Iram Ramzan retorts to Hanna Yusuf’s article expanding on her “yay for the hijab” video.

I’m sorry but I have very little patience with this, oh woe is me attitude, when there are two women in Morocco who are being prosecuted for indecency for wearing summer dresses in a souq. As far as I am aware, no one is arresting Hanna for wearing her hijab nor is she being forced to remove it.

By implying that women who don’t wear the hijab are slaves to glossy magazines and consumer pressures, Hanna makes the same patronising generalisations that she claims others people make about hijabi women.

Even people who are in thrall to glossy magazines and consumer pressures can easily decide not to be. It’s not so easy for people who believe they are required to obey the rules of their religion to decide to disobey those rules. It’s no great wrench to decide that glossy magazines are just glossy magazines, but it’s a pretty big wrench to realize that some of the rules of your religion are bad rules. I suspect that’s why Hanna Yusuf imputes these crass motivations to people who aren’t like her.

“The control hijabi women have over their bodies,” Hannah continues, “Challenges existing structures”.

Where do I begin with this? Firstly, this idea that hijabi women have control over their bodies is not only simplistic but also ludicrous. Women are told to cover so that they do not provoke men’s desires – where is the control in that?

As for this idea that wearing hijab means you’re no longer objectified and no longer focusing on your appearance is nonsense. We’re humans at the end of the day and always concerned with our appearance. Women in headscarves are no exceptions to this.

It is true that the hijab makes women look duller and dowdier than they would without it. That’s the point of it, after all. But does that mean that their appearance just becomes a non-issue? Like Iram, I doubt it.

If it were just about covering the hair then there would be little issue. But the concept of the hijab is much more than just about covering the hair and Hanna knows it. As some Muslims wrote under my initial piece, it is an entire way of dressing, behaving and believing. Hence why she needed to research for three years before she decided to wear it, because once you put it on there is no going back. Women are free to wear one, just not free to remove it. And as soon as you wear the headscarf you are judged more harshly for your actions because of your perceived piety. If women without hijabs are “exploited” and “objectified”, then so too are those with hijabs, being upheld as models of good Muslim women.

…

I am glad that Hanna can make a free choice, and is able to have her free choice accepted by a tolerant society – despite insisting that is she faced by a wave of hostility. It is a pity that some of the societies where the headscarf is either compulsory or desired are not so tolerant.

The intolerance of those societies is much of the reason for hostility to the hijab, ironically enough.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Taslima writes about women working in factories in Bangladesh for nowhere near enough pay.

It was around 1993 when some women working in Bangladesh’s garment factories used to come visit me. The problems they faced at that time were less wages, long and extra hours of work, no transport back home, no matter how late at night it may be, absence of maternity leave, and to top it all, sexual harassment. Today, 22 years on, the problems remain just as acute. The same poverty, the same abysmal work conditions, the same low wages and the same rampant sexual harassment. Occasionally, we come across news of how there was a fire in some factory and several women succumbed to it.

And all these years later, she goes on, nothing is better.

A majority of workers in these factories are women, and therefore, largely neglected by the nation’s lawmakers. If the country understood the worth of this workforce, it would have created a better working environment for them. But what it has inflicted upon them is a labyrinth of lies and deceit, completely setting aside all international labour laws. MisogyBangladesh has, in fact, honed its skills in keeping its women in the worst possible scenario.

People like to have an underclass it can exploit for cheap labor.

There is no benevolent attitude in offering employment to women, instead, the attitude is that of looking at women as “cheap objectified subjects” rather than as human beings. These women cannot ask for better, more humane conditions of employment, but can be forced to work ungodly hours to suit their masters’ needs. The idea of labour is the means to an end. If there is death along the way, there is always more cheap labour available to fill the space.

Women are an underclass, Taslima points out; that makes them all the more exploitable.

