Oh goody, Soraya Chemaly and David Futrelle were on an NPR talk show – On Point – today to talk about Rodger and misogyny. Before I listen, how about a quick look at the comments…

…uh oh.

Coastghost • 16 hours ago

Perhaps Americans have grown too unaccustomed to reading various plays by Aristophanes or certain epigrams by Martial or certain satires by Juvenal, or certain poems by Villon or certain stories by Machiavelli, or certain aphorisms by Schopenhauer or certain stories by Maupassant . . . . perhaps if we had not become so keen to shield our eyes from what vexes or discomfits, we would today be well-equipped to consider familiar themes upon their recurrence.
Perhaps we’ve cultivated overmuch our taste for only the palatable.
Or perhaps contemporary utopian feminism may not be telling us anything wholly true (or actually realistic) about either women or men.

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

Hard to believe but apparently not a hoax – “Joe the Plumber” says your dead kids don’t trump my rights.

Adam Weinstein at Gawker has the details.

Continuing his tradition of providing answers to questions no one fucking asked him, Joe decided to post an open letter to the families of victims killed in Elliot Rodger’s murder-suicide rampage over the weekend. Just the victims who were shot, though; not the ones who were stabbed.

His message of hope and love: Stay the fuck away from my guns.

I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But:

As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.

And that’s the important thing here – that Samuel Wurzelbacher aka “Joe the Plumber” gets to keep his guns and stick to them too.

There’s something refreshingly honest in Joe’s acknowledgement that this tragedy is all about him. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of an ethos that’s obsessed with the self and the self’s freedom without a concomitant empathy for other selves and their freedoms. Joe’s rant illuminates quite starkly how the right-libertarian absolutist interpretation of individual rights comes into direct conflict with the lives of his fellow countrymen and their children. To talk of responsibilities is to water down a right, and we cannot do that, no matter what the cost! (On the other hand: “They talk about gun rights,” Martinez said in his stirring press statement about his son. “What about Chris’s right to live?”)

Doesn’t count. Trumped by Wurzelbacher’s right to have guns.

It’s part of a larger move in conservatism away from appeals to the common good and toward an antipathy for anything but the self. Where conservatives used to justify the free market, for example, in Adam Smith’s practical terms—the invisible hand provides for all, a rising tide floats every boat—they now rationalize it in Ayn Rand’s fundamentalist terms: Who gives a shit if the market is good or just? It’s right. Now get the fuck out of our way, you illogical bromide-hawking self sacrificer.

And what movement is unsettlingly full of Randian libertarians? Why, it’s the organized skepticism movement, that’s what.

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

From the Daily Beast this time. Emily Shire writes that #YesAllWomen is a good thing BUT it is not a perfect thing. Worryworry.

#YesAllWomen has led to an outpouring of simultaneously enlightening and disturbing examples of common-day occurrences of female harassment in theworkplace and world of dating. These, in turn, have inspired a number of men to tweet out their support and recognition of the dangers and double standards that misogyny has wrought.

However, #YesAllWomen also transformed a highly disturbed, socially isolated college student into a figure somehow worthy of legitimate discourse about the serious issues of misogyny. While it is inspiring to see positive conscious-raising tweets about the female experience come out of a national tragedy, there is also something dangerous about taking a deranged 22-year-old at his words. We don’t know what exactly drove Rodger to violence, and we can’t conclude that misogyny over mental illness or social rejection was the root cause.

Well we don’t know for certain, no, because we never do. Maybe what he said and put on video was all a smokescreen. We don’t know. But we do know what he did say and did put out there on video. We can conclude that he told us that misogyny was his inspiration. We can’t conclude that was the “root cause,” no, because it would take technology that doesn’t exist to know that. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing is a big blank; it doesn’t mean the black box is still on the ocean floor.

Obviously it’s not that misogyny leads directly to shooting sprees in all cases without exception. Obviously shooting sprees are extremely rare. Obviously there are vastly more misogynists than there are spree shooters.

But when someone announces his hatred of women and his plan to shoot as many as he can, we are allowed to connect his shooting spree to his misogyny. That’s not making a big unjustified leap.

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

Sarah Ditum wonders why there’s an expectation of privacy for misogyny but not for the women who are its targets.

Public life is full of men with manifest habits of misogyny, but whenever this is challenged, one excuse is reliably rolled out: that was private, it doesn’t affect his job. Men, it seems, are the champions of doing two entirely contradictory things at the same time.

