There’s a thing, or a fake thing that turned into a real thing, or not a real thing but a fake thing that people shouted at women for having anyway, that is called Bitchy Resting Face.

it wasn’t coined until – amazingly – May of this year. Needless to say, it instantly grabbed the media’s attention. Truly, a titbit with such potential for female anxiety and self-loathing is like an iron filing to the media’s magnet. The term emerged in a public safety announcement video – and we’ll get back to this video in just a tick – in which several women discuss the terrible problem that afflicts so many of their gender: Bitchy Resting Face. “They might not be bitches at all – they might just have faces that look bitchy,” one of the films several narrators clucks sympathetically.

Uh huh. I’ve had that my whole life. I’ve actually explained to people on occasion that I’m not as horrible as I look. I am very horrible, admittedly, but not as horrible as I look.

The weirdest thing is the BRF does not actually exist: the video that coined the term was made by comedian Taylor Orci and is a joke, as some of you might have guessed from the very name BRF. Yet this has not stopped plastic surgeons eagerly offering cures for this non-existent problem. In this sense, BRF is the new cankles. Hail the new cankles! Someone wheel out the gilded easel and announce its arrival!

It’s the kind of joke that needs a Dan Cardamon, I think.

There’s another issue here: the original video doesn’t just talk about BRF. It addresses Resting Asshole Face, the male equivalent of BRF. Needless to say, that has not garnered anywhere near the amount of comment that BRF has. As far as I’m aware, Jon Hamm has not appeared on US talkshows apologising for his Resting Asshole Face as Anna Paquin did for her BRF. Nor has the RAF (with apologies to the Royal Air Force) featured in the Mail Online’s sidebar of shame whereas BRF has already become almost as much of a regular feature there as drool-splattered photos of 14-year-old girls looking “grown up for their years”. To be fair, RAF is made up. But then, so is BRF.

I know this one! I totally know it. It’s because men are supposed to look like that, and women aren’t. Men who look like that just look strong and reserved and maybe intimidating. Women who look like that look like evil witches kill them kill them kill them.

The reason BRF has attracted so much more attention than RAF is not just because it’s more instinctive for the media to mock women’s bodies – although there is that – but because, clearly, the former underlines the expectations on women. To be an acceptable woman is to be feminine and that means being compliant and smiley. It doesn’t matter how many Anne-Marie Slaughters or Sheryl Sandbergs out there tell women to be more aggressive, the current public image of businesswomen in this country is one who bakes cupcakes and who injects Botox, two things that would presumably help sort out any woman’s BRF.

All BRF means, really, is “not at that moment smiling”. And how dare a woman not do that all the time, right? Cheer up, love it might never happen! Female characters in books, movies and on TV are meant to be likeable and, as nymag.com points out this week, if they’re not, the problem is usually explained away as a medical problem (such as Homeland’s Carrie being bipolar.) If they’re simply difficult, grumpy or selfish in the way male characters are, they provoke outrage and astonishment in the way male characters never do (hello, Lena Dunham.).

Precisely. They even get men, total strangers, shouting at them on the street for not smiling. Really: they do. We do. I do. Remember that? Two years ago? That guy was seriously pissed off by the audacity of my walking past his house with a bitchy witchy resting face.

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

Oh come on, laydeez, you can’t expect to have women on the money and the postage stamps, for cryin out loud. There’s a limit.

Caroline Criado-Perez started a battle on this principle: if the Bank of England wanted to take Elizabeth Fry, the only woman on any banknote, off the fiver, it had to replace her with another woman. We couldn’t live in a society that was only prepared to celebrate the achievements of men. What kind of a message is that to the nation, that the only declaration of legacy people will see most days, the only open declaration many of us will ever notice, includes no women?

That men are more important, of course. Which they are. Aren’t they?

The thing that triggered my interest was when people started laughing, and the laugh was always this: “Look on the other side, you dumb cow! The Queen is a woman! She’s on all of them!” Just as a thought experiment (redundant, now that Criado-Perez has won), try to explain to a hypothetical person why the Queen does not count as a “woman of note”. Do you feel as though you’ve regressed 50 years, even 100 years, to a time when it actually needed explaining, the difference between attainment and an accident of birth?

