, he wrote, of “the most detestable and horrible crimes of sorcery, witchcraft and devil worship.” Serra soon gained control of the missions of Baja California, but he found that the native population had already been nearly extinguished by contact with the Spanish. Looking for fresh converts, he led expeditions up the coast into the present-day state of California, where he settled at Monterey and set up ten new missions to spread the gospel through the new land.

To “spread the gospel,” meaning, to coerce the colonized population into adopting the colonizers’ religion.

From their establishment in the late 1760s until Mexico declared independence and secularized them in the 1820s, the California missions formed a network of forced-labor camps and, in effect, slaughterhouses, where the once-vibrant native peoples of California were systematically reduced to mere shadows of their former selves: Under the mission system, the overall indigenous population of Southern California declined by nearly 1,000 every single year.

If they were lucky enough not to be killed by European diseases spread largely through sexual violence on the part of the Spanish, many natives at the missions sought to run away, not terribly unlike African slaves on the East Coast in the United States.

So what is the point of canonizing that?

The summer that is ending saw the beginning of what many of us only a few months ago thought impossible: a serious and fairly intelligent national debate about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War. The proposed canonization of Serra has gained some attention on the West Coast, but almost none in the East. That is because in their grade-school history classes the students of California learn something the rest of us do not: There was not one form of slavery in the territory that is now the United States. There were at least two.

But of course from the point of view of the church, forcing Catholicism on a colonized population is a good and saintly thing to do.

Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, wishes people would not talk about vaccines at presidential “debates.”

Questions about vaccines and autism were asked not only of Donald Trump, but also of the two physicians taking part: Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, and Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist. The doctors, at least, should know better.

Here are the facts:

Vaccines aren’t linked to autism.

The number of vaccines children receive is not more concerning than it used to be.

Delaying their administration provides no benefit, while leaving children at risk.

All the childhood vaccines are important.

Then he provides evidence for all four claims. On the second claim –

It’s also not correct to call autism an “epidemic,” as Mr. Trump often seems to do. Autism is more prevalent as a diagnosis than it used to be. But much of that in recent years is because we’ve changed the definition of what it means to have “autism spectrum disorder.” For instance, 10 years ago, two-thirds of children diagnosed with autism had below-average intelligence. But today only about a third of those diagnosed with A.S.D. do. The fastest-growing group of children with autism have average or above average intelligence. We’re being more inclusive in the diagnosis.

It’s not that it’s happening more, it’s that it’s being diagnosed more. Donald Trump please note…but he won’t, of course.

And no, none of them are “optional.”

All of the shots recommended by the Centers for Disease Control have been judged to be important. I know of some people who think that the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine is one of the “less important” ones. Tell that to my father, who contracted the illness as an adult when my siblings and I did, and almost needed to be hospitalized. Or tell that to the many babies who might catch the disease before they can get the shot and become severely ill.

In one of my favorite studies on this topic, researchers looked at how many children died of varicella before and after the introduction of the vaccine in 1995. Between 1990 and 1994, more than 45 children died with varicella as the underlying cause. From 2003 to 2007, only 10 did. Even more significantly, in that latter period only one child younger than 1 died with varicella as the underlying cause, and none after 2004. Remember that not one of those infants was vaccinated. That result came about only from herd immunity: when enough people are vaccinated to protect those who can’t be.

This shouldn’t be politicized in the first place.

Here is Ahmed Mohamed talking to Chris Hayes yesterday.

He’s still suspended from school though, and his parents are looking for a new and less ridiculous educational facility for him.

Ahmed was still suspended by school officials. He said Wednesday that his family is looking for a new school for him after he was placed in handcuffs.

“I built the clock to impress my teacher, but when I showed it to her, she thought it was a threat to her. So it was really sad she took the wrong impression of it,” Ahmed said at the press conference.

School district spokeswoman Lesley Weaver declined to confirm the suspension, citing privacy laws. Weaver insisted school officials were concerned with student safety and not the boy’s faith.

Oh, so the photo of the all-male group of Famous Late Night TV Hosts was in Vanity Fair. Christina Cauterucci at Slate talks about the reaction and the reaction to the reaction.

The reaction to Monday’s Vanity Fair comedy dudefest was swift and unified. Moments after the magazine published a photo of 10 men to illustrate its article on why late-night TV is “better than ever,” Twitter erupted the way only Twitter knows how.

Good. That photo is a slap in the face.

Whether or not Vanity Fair intended the photo as a jarring critique of the endemic sexism in contemporary comedy and television—let’s go with “not”—it is an effective visual signifier of a bleak reality that can’t be explained away as coincidental or merit-based. For anyone who thinks about issues of diversity and gender equity, looking at the overwhelming maleness of this bourbon-nursing pack is like looking into the sun.