That’s been the consensus around Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore’s misogynistic emails. And yes, they were misogynistic – not just a bit sexist if you looked at them funny, not “private banter” (as the headline of India Knight’s Sunday Times column described them), but absolutely misogynistic: Scudamore discussed women’s breasts, described women as “irrational”, and called women “gash”, reducing women to a grotesque image of their genitals. This is the language of someone who doesn’t even think women are people. In fact, Scudamore had so little respect for women that, according to Rani Abraham (the PA who leaked them), he sent these missives through a work email account that it was her job to monitor. One of the women discussed so crudely was a Premier League employee – and was copied into the emails. (Abraham says she left the job because she could not tolerate working for a man who used such language.)

That reminds me of something – it reminds me of one of Carrie Poppy’s tweets under #NotAllWomen:

Because my old boss adopted a little girl’s voice to impersonate me crying over my own assault. #YesAllWomen

Carrie too left the job because she could not tolerate working for a man who used such language.

Scudamore left no daylight between his professional life and his sexism. Yet it has been insisted in every outlet from the Times (Leader) to the Mirror (Carol McGiffin) to the Guardian (Marina Hyde) that emails sent at work, through a work account monitored by an employee, about and to colleagues should be classed as a private matter. (And yes, I noticed how many of those pieces were bylined to women. Maybe working in a massively sexist institution like a newspaper skews your sense of what is acceptable.) If these emails had been on any other topic, the idea of classing them as “private” would be laughable: it’s only because they’re misogynistic that people are anxious to separate them from Scudamore’s public role.

So this is an example of the same thing, I take it. Racism? Not acceptable. (Can be directed at men.) Homophobia? Not acceptable. (Can be directed at men.) Misogyny? Protected. (Is directed only at women.)

The hideous truth is, though, that you can do worse than call women “gash” and still have it tucked away as a private matter. In Kirsty Wark’s Blurred Lines documentary on the new culture of misogyny, Rod Liddle is shuffled out to provide the contrarian point of view, arguing (in the face of all evidence) that women experience no worse abuse than men, and what women do experience is neither specific to gender nor related to violence. Liddle has repeatedly attacked women for their looks in his Spectator column, so he’s certainly no neutral in the sex wars, but there’s also something even more concerning in his history – something which, I think, should permanently rule his opinions on the abuse of women out of contention.

In 2005, Liddle accepted a caution for common assault against his girlfriend, who was then pregnant. Liddle later denied wrongdoing and claimed he only accepted the caution “because it was the quickest way for him to be released”, but nevertheless, there it is: a man with a criminal record of violence against women, being invited to give his professional opinion on the abuse women experience. The caution was not mentioned by Wark. Presumably, it has been dismissed to the realm of the private where men are imagined to be capable of operating an entirely different – even contradictory – set of values to the ones we like to imagine they hold in the course of public decency.

Jesus fuck. I did not know that. They got a guy with a conviction for violence against a woman to talk on a documentary about misogyny, and did not disclose the conviction.

Trust no one.

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

I wrote a public Facebook post in the middle of the night to express my middle of the night feeling of horror at the state we’re in. I’ll put it here too, because this is the state we’re in and it is horrifying.

——————–

I’m beyond appalled, horrified, staggered. I don’t have the words to name my thoughts on the fact that we know racist violence when we see it – we don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that white guys dragging a black guy behind a truck to kill him is not about racism. We don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that Matthew Shepard was not beaten to death because of homophobia. Why THE FUCK are we getting so many ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that Rodger’s murder-spree was not about misogyny?

Apparently we just really are that…expendable.

———————————————————————

It’s produced an excellent discussion. One comment in particular I got permission to publish here; it’s by Michael Šimková.

I’ve noticed in many spaces heterosexual men claim to hate women and at the same time desire them. That is another contradiction many people seem to intuitively understand and I find mystifying. This murderer actually ranted that he hated women because they would not let him love them. That is certainly not coherent using my understanding of love. My impression is that this makes sense to them because they understand women as a desired object, not a subject, and that is what they call love. It is similar to the feelings you might have about a car that won’t start when you were counting on it to get you somewhere. Many people become irate and scream and bang fruitlessly on the car. They hate the car, yet they still want the car.

That seems to be the standard model for heterosexual men now. To regard uninterested women as broken sex toys, and interested women as functional ones. This Rodgers certainly seems to have seen things that way. Under that paradigm, it makes sense to them to despise the same objects they desire and to vehemently reject the notion that their objects should have autonomy. That is also consistent with the legal status of women in most of the world and of history. Originally rape was a crime against the male owner of a woman, not the victim herself, as it sullied his private property. I still see Marxists argue that capitalists oppress proletarian men by hoarding women and that, come the revolution, women would be redistributed with the rest of the wealth, as there must be a 1-1 ratio of women to men because every man is entitled to a wife.