What I’ve been saying. An accident of birth didn’t magically make Charles Windsor a medical expert with no training.

Meanwhile, there was something interesting going on in the Council of Europe (I know, there’s a sentence you may not have read very often). It held a conference in Amsterdam on gender equality, in which Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project – so far 25,000 women have tweeted examples of often eye-popping misogyny – gave evidence. Her highest-profile campaign recently has been to get Facebook to apply its own moderator-standards – the rules it uses to prevent racism and anti-semitism on the site – to images of violence against women. As she points out in a brilliant video: “There are images of women being raped, being killed, being tortured, pictures of women with black eyes and bloodied faces with the caption, ‘Next time, don’t get pregnant’.”

Facebook, with that distinctive, MBA, small-c conservatism, will come down hard on abuse if it can see itself getting bad press over it, but cannot make a moral decision of its own about whether or not a joke about violence towards women might be equivalent to a joke about violence towards a particular race.

Women are more irritating, you see.

Following Bates’s and other testimony, on 10 July the Council of Europe made a set of recommendations (which it announced this week): member states should adopt an “appropriate legal framework” that would ensure “respect for the principle of human dignity and the prohibition of all discrimination on grounds of sex”, as well as of incitement to hatred and to any form of gender-based violence within the media.

Naturally, the Council of Europe doesn’t have the power to enforce it; and David Cameron, with his craven fear of the attack-labrador Europhobes in his party, will probably not simply reject the recommendations, but use his rejection of them as a calling card. The opposition to the call will be hideous to behold, uniting all the people who hate Europe “telling us what to do” with the people who treasure, above most things, their right to make hilarious jokes about rape; and what a cesspit that will be (hang on – unless this is not a Venn diagram at all, but a picture of one circle overlapping entirely with another circle?).

Pretty much. “Don’t tell me what to do, bitch” – that’s the Weltanschauung.

But this is potentially huge: imagine some crazy future, some post-angry time, when people listen to sustained argument and take it seriously. This “respect” would go far beyond Facebook. How could the Sun defend page 3 from the charge that it discriminated on grounds of sex? How could lads’ mags exist; what would happen to the Sunday Sport? The landscape of the printed media in the UK would change completely. And it would change because of Laura Bates and Everyday Sexism; because of Kat Banyard, and Lose the Lads Mags; because of Lucy-Anne Holmes and No More Page Three; because of Caroline Criado-Perez and her campaign on banknotes; it would change because of the 34,000 who signed the Bank of England petition, the 220,000 who tweeted about the Facebook campaign.

Two things are unarguable about this century; the first is that it is more sexist than the end of the last, raunch and postmodernism having converged to normalise the presentation of women as meat; the second is that the internet has had profound consequences for privacy and, inevitably, personal freedom. But pause to consider the vivacity of the feminist fourth wave, its energy and victories, the way it has honed and deployed the power of social media rather than surrendered to the misogynist tropes it throws up. It is fearless and pugnacious and alive with a sense of possibility.

Campaigning is better than it was in the 90s or the noughties; it is more determined, its weapons are more lethal; it is Buffy to yesteryear’s Mary Poppins. Look on its works, ye Mervyns, and despair.

But if whatever wave this is is so much better than all the previous waves, why is this century so much more sexist than the last? If Buffy is so great why is she losing?

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

By Susan at Popehat.

Hey, my dogs got vaccinated and now they are unable to talk!!!!!!!!!

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

Dr Paul Offitt is on the case.

A pediatrician who spent years defending childhood vaccines against the likes of actress/activist Jenny McCarthy has launched an assault on megavitamins and dietary supplements.

“If you take large quantities of vitamin A, vtamin E, beta carotene [or] selenium you increase your risk of cancer, risk of heart disease, and you could shorten your life,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The good thing here is, he has actual training in this field, unlike a certain eldest son I could mention.