Cauterucci quotes Trevor Noah – one of the guys in the infamous photo – talking to Newsweek about women-in-comedy.

I guess what we need to look at is how is that evolving? The first step in that is you go, OK, there’s two men of color. That’s a big jump. Pretty soon there will be a woman that’ll be added to that. And there will probably be more women, which is gonna be fantastic. And over time, that’ll happen; it’s a conversation that we need to continue having.

Pretty soon? What does he mean pretty soon? Starting from when? Pretty soon might sound ok if you thought history started a couple of years ago, but why would you think that? It’s not as if nobody had noticed that women are scarce in jobs like hosting late night tv shows until yesterday. We noticed that a long time ago. Decades ago. We noticed the way even in a world where women have equal rights on paper, that does not mean women do not routinely get passed over for desirable jobs. We noticed that such a long time ago. So what can “pretty soon” possibly mean in that context? It hasn’t happened yet, so why would it happen “pretty soon”? And why would that be good enough anyway?

Notwithstanding Noah’s history of problems with women, his complacent, tepid hope for incremental gains is a major part of the entertainment industry’s gender problem. There’s a prevailing attitude that gender and race equity are inevitable—that if we wait long enough and stop griping over quotas and diversity initiatives, they’ll happen on their own.

And how long is long enough anyway? And if they’re so damn inevitable why haven’t they happened yet?

But TV lineups aren’t chosen by an algorithm that spits out a steadily rising number of female hosts each fall. There are human decision-makers behind these TV networks: producers, investors, and executives who usually hold more power than the (sometimes female) stars themselves—and who sometimes have some bizarre ideas about when diversity is and isn’t appropriate, as was the case with Matt Damon on Project Greenlight. While the harsh reaction to Vanity Fair’s photo should be read as an indictment of barriers to women in comedy, Vanity Fair editors, too, make deliberate choices that affect the gendered landscape of TV. Noah won’t start at his post until Sept. 28, but he made it into the boys’ club; Samantha Bee and Chelsea Handler, both of whom have forthcoming late-night shows in the works, did not. The next time a magazine pulls a move like this, Noah would find better footing lampooning his own industry from The Daily Show pulpit than defending it.

Damn right.

Fabulous. A kid makes a techy creative science project clock and takes it to school and he gets arrested. Brilliant. God bless America.

At a press conference this morning, Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after bringing what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.

Boyd said the device — confiscated by an English teacher despite the teen’s insistence that it was a clock — was “certainly suspicious in nature.”

Oooooh yeah, and so is the inside of this laptop I’m typing on, and so is the inside of every computer in MacArthur High School, along with all the phones and tablets and every other ELekTronIck device anyone in the building has.

School officers questioned Ahmed about the device and why he’d brought it to school. Boyd said Ahmed was then handcuffed “for his safety and for the safety of the officers” and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.

“The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,” Boyd said.

So, no harm done. Except to Ahmed, but hey, he’s just some kid. A talented kid, yes, but still just a kid.

Soon after the press conference, Obama tweeted:

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.

Yaboosucks, Irving police department.

Rebecca Solnit was giving a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago, and the audience for some reason wanted to talk about whether Woolf should have had children…as opposed to talking about the thing that makes Woolf of interest: what she wrote.

In the talk I had quoted with approval her description of murdering “the angel of the house,” the inner voice that tells many women to be self-sacrificing handmaidens to domesticity and male vanity. I was surprised that advocating for throttling the spirit of conventional femininity should lead to this conversation.

What I should have said to that crowd was that our interrogation of Woolf’s reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, “Fuck this shit,” which carried the same general message and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people have children; only one made To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and we were discussing Woolf because of the books, not the babies.

But she was a woman, so let’s talk about the babies anyway.

The line of questioning was familiar enough to me. A decade ago, during a conversation that was supposed to be about a book I had written on politics, the British man interviewing me insisted that instead of talking about the products of my mind, we should talk about the fruit of my loins, or the lack thereof. Onstage, he hounded me about why I didn’t have children. No answer I gave could satisfy him. His position seemed to be that I must have children, that it was incomprehensible that I did not, and so we had to talk about why I didn’t, rather than about the books I did have.

I guess she should consider herself lucky he didn’t ask her about her penis envy.

The interviewer’s question was indecent, because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.

But even to say that there’s one proper way may be putting the case too optimistically, given that mothers are consistently found wanting, too.

Women are the permanent children of the world, always subject to questioning and scolding by the adults.