There are endless such examples. All fundamentally seem to be about objectification, which is really nothing new, as feminists have said this for decades only to be decried “because objectification is good” and life would be boring without it.

I think that’s brilliant. Too bad it’s true.

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

Dave Zirin in The Nation:

If a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist does not make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women, I am not sure what will.

Just what I keep thinking, as it becomes clearer and clearer that a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist will on the contrary make a lot of us bristle with outrage at the very mention of misogyny in connection with Elliot Rodger’s adventure. It appears that nothing will  make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women.

It does not take any sort of genius to draw a line in between the weekend’s shooting, the torments faced by Marissa Alexander or other women who defend themselves, and the fact that the quickest way to invite a barrage of social media hate is to say something as simple as, “I don’t think rape jokes are funny.” These dots connect to create a gun pointed at the ability of women to possess the most elemental human right in what is supposed to be a free society: the right to be left alone.

It doesn’t take a genius, but it does take someone who thinks women shouldn’t be treated like shit.

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

There’s an Elliot Rodger fan page on Facebook that keeps returning after people manage to get one taken down (with great difficulty because Facebook is Facebook).

Facebook has removed fan pages for mass murderer Elliot Rodger, but new ones keep popping up — including one that targeted a woman who alleged its creators have harassed her for years.

Using one misogynist campaign in the service of another misogynist campaign. Enterprising.

Facebook has since said earlier versions of the pages were removed.

A man claiming to be behind the page, an Internet radio host who goes by the moniker Wild Goose, told QMI the “page was set up [in] order to rustle the jimmies of feminists around the world who are attempting to hijack this tragedy in order to further their own agenda.”

Nice company the Zaras and Hales are in.

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

And in Pakistan…

A Pakistani woman has been killed by her relatives outside Lahore High Court for marrying against their wishes.

Police said 30-year old Farzana Bibi died on the spot after being attacked with bricks and sticks.

…

Farzana Bibi’s parents accused her husband, Muhammad Iqbal, of kidnapping her, and had filed a case against him at the High Court.

However, she testified to police that she had married him of her own accord. Police said the couple had been engaged for a number of years.

As she arrived at the court building for a hearing, police said about a dozen family members pulled her aside and began to attack her and her husband, who managed to escape.

What a lovely “family.”

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

Originally a comment on How dare you treat Rodger’s murders as political?

What’s funny is that saying ‘don’t politicise the issue’ *is* politicising the issue. Here’s my word on the subject, from my tumblr:

It’s quite simple, really. Whenever something happens in the ‘real’ world, whenever people get injured or killed due to neglect or human malevolence, there is always a cavalcade of gainsayers admonishing everyone not to ‘politicise’ the tragedy (at least whenever it’s a tragedy that can be lain at the feet of white men). Whenever there’s a shooting, the NRA falls all over itself to say that anyone who might propose reasonable gun control measures is ‘an opportunist’ who should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of violence for their own political ends. Whenever men attack women (in such a way as to garner widespread attention), there is a contingent of people who deny that widespread misogyny and rape culture had anything to do with it, and anyone who claims otherwise is ‘an opportunist’ who should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of violence for their own political ends.

We’re unlucky enough to be able to experience both of these groups of people rising in response to the horrible violence perpetrated in California. Despite the fact that the perpetrator participated in misogynist communities, despite the fact that he posted a video manifesto that positively dripped with hatred of women just before he fulfilled the threats he made with a gun. We’ve been warned on the one hand that Americans’ ready access to firearms had nothing to do with this man’s ability to slaughter people, and on the other hand that his obvious misogyny had nothing to do with his targeting of women. We’re told to shut up, not to draw any conclusions (or even engage in any kind of discussion) about the issues that this violence raises.

The thing is, these people (let’s call them ‘denialists’, since that’s what they do) always tell us to shut the fuck up, no matter what. They beat us about the head any time we talk about feminism, about social justice, about welfare or gun control or climate change or a million issues that involve compassion for other humans. So when the denialists tell us ‘don’t politicise this tragedy’, they’re turning the tragedy into a political attack against us.

There’s a difference between politics and culture, just as there’s a difference between politics and policy. Politics entails using real-world events to orchestrate attacks on one’s opponents or to shore up support amongst one’s allies. That’s not always a bad thing; often, it’s a vital and necessary activity in order to successfully enact policy and/or shape culture. But political activities are not synonymous with policy or cultural activities. Pretending that they are is inherently political, since it serves no purpose but to attack your enemies and bolster your allies.

But, of course, we cannot expect anti-feminists and misogynists to be consistent.