One big problem with dietary supplements is a 1994 law that exempts them from the tighter scrutiny the FDA applies to its regulation of medicines, Offit says. So the makers of a garlic supplement can say that it “supports cardiovascular health” even though a government study found that garlic supplements didn’t lower cholesterol. Meanwhile, Offit says, patients clearly benefit from a range of FDA-approved statin drugs that actually do what garlic supplements claim to do.

I remember the lobbying for that law. Every time I wandered into a health foods store I would see 47 signs and notices shouting about the horror of regulation of dietary supplements. The forces of No Information Please won that fight: makers of supplements get to say any old bullshit, which consumers believe, because they know the gummint wouldn’t allow anybody to tell lies on packaging.

Offit says doctors are partly to blame for the growing popularity of high-dose vitamins and other dietary supplements. Rather than pushing back against patients who want to take them, he says, doctors have acted like waiters at a restaurant, simply asking, “What would you like?”

Many hospitals also include unproved dietary supplements in their list of medicines available to patients, Offit says. But he says his own institution, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, plans to remove nearly all supplements from its list later this month.

Offit says his attack on dietary supplements has generated a steady stream of hate mail. But he says it’s not as harsh as the hate mail he used to get from people who believe vaccines cause autism. “This is more, I’m ‘a liar and a shill for the pharmaceutical industry,’ ” he says, “not, ‘You’re going to hell.’ “

We need an official scale for hate mail.

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

Guest post by Claire Ramsey. Claire is the author of The People Who Spell, Gallaudet University Press 2011.

I’m not a philosopher and I dread to think how many years it’s been since I read Searle. But I’ve spent years not only trying to transmit knowledge and prod the youth of America into some kind of understanding but doing it on the actual topics of knowledge and understanding. In some models (I think ed psych but I could be wrong) they talk about different kinds of knowledge – declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conceptual knowledge and probably other kinds, I think some models include temporal knowledge, all of the time-related parts like sequence, and duration. Obviously declarative knowledge is just knowing what something is = that is a shoe and that other thing is a nectarine. Procedural knowledge is knowing procedures to accomplish something – it might be strategies for memorizing vocabulary or how to fix a carburetor. Conceptual knowledge is knowing the “why” of something – that’s the sky and it looks kind of blue and here’s why we see it that way even though it’s not really blue. I think both procedural and conceptual knowledges lead to a kind of understanding. All of this stuff unrolls inside an individual’s head, which is mostly what ed psych is interested in grasping.

Then there’s another kind of understanding that is key for being a good teacher and, I’d argue, a good talker, citizen, person, writer, story teller.  In other words it’s the kind of understanding that we develop – some more than others – so that we can be in the social world w/other people and do things with them, like have a conversation. In education circles there is a jargon term  – “Pedagogical Content Knowledge” – I think this business is the basis of many other interactions in life, not just teaching & learning & explaining.  It means knowing something so well from all angles that you can figure out (even predict) where another person (a learner in this case but it could be your interlocutor or your reader) stopped getting it and why, and figuring out another way to explain it so that it’s clear or figuring out what the background info or sequential info or whatever to add that the other person does not seem to be getting . . . and that is the stuff that takes empathy plus a big dose of knowing what you’re talking about.

In the tortured arguments and/or explanations of the MRA and the atheist sexist pests, their seemingly intentional pretense that they know what X means drove me nuts because it’s an example of intentionally being anti-social and anti-understanding while pretending that they aren’t. I hate that shit. And I think that’s why. We’ve all run into people who pretend that the whole world is completely literal (in their way) and all of that other stuff doesn’t matter. Well, they are wrong. And they don’t know jack about how conversation works or how language operates in social interactions.

Anyhow, like I said, I’m not a philosopher or an epistemologist or even a psychologist. I’m a  sociolinguist who gets annoyed easily by those who mishandle language. Then I just want to start slapping them.

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

Crissy Brown describes a nightmare that happened to her.

She was driving to work in Tuscaloosa (Alabama) and got pulled over for having expired license plate tags. The cop told her there was a warrant out for her arrest (for expired license plate tags???), handcuffed her, and searched her car. Then he took her to the police station.

