Tag: Freethought Blogs

  • Appropriate for male and female people

    Another thought has been bobbing around just at the edge of my vision for awhile. I’m reading (I think for the second time) a brilliant piece by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, A gender idealist in a non-ideal world, at More Radical With Age. She says something there that brought the thought bobbing at the edge of my vision out to right in front of me. She is talking about gender as a socially constructed, externally imposed hierarchy that operates to prescribe and proscribe certain modes of behaviour, and the way it limits our freedom and potential.

    We are saturated by gender in this non-ideal world. It is everywhere, so much so that most of us cannot see it: it’s the air we breathe, the water we swim in. Our entire social order is organised around the idea that different forms of behaviour and appearance are appropriate for male and female people. This idea has shaped our history and our politics. It is reflected in our language and embodied in our culture. It is the reason why gender non-conforming behaviour is still so heavily sanctioned: why homosexuality is still widely stigmatised; why rejection of feminine beauty norms comes at such a high price; why assertive, powerful women are socially shunned and ostracised.

    Shunned and ostracised. Those words have a new resonance for me these days – they grab my attention more because they apply to me in a new way. Mouthy, assertive women are shunned and ostracised. (Notice I don’t call myself powerful. Mouthy, yes, powerful, no.) Well yes, we are, aren’t we.

    It’s interesting to me that Ally Fogg flies under everyone’s radar at Freethought Blogs. It’s interesting to me that apparently the bloggers there haven’t felt the need to comb through his Facebook activities looking for incriminating “likes” or friends or jokes or groups. It’s interesting to me that it was so urgent to destroy me when it wasn’t so urgent to destroy anyone else. Ally’s always been quite open about the fact that he disagrees with most FT bloggers on a lot of issues about women and men, and that they would probably find material that irritated them if they went looking for it. And yet apparently no one has. Funny, that, isn’t it.

    So anyway my point is here’s this network that prides itself on being all yay social justice and yay feminism and yay mouthy assertive women…

    …and yet the network just succeeded in driving away by far the mouthiest (measuring by hits) woman it had. Mouthy, assertive women are shunned and ostracised, even by a putative social justice feminist network.

    Funny how that works.

  • Target

    Update February 13 – Well that last update turned out to be a mistake. Anton Hill asked me to update to say there was a truce, so I obliged, but he was bullshitting me. There’s no truce. He’s still talking shit about me on Twitter (compared to my saying nothing about him at all) and he’s still blogging about me, and tagging me in the hopes that his blog posts will infect internet searches about me.

    This entry was posted on February 8, 2013 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    February 8. Three days after he asked me to update saying there was a truce, and I complied.

    Lee Moore is still trying to con people into having a “discussion” with people like this. Yeah right, that’s a good plan.

    Update February 5 – We have managed to arrive at a truce behind the scenes, and Anton took the picture down, so that’s progress. He points out that I can’t know he was “pretending,” and he’s right.

    Anton Hill hadn’t talked about me enough yet, so he did another post about me today…pretending he’s now in full truce mode.

    But he helped himself to a picture of mine to publish (for no apparent reason, unless it’s in hope of inspiring new photoshops) on his post. That’s a peculiar thing to do. I don’t post pictures of people I blog about, except truly public (and powerful) people like the pope. It’s kind of…off, posting a picture of someone for no apparent reason. In the context of all the threats and jeers and photoshops and mutterings about acid, it has a bullying note. It’s not clear exactly which kind of bullying note – whether “look at this ugly bitch” or “here she is, this woman who has ‘chosen to be a public figure on multiple public forums’ but doesn’t want me hassling her on Twitter” or “got a funny caption?” or “hahahaha prune hahahahahahaha” or “photoshop please!” or “I bet you could take her down with one punch” – but it has the note.

    I doubt that he has permission to post it. I asked for permission to post it, myself. I asked him on the post if he has permission. The comment got held for moderation, but now it’s posted, so he’s seen it – but he hasn’t bothered to reply.

    That’s a “truce”? No, that is not a truce.

  • All your blogger are belong to us

    At last at last I can say it in public – I’ve been dropping hints for weeks, and I’ve told people off the record, but now I can say it out in the open –

    Taslima Nasreen has joined Freethought Blogs.

    Here’s a brief bio –

    Taslima Nasreen, an award-wining writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.  Taslima Nasreen was born in  Bangladesh. She started writing from the age of 13. Her writings also won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India  in 1992 and 2000. Taslima  won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award   from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France. She became Humanist Laureate from International Academy for Humanism,USA, She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., Erwin Fischer Award from IBKA,Germany, Feminist Press Award, USA .   She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris  and Paris Diderot University  in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar of Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009. Taslima has written  35 books, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in twenty Indian and European languages.Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideals she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been living in exile for more than 17 years.

    The excitement around here is Big.