Here we go again.

This time it’s not evil bloggers-while-female, it’s evil gymnast-while-female.

McKayla Maroney is not going to win any medals for congeniality. As a member of the U.S. gymnastics team’s “Fab Five,” she’s the one Least Likely to Crack a Smile. But if you think that automatically makes her a sore loser, or worse, that it justifies calling a 16-year-old girl a brat or a bitch, please report to the nearest rock and crawl under it.

Oh don’t be silly, any fule kno it’s every woman’s job – yes even if she’s a girl of 16! – to look Nice and approachable and cuddly and non-threatening. If she fails in that duty it’s perfectly fine to shout at her and call her a bitch and a cunt.

At the opposite end of the age range, the queen got the same kind of crap for failing to grin for five hours straight.

Police those women and their scary faces, or else.

That face, that tough, steely look, has been a wide-open opportunity for would-be comics to poke fun at Maroney’s “Oh, hell no” countenance, and to riff on her “mean girl”  persona. She’s had entire galleries devoted to her “bitch face,”  which also serves as her unofficial nickname. She’s been a “fool” and a “brat” and a “baby,” a “snobby,” “pissy” “diva.” Well, what do you expect from the same civilization that also brought you the endless ragging on Gabby Douglas’ hair?

Nothing. I expect fucking nothing from that civilization.

Maroney isn’t the naturally smiling, ebullient Olympian. She doesn’t exude the warmth of Sanya Richards-Ross or outdoorsy ease of Kerri Walsh. Nothing about her serious, controlled persona says, “Hey, world, love me!” That’s a difficult thing for a lot of people in the world to accept in a female.

And that’s where they get us, right there. Intensity and focus are not allowed if they interfere with the cuddly – and you don’t want cuddly people who can’t focus in serious subjects like physics and engineering and computer science and math and philosophy, so better nudge the women out by making fun of them and policing their faces and tits and clothes all the time.

Bitch face indeed.

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

An excellent post on wrong ways to think about “honor” killing and other crimes of patriarchy, in particular on the murder in a courtroom of a woman by her brother, a lawyer. His reason? She married a man that her family hadn’t chosen for her, and without their permission.

Clearly, mere academic education is no proof against familial brutality, particularly when patriarchy, and the consequent misogyny, leave their indelible and putrid stench upon the family unit, the educational system, the political state, the emotive components of social and cultural institutions, such as religion, music and arts, language and literature (including folklore), as well as media associated with such cultures.

Education is surprisingly worthless as a preventive against misogyny. Why surprisingly? Because it seems so stupid and unthinking to foster inter-sexual hatred on one side and fear on the other. What’s the use of that? How does that make the world a better place to live in? It doesn’t – yet people can be supereducated and still not grasp that.

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

Phil Plait has a fantastic observation on all this, prompted by the amazing photo from the Mars orbiter of the Rover on its way down – this one -

The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that’s been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently – and perfectly – touch down on the surface mere minutes later.

I know. I was tripping on it yesterday, and I still am. Wham bam 8 months at high speed then wham decelerate then whisper touch down gently on the ground. It makes my eyes prickle every time I think about it. And not only that but the orbiter snaps a photo of it from above. It’s just too amazing.

The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don’t let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we’re curious – that’s when we’re at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn’t divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.

It’s what we can do, and what we must do.

Ya. One of the guys at the late press conference last night said he really believes curiosity is the central human quality. It was thrilling, especially because that’s what I think too.

Thank you JPL. Thank you engineers.

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

Courtesy of NASA.

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

Two academics, Stephen F. Cohen a professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, and Peter Reddaway, a professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University, report on problems with the work of Orlando Figes. Remember him? The historian who posted sockpuppet bad reviews of rivals’ work and flattering review of his own at Amazon, and then denied it, and threatened libel, and then let his wife take the blame, and only when that ploy failed too finally admitted he’d done it? And yet is still at Birkbeck?

Many Western observers believe that  Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.

You know there’s a “but” on the way.

Our examination of transcripts of original Russian-language interviews he used to write The Whisperers, and of documents provided by Russians close to the project, tells a different story. A second Russian publisher, Corpus, had no political qualms about soon contracting for its own edition of the book. In 2010, however, Corpus also canceled the project. The reasons had nothing to do with Putin’s regime but everything to do with Figes himself.

He got the Memorial Society, a widely respected Russian historical and human rights organization, to do a bunch of interviews for the book, and then when Corpus was going to do the Russian translation of the book, it looked at the original interviews and found mistakes in Figes’s (English language) book – so many mistakes it decided not to publish a translation after all.