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

Oh yes.

Tobias Buckell and John Scalzi on Twitter:

Tobias Buckell ‏@tobiasbuckell  10h

I love how the phrase ‘no politics’ always comes from someone swimming in politics… just of their own brand. So little self-recognition.

John Scalzi @scalzi

.@tobiasbuckell “MY politics aren’t REALLY politics, you see! They’re just plain COMMON SENSE!”

Oh yes. That “I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about trying to spin tragedy for political purposes” from earlier today is a classic example. “Your view of this is political, while my view of it is from a distant point in space where politics no longer exists.”

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

Oh no, feminist writers stirring up moral panics – someone call – VaculaMan!

Justin Vacula The Daily Mail is over-the-top with its headline, too, calling him the “Hunger Games Assassin.” I guess we can be outraged by tabloid publications. I’d rather not.

Anyway, to recap and follow up on recent comments, I think that focusing on misogyny and people like Valenti/Macrotte/SPLC representatives talking about this as being part of a “war on women” or “proof that misogyny kills” is as silly as people saying women who kill their male sons by microwaving them being “proof that misandry kills” or a “war on men.” It’s just much more complex and it’s really no surprise, unfortunately, that the SPLC and feminist writers are using this to further their agenda by creating moral panic following an isolated incident committed by a troubled individual.

Indeed, statements the shooter made were hateful toward women, but that’s only part of the issue. I don’t, though, think that cultural messaging that men are entitled to have women as rewards has anything to do with this (or at least a major part of it). I further fail to see how a ‘damsel in distress’ trope explained by Sarkessian (or Disney movies) has anything to do with this incident.

Beware the feminists furthering their dastardly agenda of not being treated like shit any more! Won’t someone please think of the microwaved boys?!

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

So…this too is “spin” for “political purposes,” yes? Or not.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

“What’s so wrong about hating? Its just evolution, and how their chemicals react to such things.” Are you really that stupid, or pretending?

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 24

Sorry, it seems my sarcasm needs spelling out. It’s usually aimed at Western liberals who patronisingly excuse atrocities as “their culture”

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins May 23

What is especially depressing is that the demand comes from STUDENTS. http://bit.ly/1jC25ge  Pathetic, brainwashed little twerps.

Demand for Iranian actress to be flogged, because formally kissed on cheek by President of Cannes festival http://bit.ly/1jC25ge 

It’s all so frightfully political! How cruel that is!

Or is it? I haven’t seen anything from Zara or Hale saying it is.

Why is that?

H/t for the idea to Michael Nam.

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

You may think The New Misogyny (as, I’m told, David Futrelle calls it) and the harassment and threats and sometimes plain old violence that go with it are a problem, but there are those who think the problem is instead noticing the link between misogyny and harassment—>violence.

Steve Zara @sjzara

That video seems thoughtful and describes real problems for women, but I think the leap from masculinity problems to murder is too much.

Miranda Celeste Hale @mirandachale

@sjzara What angers me re: that video & the hashtag &Valenti’s op-ed etc. is the cruelty of the women who think this tragedy is about *them*

Steve Zara @sjzara

I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about trying to spin tragedy for political purposes.

Steve Zara @sjzara

. @mirandachale I get deeply uncomfortable when it’s put to me that a view or campaign position is beyond any criticism, any discussion.

Melynie Withington @MelynieAZ

@sjzara@mirandachale Same thing with gun control campaigners.

Andreas Draganis @ADraganis

@MelynieAZ@sjzara@mirandachale to play devils advocate here: when are they allowed to weigh in, only after directly affected by tragedy?

Steve Zara @sjzara

@ADraganis@MelynieAZ@mirandachale Surely, all the time, because their issues are general. It’s the linkage with tragedy that seems odd.

So what is happening here is that women or feminists are “trying to spin tragedy for political purposes.” So Rodger’s murder-spree was a simple tragedy, it was in no way political, and it’s bad, suspect “spin” to view it as political.

Why?

Why would that be the case? How could that be the case? Given the manifesto and the videos and especially the just-pre-murder video, how can his murders not be political? I suppose it’s conceivable that he just felt like murdering some totally random people and the pre-murder video was a misdirection…but it’s not very plausible.

I think when somebody makes a video announcing a plan to murder and reasons for the murder, and then commits the promised murder(s), we’re allowed to take that announcement at face value.

We do that when jihadists make pre-murder videos, I think.

Even without videos and manifestos, certain kinds of murder are pretty unmistakably political. The murder of James Byrd, the guy in Texas who was dragged behind a truck and battered to death, was pretty unmistakably political, despite its random quality. The murder of Matthew Shepard was pretty unmistakably political.

