Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Saturday Night Live gives you: chess for girls!

It’s sarcastic, and yet…it could just as easily be straight up.

The first thing I saw when I went to Twitter just now:

Sara E. Mayhew @saramayhew 31m

Fcking embarrassing to have such shitty speakers representing women. @wis3cfi: Women in Secularism 3 approaches by @opheliabenson

Ah yes, such “shitty speakers” as Taslima Nasreen, Susan Jacoby, Rebecca Goldstein, Katha Pollitt, Barbara Ehrenreich, Soraya Chemaly, Amanda Knief…

Embarrassing indeed.

Carol Tavris takes a look at the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen matter at Michael Shermer’s Skeptic.

The first part is good. I agree with all of it; it’s why I was careful not to say I “believed” Dylan Farrow or that I thought all claims of rape or sexual assault should be believed, just like that no matter what. It’s why I pointed out that DF’s memory could be wrong, without any intention or malice.

I was also dismayed to read claims by many of Dylan Farrow’s supporters that have long been scientifically disproved:

• Children never lie about sexual abuse.
• If a memory is vivid, detailed, and emotionally laden, that is evidence that it is accurate.
• In the case of Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow, one must be “lying.” As Aaron Bady posted in The New Inquiry, “If one of them has to be lying for the other to be telling the truth, then presuming the innocence of one produces a presumption of the other’s guilt. And Woody Allen cannot be presumed to be innocent of molesting a child unless she is presumed to be lying to us.”

Same here. But then, toward the end, things go slightly wrong.

The problem, as studies of cognitive dissonance show, is that as soon as we take sides, the brain sees to it that we will justify and solidify our position by seeking only the information that confirms it, and deny, ignore or minimize evidence that we could be wrong.

That is the reason for the vehemence with which many of Farrow’s supporters are shouting down the opposition. (The title of a research paper captured this phenomenon perfectly: “When in Doubt, Shout.”) Given a choice of whom to believe, they say, we must always side with the accuser in a rape or molestation case; otherwise we are supporting the patriarchal “rape culture.” As Bady writes, “if you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured.” Anyone who asks skeptical questions of Dylan Farrow’s story is a pedophile or a sexist who is abetting the abuse of children and women. That kind of self-righteous certainty shuts down thoughtful inquiry. It does not help the cause of feminism or justice.

How, then, should we think about Dylan Farrow’s allegations? It’s relevant that they occurred during a bitter custody dispute, when Mia Farrow’s understandable rage at Allen over his affair with Soon Yi was going at full blast. We might ask why Dylan is making her story public now. We might wonder whether she has been influenced by recovered-memory therapists or, as her brother Moses writes, by an angry and vengeful mother. We would want to take into account that this family remains bitterly divided. Most of all, we have to accept the most difficult lesson of critical thinking: tolerating uncertainty.

What we should not do, as my coauthor Elliot Aronson has said, is “sacrifice our skepticism on the altar of outrage.” Outrage is good when it leads to constructive, mindful efforts to promote justice—for innocent children and for innocent adults. But outrage without skepticism and science is a recipe for hysteria and witch hunts.

Notice anything? She forgot to follow her own instructions. That’s odd, isn’t it, since she had just given them. In one paragraph she said “as soon as we take sides, the brain sees to it that we will justify and solidify our position by seeking only the information that confirms it, and deny, ignore or minimize evidence that we could be wrong,” and in the next three paragraphs she discusses only Dylan Farrow’s allegations and not Woody Allen’s claims. It’s relevant that he’d been seeing a therapist because of his obsessive possessive relationship with Dylan; we might wonder whether he had some strange views about adoption and siblings and suitable sex partners; we would want to take into account that he never did see anything wrong with secretly fucking his long-term partner’s daughter.

So, yeah. Tavris is right that we don’t know, and that excess certainty is just that. But she’s quite wrong that that applies only to what Dylan Farrow has said.