As soon as I arrived at the police station, before I could make it through the metal detectors, I was pushed against a wall and made to stand there until a female officer could take the time to inappropriately touch – I mean frisk – me. As the woman ran her hands down my body and between my legs, three male officers stood behind me, watching the show.

From there, I was processed, which included stripping down in front of a female officer. While I stood before her naked, I asked the cop why it was necessary for me to be strip searched; she responded by calling me an asshole and deciding I needed to take a shower to, I suppose, wash the filth out of my mouth. I didn’t even get a towel to dry off with. She handed me a large, burlap-like orange set of scrubs, bedding, and a mattress. I was escorted down to population, made to walk along gray tape on the ground (it really pissed them off if you deviated from the “inmate line”), and then put in a holding cell that had more women than beds, two metal picnic tables, and an old fuzzy TV set.

For expired license plate tags.

This country has a completely crazy attitude to imprisonment.

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

Ireland is changing.

Traditionally Catholic Ireland has allowed an atheist group to perform weddings this year for the first time, and the few people certified to celebrate them are overwhelmed by hundreds of couples seeking their services.

Demand for the Humanist Association of Ireland’s secular weddings has surged as the moral authority of the once almighty Catholic Church collapsed in recent decades amid sex abuse scandals and Irish society’s rapid secularization.

Ah not just the sex abuse scandals. Don’t forget the enslavement and brutality scandals; don’t forget the industrial “schools” and the Magdalene laundries.

Until now, those who did not want a religious wedding could have only civil ceremonies. Outside of the registrar’s office, only clergy were permitted to perform weddings.

But statistics show rising demand for non-Church weddings. In 1996, 90 percent of Irish weddings were performed by the Catholic Church or the Church of Ireland. But by 2010 that percentage had fallen to 69 percent.

The pent-up demand from those who want more than a civil ceremony in a registry office but reject a religious wedding has created a major backlog for the humanist group’s ceremonies director.

And a seller’s market, apparently.

The law says solemnizers cannot work for profit. Whiteside said he usually asks 450 euros per wedding, although it might be more if long distance travel is involved.

“We don’t have salaries, so we have to have some kind of income,” he said, noting that priests had salaries and used their own churches for weddings.

Hmm. Sounds like profit to me.

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

Here’s a question for you. What’s the relationship between knowledge and understanding? What does epistemology have to say about understanding?

I’m thinking about the role of empathy and experience in understanding and, I think (but I’m not sure), in knowledge. If you experience something and thus come to understand it better than you did, is that knowledge?

I’m not a bit sure it is. If the understanding depends on experience, then it’s not sharable, and I think of knowledge as being generally sharable…but perhaps that’s a mistake.

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

Ah it turns out it was all a misunderstanding about Al Mana Interiors and its firing of Marte Dalelv for being slutty enough to get herself raped. Al Mana Interiors behaved impeccably the entire time; it says so itself.

DOHA, Qatar, July 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Hani El Korek, spokesperson for Al Mana Interiors W.L.L., today released the following statement:

“We are sympathetic to Marte Dalelv during this very difficult situation.  Al Mana Interiors has repeatedly offered Marte support and company representatives were by her side throughout the initial investigation and police interviews, and spent days at both the police station and the prosecutor’s office to help win her release.

“Company representatives have been supportive and in communication with Marte throughout her ordeal.  Only when Ms. Dalelv declined to have positive and constructive discussions about her employment status, and ceased communication with her employer, was the company forced to end our relationship with her. The decision had nothing to do with the rape allegation, and unfortunately neither Ms. Dalelv nor her attorneys have chosen to contact the company to discuss her employment status.

“We continue to be open to helping Ms. Dalelv and extending her resources during the Dubai legal process.  We are hopeful that we can resume a positive discussion about the assistance she needs during this difficult time.”

See? It was all her fault. Despite what Wissam Al Mana said in that “you’re fired” letter. He was just joking.

As mentioned is the suspension letter dated 20th March 2013, your employment agreement is termination due to your unacceptable and improper behavior during your last business trip in Dubai, which has resulted in your arrest by the Police Authorities in UAE.