What we first need to do is to get rid of such anti-women myths. If not, these will further fuel the gender bias that has become so predominant in society. To cure any illness, we must first eradicate its cause, else it will always lurk behind the shadows bidding its time.

About half the world’s population consists of women. If such a force is considered to be weak, denied the opportunities they are entitled to, and their contributions go unacknowledged, then it is matter of shame for the entire human race. As I have so often repeated, women are not meant only for household chores and sexual pleasure. They are more than capable of holding their own ground, and it is time to recognise that and demolish these demarcations of society, or suffer at our own peril on its outcome.

Sexism and racism and other ways of othering aren’t just harsh rhetoric, after all – they’re part of the mechanism of exploitation.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Joan Smith writes about Rafida Bonya Ahmed in the Independent. (Note: Joan Smith reviewed Does God Hate Women? for the Indy. She thought well of it.)

When a slight woman with cropped dark hair walked on to a stage in a London hotel on Thursday evening, she was greeted with an immediate standing ovation. Four months ago, Rafida Bonya Ahmed and her husband, Avijit Roy, were attacked with machetesby Islamic extremists in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. Roy died and Ahmed was seriously injured, receiving deep wounds to her head.

At first glance, it is hard to believe that this lively and engaging woman has gone through such an ordeal. The only visible reminder is her left hand, which is missing a thumb after it was slashed off in the attack.

Ahmed travelled from her home in Atlanta, Georgia, to give the annual Voltaire Lecture, organised by the British Humanist Association – the first time she has spoken in public since the attack. The lecture took place, poignantly, opposite Edgware Road station, where six people died in an Islamist bombing 10 years ago.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

From David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day:

None of the therapy students were girls. They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains. “You don’t want to be doing that,” the men in our families would say. “That’s a girl thing.” Baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of Boy’s Life or Sports Illustrated, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received. When asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up. “A policeman or a fireman or one of those guys who works with high-tension wires.” Symptoms were feigned, and our mothers wrote notes excusing our absences on the day of the intramural softball tournament. Brian had a stomach virus or Ted suffered from that twenty-four-hour bug that seemed to be going around.

“One of these days I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues. [pp 9-10]

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

On Fresh Air yesterday:

Is there such a thing as a “gay voice”? For gay filmmaker David Thorpe, the answer to that question is complicated. “There is no such thing as a fundamentally gay voice,” Thorpe tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. But, he adds, “there is a stereotype and there are men, to a greater or lesser extent, who embody that stereotype.”

In his new film, Do I Sound Gay?, Thorpe searches for the origin of that stereotype and documents his own attempts to sound “less gay” by working with speech pathologist Susan Sankin.

By which he doesn’t mean “zero gay,” let alone straight; he seems to mean less like the stereotype while keeping his own style. It was an interesting discussion about where the stereotypes come from, where the voice comes from (Paul Lynde got a mention), what it all means.

Friends of mine have been talking about the fact that there was no mention of a lesbian voice, or whether there is such a stereotype. There doesn’t seem to be, offhand. I wonder why not.

Side note. I watched a few minutes of West Side Story the other evening while channel-surfing – an early scene in which the Jets talk about what they’re going to do to keep the “Porta Rickans” out of their turf, and then sing the “When You’re a Jet” song. While they were talking I suddenly realized…huh, they’re all gay. Obviously. But when I saw that movie as a kid I thought they were macho and scary. I was a rather inattentive child.

Also, there’s a transgender kid in that movie – Anybody’s. She wants to be a Jet and acts as much like one as she can, but they just chase her away (and call her Anybody’s).

A sub-theme in the Fresh Air interview was the stigma of being “effeminate” but it wasn’t discussed as much as I would have liked.

“David was the first person who came to me who was upfront right from the beginning about sounding gay and what he wanted to do,” Sankin tells Gross.

“I’ve always been self-conscious about sounding gay,” Thorpe adds. “I think that that comes from childhood — I was always aware that my voice potentially gave me away to bullies.”