Malala Yousafzai is supporting Fahma Mohamed in her campaign to get education about female genital mutilation into all schools in the UK.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Malala praised Fahma’s campaign, and joined her in calling for better education in schools about FGM. “I’ve watched every step of Fahma’s campaign and I think she is on the edge of something huge,” she said. “Over 140 million girls and women are mutilated – but like keeping girls out of school in Pakistan, we can come out together and be strong and change things for the next generation. I am her sister and I am at her side and I want her to be listened to I as I was.”

Fahma is 17, Malala is 16.

Malala, who has recovered well in the UK after receiving specialised treatment at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, compared the work done by Fahma and other members of the anti-FGM charity Integrate Bristol to her own battle for universal education. “I’m also trying to work for women’s rights and girls’ education and I think the campaign that you are doing is a part of my campaign as well,” she said. “[W]hen you talk about education you talk about quality education and it should be [known] all over the world about FGM – what it is and how can it affect the life of a girl. So I think it should be a part of education and we both will struggle for this. Because we can never achieve our goals unless we struggle for it, so I think this is the time to start it.”

Maybe that’s what girls are like. Maybe they actually have ideas in their heads. Maybe the people who carefully design extra-stupid toys and games for girls should pay more attention to girls like Fahma and Malala.

As Blanche Quizno points out, there was this:

It’s not a pink version of Battleship, it’s the women segregated in the kitchen doing the chores. Which is more infuriating?

I can’t choose between them.

Hey look what time it is – it’s almost March, so it’s almost time for Women in Secularism 3.

Taslima Nasreen will be there. She just tweeted a bit of good news – finally someone in Bangladesh has spoken up for her. The National Human Rights Commission has done that.

National Human Rights Commission Chairman Mizanur Rahman is unhappy about the lack of initiatives to bring feminist writer Taslima Nasrin back home.

His reaction came at a view-exchange meeting on empowerment of women held at CIRDAP auditorium in the capital on Wednesday.

Addressing the audience, he said: “What have you done to bring Taslima Nasrin back. Under what authority, a state deprives its citizen of the right to return home?”

Rahman said every citizen had the right to live in their motherland.

He said in an angry tone: “Taslima Nasrin couldn’t return home even after the death of her mother and relatives to see them for one last time.”

“She speaks against militants, is this her fault?”

Nasreen, a physician by training, was compelled to leave the country amid threat of militants following publication of her novel ‘Lajja’.

Since then, she has been living abroad – presently in India.

And in just a few weeks she’ll be at Women in Secularism 3.

Also, Susan Jacoby and Rebecca Goldstein are going to do an onstage conversation to talk about “Why Women Are Too Polite About Religion.” I look forward to that – it’s the other side of the “outspoken atheism is more of a guy thing” mistake. One reason people make that mistake is because a hell of a lot of people think that’s how things are divided: women do politeness and men do outspokenness. Women are pink and fluffy and need pink Monopoly and pink pens, and men are normal and sandpaperish and know how to be direct and frank. I look forward to hearing Susan Jacoby and Rebecca Goldstein skewering that notion.

As Kausik said – this is always relevant, alas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCyw3prIWhc

Lordy, how silly.

American Atheists got an information booth at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and announced it today, and promptly had its table snatched away because…I don’t know, because it turned out that atheists are atheists, or something. I did say it was silly.

Politico explains.

“American Atheists misrepresented itself about their willingness to engage in positive dialogue and work together to promote limited government,” said CPAC spokesperson Meghan Snyder in an email.

Earlier Tuesday, after announcing the group’s participation, American Atheists’ president David Silverman told CNN, “I am not worried about making the Christian right angry. The Christian right should be angry that we are going in to enlighten conservatives. The Christian right should be threatened by us.”

When CPAC spoke to Silverman about this “divisive and inappropriate language,” Snyder said, “he pledged that he will attack the very idea that Christianity is an important element of conservatism.”

“People of any faith tradition should not be attacked for their beliefs, especially at our conference. He has left us with no choice but to return his money,” she said.

But “attacking” the idea that Christianity is an important element of conservatism is not the same thing as “attacking” people for their beliefs.

Now, in all fairness, if Dave had been harassing the people behind CPAC for several months, calling them names and mocking them and tweeting at them, I could certainly see why they would decline his request for a booth. But that’s not what happened. Saying they can’t have a booth after all because he wanted to tell them that Christianity is not an important element of conservatism is just silly.