Kidding! Kidding!! Totally kidding. Wissam and Marte were always kidding each other like that, around the water cooler in Doha. But for some reason the other day she just totally declined to have positive and constructive discussions about her employment status, so if she’s going to be a bitch about it, what do you expect? We’re not running a home for wayward sluts here.

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

That’s what Marte Dalelve’s company told her after she was arrested for being raped in Dubai. She behaved improperly, you see.

Ms. Dalelv received a letter from her employer Al Mana Interiors three weeks after she reported the rape, informing her that she was suspended from her position, effective immediately.

The ninth of april she got a new shocking letter: Her contract was terminated due to «unacceptable and improper behavior». This time it was the company’s managing director, Mr. Wissam Al Mana, who himself signed the letter.

It’s a very sweet letter. It doesn’t come right out and call her a whore.

Al Mana writes the following in the letter he personally signed:

Dear Ms. Dalelv,

Further to the suspension letter notified to you on 20th March 2013, we hereby inform you that you employment with Al Mana Interiors W.L.L. is terminated for misconduct and breach of your employment duties, effective immediately.

As mentioned is the suspension letter dated 20th March 2013, your employment agreement is termination due to your unacceptable and improper behavior during your last business trip in Dubai, which has resulted in your arrest by the Police Authorities in UAE.

The full and final settlement of any outstanding benefits can be discussed wih Mr. XXXX XXXXXX. At the same time, you are requested to hand in any company property given to you on account of company work.

The present letter has been given in accordance with article 61 of the Qatar Labour Law no 14 of (2004), and a copy of which will be submitted to the Labour Department, for their records.

Sincerely,

Wissam Al Mana
Managing Director

You just can’t let them out of the house, can you. If you try it just all goes horribly wrong.

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

At least, according to a DC Superior Court decision on Friday, there’s enough evidence that it does to make it ok for Michael Mann to proceed with a defamation suit.

A stunning DC Superior Court decision Friday on behalf of climatologist Michael Mann against the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) found:

There is sufficient evidence presented that is indicative of “actual malice. The CEI Defendants have consistently accused Plaintiff of fraud and inaccurate theories, despite Plaintiff’s work having been investigated several times and found to be proper. The CEI Defendants’ persistence despite the EPA and other investigative bodies’ conclusion that Plaintiff’s work is accurate (or that there is no evidence of data manipulation) is equal to a blatant disregard for the falsity of their statements. Thus, given the evidence presented the Court finds that Plaintiff could prove “actual malice.”

Sounds like actual malice to me – being shown over and over again that there is no data manipulation, and continuing to say there is just the same. Yup, I call that malice. I see a lot of it, too – a lie being repeated over and over and over and over again no matter how many times you point out that it’s a lie.

There were actually two decisions handed in DC Superior Court affirming Mann’s right to proceed in his defamation lawsuit against CEI and the National Review Online for their accusations of data manipulation and fraud. The Court eviscerated the Defendants’ arguments (made in their Motion to Dismiss) that their attacks are somehow First Amendment “protected speech” — merely “opinion,” “rhetorical hyperbole,” or “fair comment.”

The determination of “malice” is critical, as the decision explains:

The Court of Appeals has stated that to recover for defamation, a public figure must prove that the defamatory statement was made with “actual malice.” Nader v. de Toledano, 408 A.2d 31, 40 (D.C. 1979); see also, Foretich v. CBS, Inc., 619 A.2d 48, 59 (D.C. 1993) (quoting New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 297 (1964). This means the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Which is malicious.

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

There was a measles outbreak in Brooklyn in March. That means there was a vaccination problem in Brooklyn.

In March, New York City health authorities saw a sudden rise in measles cases in several densely populated Orthodox Jewish communities.

The disease quickly spread. Among the 58 measles cases reported thus far, a child contracted pneumonia and two pregnant women were hospitalized, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. One of the women had a miscarriage.

Very sad, when measles shouldn’t be around at all.