Cohen and Reddaway describe some of the mistakes, and then sum up:

Unfortunately, The Whisperers is still regarded by many Western readers, including scholars, as an exemplary study of Soviet history. These new revelations show, however, that Figes’s work cannot be read without considerable caution. Historians are obliged to be especially meticulous in using generally inaccessible archive materials, but Figes cannot be fully trusted even with open sources.

That’s no good.

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

PZ has new rules.

Also, the porcupine joke is on its way out.

That’s good; I hate the porcupine joke.

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

A reader alerted me to a famous Belgian cartoonist’s response to Sophie Peeters’s documentary on street harassment of women.

She translated for me. The title is “More women get verbally harassed on the streets.” The cop is asking the woman, “What did the harasser look like?” She is replying, “Blue eyes, red nose, shabby clothes and not a complete set of teeth.”

Apparently the point is that she’s dressed like a whore and she’s enormous, while the guy she’s reporting to the cop is small and beaten to a pulp.

In other words, bitchez be lyin.

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

Mick Nugent has the latest post in Amy’s series, and it’s a Mars landing of a post. He gets it. (I know that’s an expression that some people dislike…but it does describe something, as does its obverse.) He gets what it’s like, and how it’s bad and harmful.

We should not tolerate, in any of our online or offline communities, any sexual harassment or abuse or threats of violence against women that we would not tolerate if they were directed against our family or close friends. On the Internet, many women face a pattern of online sexual harassment, including rape threats, in the technology, business, entertainment, atheist, skeptical, pop culture, gaming and many other online communities.

This can cause women to feel hurt and frightened, to hide their female identity online, or to retreat altogether from the Internet. And this can in turn affect other aspects of their lives. Our online identities and online networking are increasingly important to our social lives and careers. And our friends and employers may see this hate speech when searching online for information about us.

…

Most men have no idea of the relentless nature of this type of online abuse, and how devastating the cumulative impact can be. Because most men don’t get the same type of sexual abuse as women do, and because the Internet can seem to be an artificial environment, we can easily become desensitized to abuse that would outrage us if it was aimed at our sisters or friends or daughters or wives or mothers.

You may sincerely believe that people are exaggerating the scale and impact of this abuse, or that is prudish or victorian to be concerned about it. Or you may see it as a trivial problem that goes away when you turn off your computer. If any of these thoughts cross your mind, you should consider some actual examples of what this abuse really looks like, and imagine experiencing this from the perspective of the victims.

And then he provides a whole bunch of examples that illustrate the problem well.

This is a pattern of behaviour, not a series of isolated incidents. It is gradually becoming less acceptable to sexually harass or threaten women in real life. But that message has not yet reached the Internet, where anonymity and hostile debate and absence of oversight make it easier for us to evade responsibility for our actions.

…

There is also the wider context of sexism in general. If we as men faced this pattern of sick online abuse simply because of our gender, I suspect that we would urgently take action to tackle the problem. If we fail to take the same action when women face this problem, our inaction reinforces prejudice and discrimination against women generally. We may not mean to do that, and we may not even be aware of it, but the impact of our inaction remains the same.

Tackling sexism is a complex problem, with no magic answers. We should rigorously analyze the extent of sexism in our communities, both online and offline, and we should test and refine the best ways to eradicate it. But we must not deny that it exists, or reinforce it with prejudice and discrimination. Instead we should actively work to create inclusive, safe and supportive communities, in which we can live together as equals, regardless of our race, gender, sexuality or ability levels.

And he provides a bunch of references with links.

Touchdown confirmed. (Yes I’m going to be a Mars bore now. You’ll just have to get used to it.)

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

We’re safe on Mars.

We’ve got thumbnails.

That’s a wheel!

Holy shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZlo0wHx9bk

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

Curiosity has landed safely. It’s sent back pictures. I’m watching a room full of laughing crying hugging partying engineers.

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

John Protevi on body dimorphism in gymnastics.

…a glaring instance of gender inequality is with the sport that is usually said to get the best TV ratings, women’s gymnastics. The difference is in the disciplines. The men do 6 disciplines: floor, vault, pommel horse, high bar, parallel bars, and rings. The women do floor (but with music, which the men do not have), vault (but with the horse placed horizontal to the runway, whereas it is longways for the men), uneven parallel bars, and balance beam.

The resulting difference in demands produces a striking body dimorphism, with women gymnasts being very small and thin in the upper body compared to the men.

Indeed – also very young; also very small all over as well as in the upper body; also very made-up and with sparkly stuff in their hair. They’re part athlete part dancer part showgirl. It’s seriously weird.

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

And there’s Colombia, where acid attacks on women are the hot new fad.

It’s heartbreaking.