Oh, so that’s what the burqa is for.

TORONTO – A Muslim man wore a traditional woman’s burka and female shoes before he strangled his estranged wife in the company of their toddler son.

Abdul Malik Rustam admitted he donned the headdress — which disguised his face — and wedge shoes when he killed his wife, Shaher Bano Shahdady, after she asked for a divorce.

…

The killing occurred only two weeks after the 21-year-old woman received social assistance and moved into an apartment at 3131 Eglinton Ave. E.

Shahdady, who emigrated from Pakistan to Canada with her family when she was a year old, returned to her homeland when she was 12 or 13.

Rustam and Shahdady were wed in an arranged marriage in their native Pakistan in 2008 when she was 17 or 18 and he was 25.

Arranged? When she was 17 or 18? Is “arranged” really the right word there? Was it really arranged and not forced? I don’t know, but the power differential is obvious enough.

Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said the murder is an honour killing that raises two disturbing issues for him.

“This attire has become an attire of choice for various crimes, terrorists, and now this is the first time the burka has been used as an instrument to a murder,” Fatah said. “The burka is protected under the guise of religious freedom.”

He added that the burka enabled the killer “to gain access into the home.

“Had it not been for the burka, she would not have let him gain entry at 1 in the morning and would still be alive today,” he said.

“It follows the whole question of arranged marriages, for girls born or raised over here, to men overseas who simply cannot visualize or imagine their wives having professional relationships with any man,” Fatah said.

The whole thing is a nightmare.

Exactly. EXACTLY.

Via George Takei on Facebook.

We knew it all along. The motive force behind the campaign to get rid of abortion rights is hatred of women as women, women separate from babies, women as people.

Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post:

…just last week, Virginia State Senator Steve Martin posted on his Facebook wall, in response to a Valentine from a pro-choice group, that “Once a child does exist in your womb, I’m not going to assume a right to kill it just because the child’s host (some refer to them as mothers) doesn’t want it.” (He updated the post on Monday afternoon to change the language from “host” to “bearer of the child” because THAT fixes it.)

The fetus is a child, while the woman is a host. The fetus is a full person, while the woman is a mere incubator.

Women are expendable. They’re interchangeable. They’re basically just machines. They don’t matter, except for their machine-function. That’s why they’re the ones who gestate the babies, while the important people who really are fully people, men, get on with the important work that only people can do. Like stand-up comedy for instance.

Now Martin claims he was joking. Really? Look, when you support a fetal personhood bill and vote for the Virginia bill that mandated ultrasounds, it seems safe to assume that literally nothing you say calling women Baby-Hosts is a joke.

Precisely.

[See update at end.]

Ah yes – this again. If you make it explicit that you’re attempting to correct the lazy habit of inviting only men (only white men, only straight white men, etcetera) to do something then that’s tokenism, shock horror, so you shouldn’t do that, you should instead just stick with the lazy habit of inviting only men. It’s better all around. No one will use the word “token” and everything will be in every way better and more emollient.

The Independent has the details.

Dara O’Briain thinks the BBC’s ban on all-male comedy panels should have “evolved” without making future female guests appear as the “token woman”.

The Mock the Week presenter criticised the decision, arguing that stand-up by nature has a larger share of male comics.

By nature?

Ok wait, that could be just the Independent’s paraphrase. Maybe he didn’t say anything quite that dumb.

“It would have been better if it had evolved without showing your workings, if you know what I mean. Legislating for token woman isn’t much help.

“A certain number of women want to go into comedy and they should be cherished and nurtured, but you’re not going to shift the fact that loads more men want to do it.”

All right, that amounts to the same thing. If you’re not going to shift the fact, that must be because it’s “by nature,” also known as “it’s more of a guy thing.”