The department traced the outbreak to a person who it concluded brought the virus from a trip to London, says Jay Varma, the department’s deputy commissioner for disease control. Overall, vaccination rates are high in the communities, he says, but the outbreak then started in a small group of families with members who refused vaccines, he says.

Refused vaccines, but continued to mingle with other people.

While measles no longer circulates freely in the U.S., health authorities still battle outbreaks. All states require that children receive vaccinations before attending school, with some exceptions for medical reasons.

But many states grant religious or philosophical exemptions, creating pockets of vulnerability.

In other words, it’s not the case that “all states require that children receive vaccinations before attending school.” Many states don’t require that at all, because those exemptions are freely given.

No doubt it’s all part of god’s plan.

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

Dubai perhaps noticed the bad publicity; anyway it dropped the sentence.

Dubai authorities hope the pardon of the 24-year-old woman will allow them to sidestep another potentially embarrassing blow to the city’s heavily promoted image as a forward-looking model of luxury, excess and cross-cultural understanding.

Yum: luxury, excess and cross-cultural understanding. Actually, make that luxury and excess, without any kind of understanding. Luxury and excess aren’t really the best ways to promote understanding.

Rape prosecutions are complicated in the United Arab Emirates because — as in some other countries influenced by Islamic law — conviction requires either a confession or the testimony of adult male witnesses.

In a twist that often shocks Western observers, allegations of rape can boomerang into illegal sex charges for the accuser. In 2008, an Australian woman said she was jailed for eight months after claiming she was gang-raped at a UAE hotel.

You know, believe it or not, that “twist” often shocks non-Western observers, too, and it shocks non-Western victims even more. It’s kind of obtuse – kind of bad at cross-cultural understanding – to assume that all the people who live under misogynist laws think they’re a fine thing. There are such things as human rights organizations outside “the West,” you know. There are also women outside the West, and not all of them endorse being treated like punching bags.

[Foreign Minister] Barth Eide told the Norwegian news agency NTB that international media attention and Norway’s diplomatic measures helped Dalelv, who was free on appeal with her next court hearing scheduled for early September. Norway also reminded the United Arab Emirates of obligations under U.N. accords to seriously investigate claims of violence against women.

“The United Arab Emirates and Dubai is a rapidly changing society. This decision won’t only affect Marte Dalelv, who can travel home now if she wishes to, but also serve as a wake-up call regarding the legal situation in many other countries,” Barth Eide was quoted as saying.

Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter: “Happy that Marte has been pardoned and that she is a free woman again.”

I don’t like to call it a “pardon” since I don’t think being raped is a crime in the first place.

The AP does not identify the names of alleged sexual assault victims, but Dalelv went public voluntarily to talk to media.

In an interview with the AP last week, she recalled that she fled to the hotel lobby and asked for the police to be called after the alleged attack. The hotel staff asked if she was sure she wanted to involve the police, Dalelv said.

“Of course I want to call the police,” she said. “That is the natural reaction where I am from.”

Norway’s foreign minister said “very high level” Norwegian officials, including himself, had been in daily contact with counterparts in the United Arab Emirates since the verdict against Dalelv.

“We have made very clear what we think about this verdict and what we think about the fact that one is charged and sentenced when one starts out by reporting alleged abuse,” Barth Eide said.

In London, a rights group monitoring UAE affairs urged authorities to change laws to “ensure victims are protected, feel comfortable reporting crimes and are able to fairly pursue justice.”

“While we are pleased that Marte can now return home to Norway, her pardon still suggests that she was somehow guilty of a crime,” said Rori Donaghy, a spokesman for the Emirates Center for Human Rights. “Until laws are reformed, victims of sexual violence in the UAE will continue to suffer in this way and we will likely see more cases such as this one.”

Precisely.

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

Salon just woke up and rubbed its eyes and realized it had forgotten to publish an article asking why all the New Atheists are men, so a mere five years late it has now done so.

“New Atheism” is old news. Enter “New, New Atheism”: the next generation, with its more spiritual brand of non-belief, and its ambition to build an atheist church. It is an important moment for the faithless. Will it include women?