Every glance at a mirror transports Consuelo Cordoba to the moment when her boyfriend doused her with a skin-searing acid that obliterated her face, leaving her with gruesome wounds that will never heal.

The chemical burned off an ear, melted an eye, ate through her lower face and ruined her teeth. She now wears a skin-tight elastic mask, breathes through a straw-like tube that protrudes from her nose and walks the streets looking “like a monster,” as she put it.

“I would like to go to sleep today and not wake up tomorrow,” she said. “The truth is life is too hard and I am alone.”

What could she possibly have done to deserve that?

The precise reason for the spike here — and not in, say, neighboring Peru — is not known. But women’s rights advocates in Colombia talk about an epidemic of violence against women, from spouse-battering cases so extreme that they make the nightly news to reports of illegal armed groups using rape as a weapon in a murky rural conflict.

“Sometimes in the West we make fast judgments and say, ‘Look how terrible they treat women in the East,’ and we don’t look first at ourselves,” said Monica Roa, the Bogota-based international programs director of Women’s Link Worldwide, a rights group. “The violence here may be different, but it emanates from the same place. This is a culture where machismo reigns, where men do what they want to do.”

H/t Simon Davis.

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

On a pleasanter note – the Curiosity Rover is close to Mars and will be landing in about ten hours. This is seriously exciting.

The Nasa robot’s flight trajectory is so good engineers cancelled the latest course correction they had planned.

To be sure of touching down in the right place on the surface, the vehicle must hit a box at the top of the atmosphere that is just 3km by 12km.

“Our inbound trajectory is right down the pipe,” said Arthur Amador, Curiosity’s mission manager.

It’s been on the way for eight months. It’s got the best scientific equipment evarrr to drill into rocks and scoop up samples. It’s got energy to last for 14 years.

JPL Mars program.

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

There’s a guy in Pakistan who, according to some reports, has been holding drink and dance parties during Ramadan.

So the fuck what, you ask. So he and a woman were forced by police to walk naked to the police station.

Really. There’s this religious holiday, which requires participants to drink nothing (including water) and eat nothing from dawn to dusk. Some guy didn’t participate, therefore the cops humiliated him and some woman on the way to the police station. That’s some totalizing religion! No opting out. Don’t like it? Fine, take your clothes off, you’re busted.

The BBC’s Shahzeb Jillani says incidents of public dishonouring are not uncommon in Pakistan, but this incident is particularly shocking because it was carried out by police and filmed on mobile phones.

Last year, several men were arrested for stripping a middle aged woman naked and parading her round the village as punishment for her son allegedly having an affair with a woman in their family.

Shahnaz Bibi told the BBC at the time that her life had been ruined by the ordeal, and she could never go home.

Relentless everyday hatred and humiliation, casually trashing people’s lives for petty reasons or even to punish someone else. It makes me shiver with disgust.

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

The theocratic group Sharia4Belgium responded to Sophie Peeters’s documentary about street harassment by remarking that she dresses like a whore.

In Thursday’s video message Sharia4Belgium said of Ms Peeters that “She walks the streets half-naked and dresses like a cheap prostitute. She has painted her face like a clown. She has done all this to attract the attention of men.”

The fundamentalist group believes that Ms Peeters provoked the men in the film.

“Why do you think that women go about scantily-clad and with painted faces? It’s to get reactions from men.”

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

Asks the blogger at Above the Field. He can and he should, he answers himself.

Yesterday I read of a sexual assault in Washington DC that occurred not long ago. A bicyclist cruised up to a woman and stuck his hand up her skirt, violating her very being before riding away laughing. It would be easy to pass this off as an isolated incident of some pervert getting his kicks, except that this particular woman victim (Liz Gorman) wrote a blog about it, and hundreds responded with their own stories of similar experiences and worse.

Thank goodness this woman and others like her are speaking out instead of staying silent. Thank goodness they’re upsetting the status quo. Thank goodness they’re waking people like me up to what is going on around us every day.

Not “playing the victim.” Not whining, not making a big fuss about nothing, not refusing to do anything for ourselves, but just speaking out instead of staying silent about microaggressions, and upsetting the status quo that tells us to ignore sexist bullshit and Just Get On With It.

I fear for our future when I see adolescent and college-age guys being spoon-fed rapacious porn and jocular yet overtly sexist advertising that just feed into their levels of testosterone at that age. Couple this with how we continue to muffle women’s voices about sexual needs and desires, and we are raising another generation of coarse, close-minded men who rally around Daniel Tosh and don’t think twice about their sense of privilege or entitlement.  Basically: bad lovers, bad fathers, absentee husbands. I grew up knowing the experience of having an adulterous, alcoholic father, and far too often I was an absentee husband in my own failed marriage, far more focused on career than relationship. That cycle needs to stop.