Thorpe describes the gay voice as one characterized by a sibilant S and a high pitch. “When I interview people,” Thorpe says, “they always say that to them the gay voice … is a voice that’s high, that’s melodious, that’s hyper-articulate, that’s perhaps uncertain because it goes up at the end. All of those things kind of add up, essentially, to an effeminate stereotype.”

Kill the going up at the end with fire. The rest of it – sounds good to me.

Thorpe: If I have to speculate about where the so-called gay voice comes from, for me, both the most predominant answers work. One is that as you’re acquiring language you tend to imitate the people you trust and you identify with, and certainly for me that was a lot of women. I always had a lot of female friends growing up and I don’t think that’s atypical for some gay men. At the same time, I totally get that when I came out, I wanted to be recognized as gay; I wanted the world to know I was gay and I wanted to fit into this existing community, so I think my voice really did change after I came out. I think that both the language-acquisition theory and the community-learned way of speaking hold water. It’s kind of impossible to really tangle out a single reason.

Tease out, he meant.

After that segment Terry Gross talked to the speech pathologist on her own, to discuss horrible fads like up-talking and vocal fry. I hate up-talking. The speech pathologist also hates it; she pointed out that it makes women sound uncertain and incompetent, and it’s mostly women who use it. Don’t sound uncertain and incompetent.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

But Cosby has his defenders, still…because hey, he hasn’t been convicted of anything, so that means he’s innocent.

The hell it does.

Whoopi Goldberg went off on “The View” Wednesday over backlash she has received for her comments on the rape scandal surrounding Bill Cosby.

“Here’s the deal: This is ‘The View’ and that was my opinion,” Goldberg said. “Not any of you threatening me or telling me you’re coming after me because you don’t like what I said is going to change the fact that no one has convicted him, he has not been arrested, and the bottom line is that’s the law–innocent, until proven guilty.”

No, that’s not the bottom line. It may or may not be evidence one way or the other, but it’s not any bottom line.

“We all have a very important role to play when it comes to abuse and rape,” Goldberg continued. “If it’s true the person has to be taken to nth degree of the world and punished; no one here thinks rape is good, no one here thinks rapists are fun… so don’t come after me like that because I’m sick of this bull.”

She concluded the American court system agrees with her because Cosby hasn’t been taken to jail or even tried: “So back off me!”

Ah no, that’s not true. The fact that Cosby hasn’t been tried doesn’t mean the US court system thinks he didn’t rape anyone. There’s a (very short) statute of limitation for rape in the relevant states, so Cosby can’t be prosecuted. That’s far from equating to prosecutors’ thinking he didn’t rape.

And new evidence keeps coming out, so it’s silly of Whoopi Goldberg to get so furious with people who think she’s wrong.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A better news story, for a change.

A Malawian traditional leader has taken it upon herself to discourage the prevalence of child marriages within her constituency.

Senior Chief Inkosi Kachindamoto annulled over 300 marriages, thereby applying the country’s new laws regarding child marriage. In April, President Peter Mutharika signed into a law a ban on child marriage, setting the minimum age requirement for marriage in the country at 18.

“I have terminated 330 marriages of which 175 were girl-wives and 155 were boy-fathers, I wanted them to go to school and that has worked,” she told Nyasa Times, “I don’t want youthful marriages, they must go to school…no child should be found loitering at home or doing household chores during school time.”

School first, marriage later – it’s a much better way. I could give you a hundred reasons, but maybe all you need is the fact that young girls have small pelvises. Female humans, tragically, go through puberty before their hips are wide enough to allow for birth.

Malawi has one of the highest incidents of child marriage in the world with 1 in 2 girls getting married before the age of 18. The practice is closely linked to poverty where, in the rural areas, girls are married off to improve their families’ financial situations.

But if they stay in school instead, they can ultimately improve their families’ financial situations a lot more.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Florida county says hell no we’re not getting rid of the pro-slavery flag; it’s our history, dude.