Wait wait wait. New, New already? No I don’t think so. We’re really not through with the Old New yet. Also – the atheists I know are not “more spiritual,” nor do they want to build an atheist church. Mostly. Maybe Chris Stedman and James Croft do, a little, sort of, in a way. But mostly, no.

Several years ago, there was discussion of a “woman problem” within the Atheist movement. New high priests of non-faith announced themselves—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Peter Singer, A.C. Grayling, Daniel Dennett, etc.—and they were men. And they were angry. Their best-selling works were important and essential. These authors helped reinvigorate the secular cause; they cast off the fog of political correctness to unapologetically lay siege to piety. But before long, these New Atheists were depicted as an old boys’ club—a clique of (white) men, bound by a particularly unyielding brand of disbelief.

Where were the women?

Why, they were right there: stolidly leading people away from the fold. They were irreverent bloggers and institution founders. And scholars. Around the time that the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris tripartite published its big wave of Atheist critique, historian Jennifer Michael Hecht published “Doubt” and journalist Susan Jacoby published “Freethinkers“—both critically acclaimed. And yet, these women, and many others, failed to emerge as public figures, household names.

It’s complicated. It’s so, so, so complicated. It’s the most complicated thing there is. It’s more complicated than genetics, or the human brain, or quantum physics, or building a bridge.

I kid. It’s not. It’s just laziness and habit and more laziness. And it’s not really true about the not emerging. I mean come on, nobody’s going to be a household name here – household names are people like Justin Bieber, not Richard Dawkins, let alone all the other atheists. But some of those people – those women – are…not household names, but maybe tiny niche names. Hecht and Jacoby certainly are.

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

Kathryn Hamen heaves a large sigh and wonders why the London Review of Books has such a very hard time finding women.

Having been asked, I told them: the ridiculously low number of women who are represented in each edition of your otherwise worthy journal is, well, ridiculous. The reply: It’s complicated, “as complicated as it gets”. The response was genuine in its bafflement and its hand-wringing consternation, and ended by stating that the editors at the LRB were desperate to change the situation.

To which I replied: then change it.

And then I posted the exchange on my blog, where it was retweeted and picked up by Salon.com in the US. Many people responded with, “I’ve been thinking that for ages.” We might be the only household where Guess the Ladies is played, but we’re clearly not alone in our frustration with the gender balance of the LRB.

Oh yes? Oh yes – so she did. She sent them an amusing, irritated letter and got a fatuous reply:

Dear Kathryn Heyman,

Many thanks for taking the time to let us know why you’ve decided to give up on the LRB. We’re very sorry to see you go, but respect your reasons. If you were interested, I’d be glad to discuss with you, perhaps in an email exchange, why it may be that women are underrepresented in the paper. I think they’re complicated; actually, as complicated as it gets. However, there’s no question that despite the distress it causes us that the proportion of women in the paper remains so stubbornly low, the efforts we’ve made to change the situation have been hopelessly unsuccessful. We’ll continue to try – the issue is on our minds constantly – in the hope that eventually you’ll feel ready to consider subscribing again. Best wishes,

Paul

No. No, and no, and no. That is not possible. Finding women who can write for the LRB is not like finding a snow leopard or gold or a sonnet written by a chicken. It’s not that your efforts have been unsuccessful, it’s that you haven’t made them. You haven’t asked enough women.

Heyman tells him that.

Secondly, I’m sorry, but I just can’t see what on earth you mean: efforts to change the situation? Really, Paul, with respect, it isn’t that hard. I could give you a list – off the top of my head -  of scores of eminent established female novelists and non-fiction writers who are not being reviewed. I could give you a similar list of emerging female writers. So, what’s the problem? Are your reviewers allergic to lady-words? Or is your problem finding female reviewers (because only women will review women?)I’m sure you are aware of the facts in the publishing industry: more women write books, more women read books. Your pages are a shocking inverse to the reality.

Quite. It’s just bullshit to claim that women who could write for the LRB are a rarity, just as it’s bullshit to claim that women who are worth hearing at conferences on secularism and atheism are a rarity. There are lots of them. People forget to ask them.