We talk about open questions, but there are closed questions, too, questions to which there is only one right answer, at least as far as the interrogator is concerned. These are questions that push you into the herd or nip at you for diverging from it, questions that contain their own answers and whose aim is enforcement and punishment. One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, “Why are you asking that?” This, I’ve found, is always a good answer to an unfriendly question, and closed questions tend to be unfriendly.

Yes indeed they do.

Microagressions at Oberlin. It could be the title of a new sitcom; someone should pitch it.

No but really, Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic gives us a case study.

Last fall at Oberlin College, a talk held as part of Latino Heritage Month was scheduled on the same evening that intramural soccer games were held. As a result, soccer players communicated by email about their respective plans. “Hey, that talk looks pretty great,” a white student wrote to a Hispanic student, “but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!”

It would help if he hadn’t made it white student / Hispanic student, since white can be Hispanic and Hispanic can be white. But anyway: the “Hispanic student” was pissed off by the email.

After initially emailing the student who offended her, she decided to publicly air the encounter that provoked her and their subsequent exchange in the community at large, hoping to provoke sympathy and antagonism toward the emailer by advertising her status as an aggrieved party.

She did so in a post to the web site Oberlin Microaggressions, a blog  “primarily for students who have been marginalized at Oberlin.”

Ooooooooh I want to check out that blog, I bet it makes for some great reading.

The aggrieved student quoted the aforementioned email: “Hey, that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!”

Then she explained her grievance:

Ok. 1. Thanks for you thinking that the talk is “pretty great”. I appreaciate your white male validation. I see that it isn’t interesting enough for you to actually take your ass to the talk. 2. Who said it was ok for you to say futbol? It’s Latino Heritage Month, your telling people not to come to the talk, but want to use our language? Trick NO! White students appropriating the Spanish language, dropping it in when convenient, never ok. Keep my heritage language out your mouth! If I’m not allowed to speak it, if my dad’s not allowed to speak it, then bitch you definitely are not supposed to be speaking it. Especially in this context.

That’s disgusting. All of it.

“Who said it was ok for you to say futbol?” Excuse me? Since when do people need permission to say things? We don’t. If it’s not clearly done to jeer or mock, nobody needs permission. And damn, “Keep my heritage language out your mouth” is just appalling. It’s not “appropriation” to attempt to speak other languages; it’s provincial not to.

She has more:

She also published the email that he sent to the white student:

1. Your not latino, call it soccer. You don’t play futbol. Futbol is played with people (LATINO) who know how to engage in community soccer, as somebody who grew up on the cancha (soccer field) I know what playing futbol is, and the way you take up space, steal the ball, don’t pass, is far from how my culture plays ball.

2. I’m not playing intramural once again this semester because you and your cis-dude, non passing the ball, stealing the ball from beginners, spanish-mocking, white cohort has ruined it (for the second time). Unless I find another team you won’t be seeing me.

Cis-dude? What’s that got to do with anything?

There’s more. It’s gruesome.

But at least modesty cultures are very respectful of women.

Just kidding.

Sometimes it is just stares. As I am walking down the street, I see him coming across me. He is several metres when I am already cringing. I lower my stare, or look away.

I want to close my manteau – the medium-length, light jacket worn by some Iranian women instead of chador – to avoid his snooping glare, but it’s too late. As I walk past him, I feel his piercing eyes looking for my breasts under my thick cloak, sizing up my figure with acute intensity. Riveted to my body, they follow me up until I feel them burning my back as he is already behind me. There isn’t even the slightest pretence of hiding: the ogling is unabashed, both nonchalant and full of aplomb.

Every so often, there are sounds. As he walks by, he turns his head towards me and slams his tongue against his palate. Or kisses the air loudly. There are so many shades of whistling, hissing, smacking, licking, puffing that I am amazed at the capacities of the human mouth. Sometimes it comes from behind me: a hiss directly in my ear. Sometimes it’s a last-second move as we walk past each other, like a snake suddenly sticking out its tongue. Every time, it is the same hideous expression of unhindered lust sending shivers through my spine.

Oftentimes, it is words too. Fortunately, my Persian is not good enough to grasp the profanity thrown in my face. Or maybe I don’t want to know anyway.

Yeh he’s probably not saying “welcome to Iran, I hope you have a pleasant walk.”

Sexual harassment in public places is a reality of every day in Iran. At first, I thought my foreign looks and my somewhat liberal style (vivid colours, open manteau, scarf thrust to the back of my head) made me a target. But when I opened up to friends, I realised this is a ubiquitous reality for young women of all styles and backgrounds.