Or take the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Would a Steve Zara frown in concern at people who “spin” that particular “tragedy” as political? Would a Miranda Hale express anger at the “cruelty” of the black people who think this tragedy was “about *them*”? I hardly think so.

But when it’s women? Oh that’s different.

Why is it different?

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

Apparently the anti-feminist crowd have only just discovered Leonard Shlain’s ridiculous book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. That’s odd because it was published in 1998; I remember finding it in a bookstore and skimming through it and laughing a disdainful laugh. That was before I had a blog to do my laughing on!

There’s an article about it on this Amazon-linked site.

Shlain frames the premise:

Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture, few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. . . . One pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture.

He defines the feminine outlook as a “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world” and the masculine as a “linear, sequential, reductionist” one characterized by abstract thinking, while recognizing — as Susan Sontag did decades earlier in condemning our culture’s artificial polarities— that “every individual is generously endowed with all the features of both.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck off. It’s just the same old shit, you jackass, dressed up as nicer and more spirachool. There is no “feminine outlook” and that “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic” crap is just another way of saying too stupid to think clearly.

Shlain writes:

They coexist as two closely overlapping bell-shaped curves with no feature superior to its reciprocal. These complementary methods of comprehending reality resemble the ancient Taoist circle symbol of integration and symmetry in which the tension between the energy of the feminine yin and the masculine yang is exactly balanced. One side without the other is incomplete; together, they form a unified whole that is stronger than either half. First writing, and then the alphabet, upset this balance. Affected cultures, especially in the West, acquired a strong yang thrust.

You know who else talks like that? The Vatican.

What is especially interesting is that Shlain was writing in 1998, when the internet as we know it — a medium that lends text and image seemingly equal gravitas — was in its infant stage. The golden age of web video was nearly a decade away, as was the invention of the smartphone camera and its constant connection to the web. Could it be that the world wide web, especially the image-heavy ecosystem of social sharing, would emerge as an equalizer of gender dynamics?

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Nope!

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

Update: oh and there’s also PZ’s account. So that’s two non-anonymous sources.

Slime pitters are all agitated, asking me in unapproved comments if I have a source for the non-anonymous allegations of Shermer’s sexual harassment. I’m pretty sure I’ve already posted this, and I’m not here to do homework for the slime pitters, but all the same – here it is again.

Jason. Last November. Carrie Poppy and the Nay-sayers.

Carrie Poppy has been extraordinarily well-placed in some of the bigger scandals regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault recently, in having been employed as communications director for JREF and having resigned after six months due to, let’s say, philosophical differences with DJ Grothe, president of the organization. Well, if you can classify her stating her reasons for leaving as mere philosophy, being his “constant duplicity, dishonesty, and manipulation”.

So people rushed then to attack Carrie Poppy, to destroy her as an irrational harpy with a bone to grind and an axe to pick against Grothe. So when she recently decided to suggest that women should generally stay away from TAM because the JREF was unlikely to treat any incidents with any level of seriousness, people naturally resorted to the same trope — that she was trying to destroy TAM and JREF.

Only the strange thing is, the corroboration of her claims came from those very people that you’d least expect. The ones who have been trying to naysay the whole thing all along.

Carrie was tight-lipped about why at first, but the nay-sayers brigaded as they normally do. When asked what JREF / TAM could do to make things better:

The answer is going to sound very vague and like the JREF *must* already be doing this, because who in their right mind wouldn’t? But from my vantage:

1. Do not allow people who have assaulted others at your conference, or you have reasonable suspicion that they have done so, back at the conference.
2. Take women’s complaints (and any victim’s complaints) seriously. Investigate them fully.
3. Have an infrastructure for reporting complaints, where people feel safe and listened to.

These are reasonable complaints, and her putting them forward here suggests she knows that, at least when she was in a position to see it, that they were not in place. She’s evidently seen enough to know this is a trend, not a one-off.

But people keep pressing her for evidence or at least concrete examples, and she eventually talks to her lawyer:

Hi everyone. I just spoke to a lawyer about sharing this information with you, and feel comfortable telling you this one thing (though it is one of several):

D.J. Grothe told me and others, repeatedly, that he (DJ) had personally witnessed Michael Shermer groping a female TAM speaker’s breast, unprovoked and against her protestations. She has confirmed this, since. D.J. continued to invite that speaker to TAM in subsequent years. D.J. has stated this much over and over. So please, do feel free to ask him yourselves.

(By “that speaker,” I meant Shermer.)

That’s where. That’s my source. It’s DJ Grothe, via Carrie Poppy.

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