I fear for the daughters of men like that. I really, really, really do. I fear for the daughters of men who have contempt for them because they’re not boys.

The stereotypical male is a sexist pig. He sees women as merchandise to be gazed at, and groped at. He sees himself as the master of his domain, and sex as HIS enjoyment, or even as his conquest. He may know of boundaries, but often feels they don’t apply to him. He laughs at sexist jokes, he gawks at pretty ladies like a slobbering schoolboy, and he is enabled and empowered by an advertising industry that gears its print and television ads at him – because, after all, the stereotypical male is the head of household, the breadwinner, and the decision maker.

I know this firsthand. I ran numerous websites and published a sexy cheerleaders calendar years ago that pandered to this demographic, and did it well. I gave no consideration to the fact that I was feeding the sexism machine, subjugating and objectifying women in the interest of making a buck. After all, the models I worked with were professionals who were thrilled to be on the sites or in the calendars, and my target demographic was those stereotypical white males who buy the merchandise.

It’s time for feminism to be mainstream. It’s time for open-minded, forward-thinking men to realize that equality means embracing feminism. Feminism isn’t a bad word. It’s simply a cry for fairness in an unfair world dominated for far too long by a small segment of white males who have convinced too many of us that speaking out is wrong, that having a voice is a privilege rather than a right, and that somehow they know what’s best for all of us.

Welcome aboard, comrade.

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

Seen on Twitter.

Dissing FtB is no more naughty than dissing HuffPo. It’s obviously a reaction to aspects, not every square inch. Ob-vi-ous-ly.

No. That’s completely wrong. Clearly lots of people are thinking something like that, but it’s wrong. The Huffington Post has editors. It’s like a magazine. Magazines have editors. They have a style, and a policy, and criteria; they have a lot of elements that make them a unified entity. It makes sense to generalize about The New Yorker or The Atlantic or The New Statesman – or the Huffington Post.

Freethought blogs is a network of blogs. There is no editor of all the blogs. There is no directive, there is no style, there is no policy. Once you’ve joined there are no criteria. It’s up to the individual blogger what she writes. There are no leaders. Just yesterday I saw somebody talking nonsense about not reading “FTB” until there was a change in “the leadership.” There is no leadership.

There is initial compatibility, yes; people are invited to join for reasons. But that’s it. It’s not comparable to the Huffington Post. And it is not the least bit obvious that endless sniping at “FTB” does no harm to, say, Dana Hunter or Mano Singham or Hank Fox. Yes, no doubt I’m a horrible person and deserve to be set on fire, but not everyone at “FTB” is a horrible person. Boooooooo on people making excuses for the “FTB” nonsense.

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

They’re talking about the “don’t mention the religion” problem at the Freethinker, too. Barry Duke Mentioned in the last paragraph of the post.

Last year, the British government’s Forced Marriage Unit investigated more than 1,400 cases of forced marriages, most of which occur in Muslim communities. Britain is home to more than 1.8 million Muslims, most from Pakistani roots.

But that’s the Freethinker, not the BBC or the Guardian.

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

The parents of Shafilea Ahmed have been convicted of her murder. There is much admirable refusal to excuse them because that’s “their culture.” All very well, but something is missing. Their “culture” is condemned; tradition and values and traditional values are declared non-exempt from competing values and from the law…but something is missing.

Consider what the judge said, according to the BBC.

On sentencing, Mr Justice Evans told the couple: “A desire that she understood and appreciated the cultural heritage from which she came is perfectly understandable, but an expectation that she live in a sealed cultural environment separate from the culture of the country in which she lived was unrealistic, destructive and cruel.”

Consider what the Guardian editorial said.

The police wisely refused to call Shafilea’s murder an “honour” killing. There can be no exonerating circumstance, no licence granted to those who claim cultural protection for brutality. Domestic violence and child sex abuse happen across cultures and ethnicities. But that only makes it all the more important that those charged with spotting it, supporting its victims and tackling its perpetrators, have the ability to understand what they are seeing and how to respond to it, wherever it is found.

Cultural heritage, cultural environment, culture of the country. Cultural protection, cultures and ethnicities.

It’s all culture. Not a word about religion. It’s as if the two were completely distinct, and as if religion had no influence on culture, nor any power to amplify and entrench and protect it from criticism.

Here’s a news flash for the Beeb and the Graun: culture without religion is a lot easier to shed and adapt and improve than culture with religion. “Culture” that’s indistinguishable from religion is a whole lot more difficult to escape. That’s just all the more true when organs of “culture” such as the BBC and the Guardian pretend it’s out of the picture altogether.

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