Marion County, Fla. officials took down the Confederate flag that flies at the county government complex last week, temporarily replacing it with a flag bearing the county seal, News 13 reported. The County Commission unanimously approved a move to fly the flag again days later, saying members would meet with historians to discuss placing markers by the flag to “explain its historical significance.”

I can tell you its historical significance. I majored in history at an actual university, so I know. Its historical significance is that it stands for the confederation of southern states that seceded from the US in order to retain the institution of slavery. It’s a pro-slavery flag. It’s a white supremacist flag. That’s its historical significance.

One Confederate flag supporter told the station: “We live in America, and the last time I checked it was a democracy. So, here in Marion County, which has, what, 300,000 people, how can one man decide to take it off a flagpole?”

It’s a constitutional democracy. I say that as a history major, so you can take it to the bank.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Malala Yousafzai was at an education summit in Oslo yesterday.

“If the world leaders decide to take one week and a day off from war and weapons, we can put every child in school,” Yousafzai told the Oslo Summit on Education for Development on Tuesday. “Books are a better investment in our future than bullets. Books, not bullets, will pave the path towards peace and prosperity.”

Yousafzai echoed the sentiment in a post on her Malala Fund Blog, urging people to use social media to advance her message of peace and education. “Post a photo of yourself holding up your favorite book now and share why YOU choose #booksnotbullets – and why world leaders should, too,” she wrote.

The activist got the ball rolling on the hashtag with a post on Instagram, featuring a picture of her holding a copy of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Yousafzai wrote she chose the book “because the book reveals the courage and strength of a young girl living under war and conflict. It inspires me to believe that every child deserves the right to dream, the right to learn and the right to live in peace.”

I don’t have a single favorite book (by which I mean I have many, not that I have zero favorites). I’ll have to think about which one to brandish.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh gosh, it’s almost as bad as having an honorary professorship withdrawn. Disney is removing a statue of Bill Cosby from one of its parks.

Disney will remove a statue of Bill Cosby from its Hollywood Studios theme park, a spokeswoman for the company said Tuesday, following revelations through court documents that support multiple allegations that the veteran comedian drugged multiple women before sexually assaulting them.

The bust of Cosby, located alongside representations of celebrities like Lucille Ball and Oprah Winfrey in Disney’s Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame Plaza, will be taken down after the park shuts at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Are there cries of “witch hunt” and “lynch mob” yet? Are there open letters and petitions beseeching Disney to put it back? Has Richard Dawkins added his name?

Several companies and businesses are now trying to distance themselves from Cosby, following the release of documents showing that he admitted, during a sworn testimony in 2005, to buying Quaalude, a powerful sedative, with the intention of giving it to women before having sex with them.

Before raping them, that is.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by iknlast on The endless supply of mother-in-law jokes.

I had a job about 15 years ago where sexist jokes were routinely e-mailed around the office, an office divided into (male) engineers and (female) clerical, with a handful of us (mostly female) in hard-to-define positions at the bottom of the echelon of professional positions, doing work that was essentially clerical, but with a “specialist” title that made it look like their highly educated, well skilled people were actually being utilized properly. The first day I was there, my e-mail was graced with a visual joke about a woman-only parking lot. It was a junkyard.

I had just come there from a job where I was an intern who could expect nothing more because they didn’t offer full time jobs to women (they always did it in a way that made it hard to prove – no jobs available today, sweeties. As soon as the woman eligible for the full time position had moved on, they emptied her desk for the male they had just hired for the non-existent position). At that job, I was called a feminazi by my boss. I challenged him, and he “acknowledged” that I wasn’t really a feminazi, it was just a “joke”.