To go over the old ground yet again: nobody knows it’s “by nature” or “more of a guy thing” or a “fact” that you’re not going to shift. Why does nobody know that? Because there hasn’t been a careful test yet. The “tests” have all been done in a context where men are already expected to be the ones who do the talking, which includes the performing and the being funny. In a context like that it’s not possible to know that loads more men want to do it. The tests have also all been done in a context where women’s offerings get overlooked or dismissed or forgotten; a context where people just casually say “oh not many women want to do that” without pausing to realize that years of discouragement and extra-high hurdles could have something to do with their inability to think of many women who do stand-up.

O’Briain went on to argue that tackling gender inequalities in other areas such as computer coding would be a more effective use of time than dwelling on the representation of women in comedy.

“I wish a tenth of the energy that was put into the women-on-panel-shows debate was put into women in computer coding, in which there are hundreds of thousands of jobs in Europe and 11 per cent of them are done by women,” he said. “It seems a more sensible challenge than these 300 people (in stand-up comedy) and how they are represented.[“]

Tech jobs are also important; of course they are. But you know what else is important? The culture. The discourse. The public conversation. Why is it important? Because it shapes our perceptions of the world and ourselves and each other, and the interactions among them. If women are scarce or totally absent in big chunks of that, that matters.

Update: O’Briain says he was misquoted. On Twitter he said

To clarify, yet again. I have no problem with a policy of no all-male panel shows. I just wouldn’t have announced it.

Fair enough. I still disagree with the “you’re not going to shift the fact” claim, but that’s less annoying without the misquoted part.

Thanks to Malachite for the correction.

Oh brilliant, another one. An Olympic gold medallist in swimming got so much bullying shit for having a non-pert nose that she got a nose job.

Have years of taunts, trolling and cruel quips taken their toll on Britain’s most successful swimmer?

Two-time Olympic gold medallist Rebecca Adlington, 25, apparently underwent nose slimming surgery at a top Harley Street clinic this month, it has been reported.

The retired athlete, who also won two bronze medals at the London 2012 Olympics, has previously expressed her struggle to come to terms with her own body image.

Then there’s Vamsee Juluri in the Huffington Post. He seems to be very annoyed, so annoyed that he’s not altogether clear.

He’s annoyed because Doniger’s book has mistakes, and because there are many books about Hinduism in India but not so many in the US.

But it is in America, this bastion of privilege, and possibility, this dream of the world, that the real consequences of misrepresentation play out. You will find in all your bookstores and journals and hallowed pulpits, that “alternative” story, often becoming the only story. There is no room here for Hindus, only an “expert” on “The Hindus.” Look at the India shelves. Look at the op-ed pages of the papers of record. You will see no Hindus except by token of name perhaps. You will find top of the line seculars who will equate any critique of racism and orientalism against Hindus with Hindu fundamentalism. You will find, reflected back and forth in the words of the four or five authors who have been chosen to portray 1.5 billion people to America, the same malignant fantasy as the old colonizers about Hinduism. It is mitigated, perhaps, by a streak of anti-colonial idealism, a great anguish for the poor, the minorities, the oppressed of the world. But their view of Hinduism is limited. They either did not know it in their lives, or knew no affection for it. They hallucinate a bogey-man in it and blame it for all of India’s ills, with a straight face. They think that when Hindus get angry it is because of their “mythology” and when others kill people it is because they are poor and oppressed. They think that Hinduism has nothing good in it, just borrowed from other faiths. They think that Hinduism has been responsible for every bad thing in India, and then also think that Hinduism doesn’t really exist. They have no clue. And if they did not have the privilege that Hinduphobic orientalism has given them, their lack of academic depth and integrity would have been called out a million times over by now. There is no mainstream history of “The Hindus” in hegemonic center stage in North America. There is just one “alternative,” which makes little sense, frankly, even as an alternative too. It is just an old hegemony by a disingenuously counter-hegemonic name, and has nothing to with Hindus.

But those who are today merely silenced and fantasized about as The Hindus will one day have their history, and their own alternatives too. For the Hindus already have their own liberalism, secularism, and pluralism, way beyond the watered-down double-standard versions offered by the self-appointed prophets of the same. They will welcome debate, dissent, and a reasonable criticism of their own ways, from within and without.

Except, of course, for the ones who won’t.