But the LRB couldn’t even manage to reply to Heyman.

Although there’s been no reply to my follow-up emails (no phone calls, no flowers, nothing), an LRB editor, Deborah Friedell, wrote to Salon, explaining, “we’re getting better, particularly when it comes to promoting and publishing the next generation of female critics”. She noted that the Review already publishes esteemed women writers.

Yes, but too few of them.

By publishing a literary journal with about 70% male contributors in every edition, the implicit message is that male writing is better than female writing.

Ah, no. With respect, that part isn’t right. The implicit message is that there are more better male writers, not that all male writers are better. The implicit message is that there are lots of good male writers and not so many good female writers.

That might be the case, considered in the abstract. (Or just as easily it might be the other way around.) But the reality is, there are more than enough writers of either sex good enough for the LRB, and people are just desperately stupid about remembering to ask enough. It’s like Cara Santa Maria saying she had a hell of a time trying to find atheist women to do that discussion, and then later revealing that she had asked only two women. I think that’s what Paul and his colleagues have been doing – asking two or three and then collapsing in anguish at how complicated it is to try to remember who the fourth might be.

My LRB correspondent explained that “men vastly outnumber women among writers proposing pieces”, but then went on to confirm that it is the editors who approach contributors – so, surely, in this case, the complication lies with the editors themselves. Is it more complicated to commission a woman than to commission a man?

This is what I’m saying! You have to ask them. You have to commission them. Don’t go telling us they won’t do it when you haven’t fucking asked them.

Bidisha (who is a writer) replies in a comment:

I’m writing this after 20+ years working directly in it, 20+ years putting up with it, 20+ glossing my complexion in the glass ceiling of it, 20+ years fighting it and 20+ years thinking about it. It’s cultural femicide: the act of erasing women from cultural life. I wrote about it 3 years ago in Tired of Being the Token Woman (which gives stats from the LRB) and Literary Women, Literary Prizes and A Call To Action and On Despair.

I’ve now spent about 4 or 5 years of those 20 producing, curating, presenting, commissioning or producing events and projects myself. Guess what? There are countless women around, all expert, all talented, all interested, all professional, articulate, insightful and keen. Despite all the complications of this complex issue – which, by the way, is incredibly entrenched and tricky, snagged on all manner of quantum enigmatic charismatic complexity – there are just gazillions of women experts, writers, critics, commentators, speakers, reviewers, artists, academics, analysts, achievers and advocates who are not shy, not unavailable, not crippled by low self esteem or any of the other victim-blaming excuses which perpetrators use to justify their extreme marginalisation of women.

Despite the positively debilitating complications of this issue let me boil it down – really, as a charitable act to help the perpetrators cut through this cloud of confusion …or shall we just call it a smokescreen… they have created.

Women are prolific and very present and active writers (in all fields and genres, fiction and non-fiction), readers, commentators, publishers, editors, agents, PRs, book event organisers and literary event attendees.

When they are ignored or heavily marginalised in the media it is exactly what it appears to be: misogynistic discrimination.

When women are working as producers, commissioners, editors and in other roles behind the scenes and still marginalise other women when it comes to handing out commissions, coverage and speaking slots, it’s exactly what it appears to be: female misogyny and man-worshipping.

It is easy to get more women: contact them and commission them. If you only know 5 women whom you consider to be worth intellectual notice, get each of them to recommend 5 other women whom they rate. It’s easy.

Precisely.

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

There’s an 11-year-old girl in Yeman, Nada al-Ahdal, who has a lot of courage and good sense.

A video, posted on YouTube, shows an 11-year-old Yemeni girl called Nada al-Ahdal recounting how she escaped her parents who wanted to force her to marry. Nada comes from a modest family and is one of eight siblings. Fortunately for her, her uncle Abdel Salam al-Ahdal, a montage and graphics technician in a TV station, decided to take her in when she was three years old, to live with him and his aging mother, away from her parents.

Here is that video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J7_TKgw1To

I would have had no life, no education. Don’t they have any compassion?

That is indeed the question.

H/t Małgorzata.

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

I had a poster of this on a wall once. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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