I have been subjected to sexist “jokes” my entire life, and yes, they did affect me. They created an environment that left me depressed and half-alive. They slowed me down in my path, because I internalized a lot of this hateful humor, and couldn’t find my path until I was already in my 30s and was able to clear the cobwebs out of my head enough (from the youthful conditioning) to realize that, hey, I was GOOD at science! I could actually be a scientist! When I think of how much time I wasted, and how much more I could have contributed, it makes me burn.

Then, I became a scientist and faced the situation mentioned above. Since moving on into academia, the sexism has been more subtle (at times), but is still very present in the dean who refers to female teachers as “Sunshine” (teachers with a doctorate degree in their field, highly competent professionals) and talks down to females, often without even realizing it. If told, he would deny that he is sexist or has ever done anything sexist. As would the people passing on these jokes, or denying jobs to women in subtle ways.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Janet Stemwedel did a Storify. Several of the sequences in it are ones that I RTd two or three days ago, wishing I could collect them all without having to go to the trouble of figuring out Storify.

While predictable, it is still frustrating that what started as a discussion of Tim Hunt, his comments to a luncheon of women scientists in Seoul, and what kind of impact those comments (whether intended as a joke or not) have on the climate for women in science, shifted into a discussion of whether those who pointed out the problem with his comments are claiming that he is a terrible human being who ought to be purged from the scientific community, whether the science journalists who reported the comments are lying liars who are just jealous and/or joyless harpies who delight in taking good men down.

In other words the subject got thoroughly changed. It would be nice if we could just talk about the way derogatory “humor” aka hostile jokes about subordinates contribute to a climate that is alienating to the subordinates who are the objects of the jokes, without having the subject changed, but we never seem to be able to. Noticing derogatory jokes is considered a high crime worthy of having the subject changed and changed and changed until all the parts fall off.

So, read that Storify.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Susan Brownmiller wrote a memoir of the women’s movement that was published in 1999.

At the beginning of the prologue…

Imagine a world – or summon it back into memory – in which the Help Wanted columns were divided into Male for the jobs with a future, and Female for the dead-end positions; …; when psychiatrists routinely located the cause of an unsatisfactory sex life in the frigid, castrating, ballbreaking female partner, when abortion was an illegal, back-alley procedure, when rape was the woman’s fault, when no one dared talk about the battery that went on behind closed doors, or could file a complaint about sexual harassment. And remember the hostile humor that reinforced the times: the endless supply of mother-in-law jokes, the farmer’s daughter, the little old lady in tennis shoes, the bored receptionist filing her nails, the dumb blond stenographer perched on her boss’s lap, the lecherous tycoon chasing his buxom secretary around the desk.

1999; long before Mad Men.

But my point is – sexist jokes are not not-sexist because they’re jokes. On the contrary. There’s always been hostile sexist humor. Jokes can be sexist. Jokes about distracting, emotional women addressed by an important man to a group of women colleagues are, indeed, sexist. Hostile humor is hostile humor.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

According to Jessica Smith Cross at Metro Canada, the woo teacher is no longer on the staff at the University of Toronto and the course has been dropped.

Beth Landau-Halpern, a homeopath, came under fire last year when the source materials for her course on alternative medicine at U of T Scarborough were made public. They included YouTube links and other non-academic sources.

Landau-Halpern was cleared by an internal investigation and continued to teach her course this spring.

A spokesperson for the university confirmed on Monday that Landau-Halpern’s course will not be offered this summer or next year, and she is no longer on staff.

Now about that course in Magical Engineering…

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The New York Times is reporting the Cosby story.

The entertainer Bill Cosby testified 10 years ago that he had obtained Quaaludes in the 1970s to give to young women with whom he wanted to have sex, according to a court document unsealed on Monday.

That must be the wording of the court document, since all the outlets are reporting it that way, but damn it’s bad wording. You don’t “have sex with” someone you just sedated! Having sex with is, obviously, mutual – that’s what “with” means. He wanted to fuck them, not “have sex with” them. He wanted to rape them. If he’d wanted to have sex with them, he wouldn’t have sedated them.