“Growing in a Muslim country where the hijab is not mandatory, I have always been told: the hijab is there to protect women from men’s desire, because our body is ‘awra’ (intimate parts of the body that should be covered) that can spread ‘fitna’ (chaos) among men,” says Sahar, a 26-year old non-Iranian who has been studying in Tehran for a year. “But then I came to Iran, where hijab is mandatory, and I am still harassed in the streets. Men aggressively stare at me, talk to me, call me names. I feel naked, and worthless.”

Intelligent design – in which one sex hates the other sex and won’t leave it alone. What a way to live.

For women, walking in the street can become an excruciating, fearful experience.

“I feel deprived of one of my favourite things in Iran: walking alone,” says Sahar. “Every day, when I leave home, I wish for one thing: to be left alone. Because of this, I started taking cabs, even for a five-minute ride, just to avoid these encounters.”

…

The hunting happens everywhere in broad daylight, with the tacit approval of all – including the very authorities supposed to protect women. There is no risk in this hunt.

The feeling of incapacitation and helplessness for women is overwhelming. “It gives you a feeling of powerlessness because it seems that, since they aren’t physically attacking you, you don’t have a right to do anything to them,” says Lucille.

I remember that feeling so well in Paris as a teenager. I would tell them to leave me alone and it did no good – it was so frustrating and infuriating – as if I had no right to myself, no right to walk around, no right to be left alone, no right to tell men to stop intruding on me.

My sense is also that these daily interactions have become so habitual that most women don’t bother to bring it up, unless there is a special instance of outright groping for instance.

“Should we disappear? Should women just disappear?” asks Sahar.

This is a feeling many women have shared with me: the desire to become invisible, to suppress one’s physical being in order to avoid the intrusive, defiling daily looks, hisses, words and gropes.

Just to be able to move about in the world unmolested.

But then what about Charlotte Proudman, eh? Humorless feminazi? Tiresome PC pain in the ass? Shrill angry demanding witch?

Barbara Ellen at Comment is Free says no.

With wonderful inevitability, human rights barrister Charlotte Proudman has been accused of overreacting to solicitor Alexander Carter-Silk commenting on her photograph on LinkedIn. For those who aren’t aware, Carter-Silk wrote to Proudman: “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture”, awarding her best photo he’d seen on LinkedIn (Carter-Silk says he was remarking on the quality of the photo).

Proudman responded that his remarks were “unacceptable and misogynistic”, then shared their interaction on Twitter, remarking that men were using LinkedIn like Tinder. For this, she has been castigated for not being able to take a compliment, branded a “feminazi” and told that she has committed career suicide. And yet, if we remember, it’s Ms Proudman who’s supposed to have overreacted.

Look…Carter-Silk (was there ever such an apt name?) said himself he was probably being horrendously politically incorrect, so why are people jumping all over his target? You know, if I say “this is probably a horrendously cruel thing to say” that doesn’t mean I get to go on to complete the sentence with “but you are boring and smelly and no fun.” Starting a sentence with an admission that what you’re about to say is shitty is not a way of giving yourself permission to go ahead and say it. If you start a sentence with a warning that should be a sign that you should stop, not that the recipient should brace herself, much less that she should laugh merrily and ask if you want to fuck.

Ellen makes a related point.

Carter-Silk signals that he’s entirely cognisant that these kinds of remarks should not really be made, yet still he makes them, all the time grimly clutching what he fondly imagines to be some sexist version of a get-out-of-jail-free card. But then, as some feminazis out there might be groaning sourly by now – what’s new?

Many women would recognise this kind of behaviour as a form of “cheeky chappie chauvinism”, where some men style themselves as wicked, naughty, devilish, refusing to be tamed, not playing by the rules (or whatever they tell themselves as they’re squirting on the Lynx). But conversely they’re not above a bit of nifty linguistic arse covering should it prove necessary.

Basically, it’s an evolution from sexism proper, as in, the sexism still happens, the inappropriateness is still there, the women are still having to deal with it, but the man slyly references it, in an attempt to destabilise and neutralise any potential objection.

It’s so infuriating – thinking that neutralizes the potential objection. “Hi, I’m about to say something shitty. Get ready! And because I’ve admitted it, you don’t get to say it’s shitty.” No; why would that be the case?

One supposes the woman is meant to be either disarmed or confused – and it must come as a grave disappointment when, like Charlotte Proudman, she turns out to be neither.

The fact that some men do this is one thing. The inference that women are too dumb to have noticed them doing it is a whole new stratosphere of insult to anyone’s intelligence.

Well, you know, women are just part-time agents.