It’s not just colonialists and Orientalists and militants of Enlightenment who think there is such a thing as caste discrimination in India. Check out Siddharth Singh in the Times of India a couple of weeks ago for instance.

Not many would argue that there is no caste-based discrimination in rural India, or that there was no such discrimination historically in India. The fact is that certain castes, such as the Dalits, have been socially excluded from full participation in the Indian society and economy over the past few centuries. There is documented evidence that in India’s villages, Dalits continue to be denied equal access to public and private goods such as water bodies, roads, land ownership, markets, financial institutions, and jobs. As a result, members belonging to such castes exhibit poor social indicators such as higher rates of poverty, lower literacy levels and higher infant mortality. However, that is rural India. What about modern, urban India? A casual glance at the matrimonial sections in our Sunday newspapers shows that caste plays a major role in our social spheres, but is there active discrimination in the modern private sector economy?

Since profits and efficiency are the guiding principles in a market economy, the claim is that only the most efficient workers are employed, leaving no room for discrimination on the basis of caste and other identities. For instance, in 2007, The Economist magazine claimed that “There is no strong evidence that companies discriminate against low-caste job applicants.”

However, such articles miss the research which does show that Dalits and other backward castes are in fact discriminated against even in the modern private sector.

Now imagine you’re born a Hindu boy who doesn’t have to worry about caste because he had the good luck not be born a Dalit…

There are people who take another view of the unpublishing of Wendy Doniger’s book in India.

There’s Jakob de Roover for instance, writing in Outlook India.

Imagine you are born in the 1950s as a Hindu boy with intellectual inclinations. As you grow up, your mother takes you to the temple and shows you how to do puja. Your grandparents tell you stories about Bhima’s strength, Krishna’s appetite, Durvasa’s temper… Perhaps you rejoice when Rama rescues Sita, feel afraid when Kali fights demons, or cry when Drona demands Ekalavya’s thumb as gurudakshina. Your father is indifferent to most of this stuff, but then he is very moody so you prefer to stay away from him in any case.

In school, you are taught about the history of India. You learn that Hinduism grew out of the Brahmanism imported during the Aryan invasion. The caste system is a fourfold hierarchy imposed by the Brahmin priesthood, so you are told, and untouchability is the bane of Hindu society. Caste discrimination needs to be eradicated, as Gandhi said, while the scientific temper should displace superstitious tradition, as Nehru taught.

Your teachers present this account as the truth, along with Newton’s physics and Darwin’s evolutionary theory. You feel bad about your “backward religion” and ashamed about “the massive injustice of caste.” For some time, as a student, you also mouth this story in the name of progress and social justice. Yet you feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with it. You sense that it misrepresents you and your traditions—it distorts your practices, your people, and your experience, but you don’t know what to do about it.

Could that be because you are a boy, and you are not a member of a lower caste?

Yes, it could. Jakob de Roover stacks the deck.

Later the boy has a daughter, who goes for a PhD in religious studies at “an Ivy League university” – without explanation for why she decided to go abroad for her PhD.

After some months, she begins to feel disappointed by the shallowness of the teaching and research. When compared to, say, the study of Buddhism, where a variety of perspectives flourish, Hinduism studies appears to be in a state of theoretical poverty. Refusing to take on the role of the native informant, she begins to voice her disagreement with her teachers. This is not appreciated and she soon learns that she has been branded “Hindutva.”

Around the same time, she detects a series of factual howlers and flawed translations in the works of eminent American scholars of Hinduism. When she points these out, several of her professors turn cold towards her. She is no longer invited to reading groups and is avoided at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion. In response, this budding researcher begins to engage in self-censorship and looks for comfort among NRI families living nearby. Her dissertation, considered groundbreaking by some international colleagues, gets hardly any response from her supervisors. Looking for a job, the difficulties grow: she needs references from her professors but whom can she ask? She applies to some excellent universities but is never shortlisted. Confidentially, a senior colleague tells her that her reputation as a Hindutva sympathiser precedes her. Eventually, she gets a tenure-track position at some university in small-town Virginia, where she feels so isolated and miserable that she decides to return to India.

There’s a lot more of the same kind of thing. It’s detailed but not convincing.