It was an acknowledgment, the first to become public and in Mr. Cosby’s own words, that he viewed powerful, sedating drugs as a part of his sexual encounters with women.

It was an acknowledgment that he wanted them unable to resist.

That’s an admission of rape, if you ask me.

The name of the woman Mr. Cosby cites in his testimony is redacted in the paperwork, but the discussion in the court record closely tracks an incident recounted by Therese Serignese, who says she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby in a Las Vegas hotel after one of his performances in 1976.

Joseph Cammarata, a lawyer for Ms. Serignese, said the account in Mr. Cosby’s testimony of the Las Vegas encounter with a woman and Ms. Serignese’s story of her encounter with Mr. Cosby were one and the same. “It’s Therese,” he said. “It’s the same case.”

Ms. Serignese, then 19, has said in interviews that Mr. Cosby gave her pills in a backstage room and that she took them because he was an authority figure and she felt compelled. Her next memory, she said, was of feeling drugged and being sexually assaulted by him without her consent.

But everybody thought he was such a nice guy!

This next bit is fascinating in relation to that:

The records from the Constand case were released in response to a request by The Associated Press, which Mr. Cosby and his legal team had fought. “It would be terribly embarrassing for this material to come out,” his lawyer, George M. Gowen III, argued last month.

In deciding to release the documents, Judge Eduardo Robreno of United States District Court said he was guided by the sense that Mr. Cosby had fashioned himself as a moral guide with pronouncements that offered “his views on, among other things, child-rearing, family life, education and crime.”

“The stark contrast between Bill Cosby, the public moralist, and Bill Cosby, the subject of serious allegations concerning improper (and perhaps criminal) conduct is a matter as to which The A.P. — and by extension the public — has a significant interest,” the judge wrote in a memorandum issued on Monday.

Yes it is. Yes.it.is.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Apparently the University of Toronto thinks it’s fine to teach medical woo at a university, not as a meta subject but just plain as a subject. Jen Gunter is not amused.

Earlier this year, two groups of academics at the University of Toronto wrote letters of concern to the President of the University to protest an Alternative health course that fostered distrust of vaccines, cited Andrew Wakefield, and completely mis-applied Quantum Mechanics to explain a bevy of bizarre health claims. This week, the school finally addressed their claims; and the university’s response is both wholly inadequate and totally baffling.

The course, Alternative Health: Practice and Theory is taught by Beth Landau-Halpern, a homeopath. During week 9 of her curriculum, she addresses: “Vaccination — The King of Controversy.”

No medical, nursing, or basic biology/immunology textbooks or articles are referenced in the required reading, nor is any information from Health Canada or the World Health Organization. Instead, the required reading and additional information for the students includes Andrew Wakefield (who lost his medical license for falsifying data in a now beyond-infamous retracted study) and anti-vaccine propaganda sites.

Not for the purpose of analysis and criticism, but for the purpose of digestion and retention. Not “say what’s wrong with this” but “learn this.”

Regarding the use of Quantum Mechanics, scientists at the University of Toronto had issues with the following paragraph in the curriculum as well as the required reading:

We will delve into a quantum physics’ understanding of disease and alternative medicine to provide a scientific hypothesis of how these modalities may work. Quantum physics is a branch of physics that understands the interrelationship between matter and energy. This science offers clear explanations as to why homeopathic remedies with seemingly no chemical trace of the original substance are able to resolve chronic diseases, why acupuncture can offer patients enough pain relief to undergo surgery without anesthesia, why meditation alone can, in some instances, reduce the size of cancerous tumors.

Maybe Deepak Chopra is the department head?

The university has said there’s no problem. Jen Gunter is gobsmacked.

In my opinion, the response basically boils down to: “Oh give her a break, she’s new and it all sounds a bit new age and that’s really what people want, but we’ll have her make it a little more sciencey next time” when it should have been a “thank you for bringing this to our attention, we share your concerns and they will be addressed immediately. This instructor is now on probation and all course material related to medicine and science will need to be approved by a faculty member in the appropriate field.” Remember, this isn’t misquoting a study, a new field where there is little published work, or a published academic having an unpopular but scientifically plausible opinion in a field. The material presented about Quantum Mechanics and immunizations is wrong. It’s the equivalent of an “alternative geology” course teaching that the world is flat, with references from 1300.

Maybe the university figures we’re heading back to the technology of 1300 – once all the oil is gone – so we might as well prepare intellectually.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Because of a stupid time-wasting SIWOTI argument I’m having with a tedious prolix humorless commenter in an earlier thread about Howard Jacobson’s reactionary rant about Tim Hunt in the Independent, I want to make clear how strongly Jacobson did imply that Hunt was “hounded out of a job.”

He starts with three paragraphs riffing on personal grooming with a specific focus on nose hair, claiming to be deeply concerned with it himself in contrast to other sorts of people who are not so concerned.

We shouldn’t be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. The day I don’t attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of his appearance, someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal. I will have retreated into myself, to that place where eccentricity and maybe even madness reside. Science, perhaps.

He’s joking, of course. Novelists aren’t generally considered worldly and respectable in contrast to those zany scientists.

Then there’s the next paragraph, the fourth:

The astute reader will by now have worked out that in truth nostril hair is only my sub-theme, and that my real subject is Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who recently made a joking reference to the lachrymosity (were there such a word) of women, in punishment for which University College London expeditiously removed him from the honorary post he held there.

His real subject is Tim Hunt.

Then we get four paragraphs on eccentricity in dress and the academic life.

Then we get two paragraphs in which he makes the transition from eccentricity in dress to eccentricity in opinion:

So what right did we have to expect modern attitudes from them? Of course they were sexists, racists, pederasts, colonialists, anti-Semites. Of course they made jokes which not another living soul found funny. Bigotry was expected and even required of them. There have to be places where people let nostril hair run wild, think differently from the rest of us, implicitly call into question and even deride everything we have made up our minds about, find wisdom through unconventionality, and say a lot of foolish things along the way. Universities are such places. Correction: universities should be such places.

Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn’t a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

He’s already told us his real subject is Tim Hunt, so yes, “every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job” is meant to apply to Tim Hunt even though he didn’t name him in that sentence.

He does name him in the next sentence though.

Reaffirming the college’s pusillanimous decision to show Tim Hunt the door, the Provost of University College London said: “Our commitment to gender equality and our support for women in science was and is the ultimate concern.”

Jacobson said the college decided to “show Tim Hunt the door” – i.e. to throw him out, i.e. to sack him from his job.

I don’t know how intentional all this implication was. I don’t know if Jacobson deliberately worded those passages to create the impression that Hunt was sacked from a job, or if he just lost track while writing – but he decidedly did write that piece in such a way as to create the impression in the unwary reader that Tim Hunt was sacked from a job.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Wow.

Rebecca Carroll at the Guardian explains how feminist Rihanna’s video is.

Helen Lewis of the New Statesman wrote that the video is not feminist “because it is not very feminist to torture women. Even if they are white. Even if they are rich. Even if you are a woman yourself.” By those standards, I have a thing or two to say about a whole history of white women who abused black women both because they were black and because they were women, and yet, somehow, are still considered feminists – many regarded as pioneers. Women from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who did not believe black women deserved any such rights as white women, to Miley Cyrus, who has used black women as stage props.

Then say it. Say what they did was very un-feminist. Say they weren’t feminists at all if you want to. That doesn’t make it feminist to torture women or to make videos about torturing women.

[W]hat really has white feminists upset is that in the video Rihanna, a black woman, puts her own needs before a white woman’s needs. And it’s clear that when those needs involve money, social class and privilege (say, lounging on a yacht), there is no room for perspective. White women will fight to obtain food stamps for black women, but don’t let us have a yacht, pretty clothes or – God forbid – payment of money we are owed.

Horse shit. Complete, unmitigated horse shit, and blatant deflection besides. It’s not about yachts and it’s not about getting money owed, it’s about torture of a bystander.

To be sure, the video is vividly violent – an unabashed revenge fantasy – but here’s what didn’t occur to me: is it anti-feminist? Feminist? Misogynistic? Why would it? Rihanna is a grown woman who makes life and career choices for herself with the expectation and understanding that she is as free to do that as her male peers are. How is that not feminist?

Wut? Grown women make life and career choices all the time, and some of them are bad, and we can and do say so. If a grown woman makes the career choice to murder someone, I don’t consider that a feminist act. Freedom to make the choice to torture and murder isn’t what feminism is about.

The obsession over what constitutes feminism in mainstream media and popular culture strikes me as resolutely anti-feminist. As for the misogyny – really? That’s just dumb, shortsighted and so deeply patronising. Because the assumption here is that Rihanna isn’t smart enough to anticipate the various interpretations of her work. She knows. She doesn’t care. I don’t either. What I care about is that Rihanna has the agency to create her music and direct her career on her own terms.

Agency shmagency. Mere “agency” is not enough. Agency is necessary for feminism but it is so very far from sufficient.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This from the NSS is alarming.

The Manchester Free Speech and Secular Society’s website has been deleted, shortly after the group received a message warning they would “feel remorse” if they didn’t stop criticising Islamic fundamentalism.

The Free Speech and Secular Society (FSS) was sent a message, from an IP address in Saudi Arabia, which warned: “Please stop mocking Muslims otherwise you will feel remorse.”

I thought that meant the Society had closed the website down, but no.

A spokesperson for the Society said that on the same day the sinister message was received, “someone tried to get access to the website, as multiple accounts received password reset prompts that weren’t initiated by the account holders.”

Despite not thinking much of the initial apparent threat or the attempts to hack into the website, by the 27 June the Society found that their website had been deleted entirely. The hacker “deleted everything that could be deleted,” according to the FSS. “No message was left on the site.”

They talked to their webhost, who said it was not their doing, nor a technical problem.

They want to run us all, these fuckers – they want to force us all to obey the rules of their horrible stupid pinch-minded little god.

The FSS said that they had “some articles critical of Islamic fundamentalism” on their website, and also commentary about their Student Union’s decision to ban the FSS from displaying the ‘survivors’ edition’ of Charlie Hebdo published after the attack on their Paris office.

I posted about that here at the time. I remember doing it.

The Society writes that their focus is on “free speech and secularism” and that they have been “hacked and threatened for supporting free speech”.

The historian Tom Holland said the society had been “menaced” by “enemies of free speech”.

Ben Jones, the National Secular Society’s communications officer, commented: “This appears to be a particularly sinister attempt to stop debate, criticism and commentary about and around Islam. We hope the Manchester Free Speech and Secular Society have their website restored soon and can recover from the attack quickly. We offer our solidarity and support. No-one group or individual should be left to face the danger of defending free speech alone.

“Threats to freedom of expression are coming thick and fast and from all quarters. Whether it is student unions censoring student comedy shows for ‘blasphemy’, or university administrators cancelling events about Islam to avoid causing ‘offence’ or on other spurious grounds, or the invidious prosecution of Christian preachers for criticising Islamic beliefs, the right to freedom of expression must be defended.

“There are concerted attempts to establish global blasphemy laws coming from the OIC, who still long for a global law against the ‘defamation of religion'; from terrorists using violent jihad; moves by complicit student unions and universities to indirectly support these efforts in the interest of ‘cohesion'; and in this case from hackers and what the FSS call ‘cyber-jihadists’. No matter what form the attack comes in, free speech must be defended.”

Their horrible stupid pinch-minded little god can go swim with the ducks.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)