Tag: Sexism

  • What Pamela Gay said

    Pamela Gay has posted the text of her instantly-famous TAM talk – and oh man is it a stemwinder.

    She starts with the bullied school bus monitor, and the people who changed her life in response. She moves on to the 5th grader forbidden to give his winning speech on same-sex marriage, and the internet outcry that made the principal feel compelled to let the student give his speech after all.

    She moves on to people getting together to do good things, like “the Virtual Star Parties that my dear friend Fraser Cain hosts and that I and many others participate in.” She talks about hope and despair, dreamers and trolls.

    Doing what he does isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier to do nothing… easier to lose hope that anything can even be done. And there are people out there who would encourage despair.

    If, like me, you’re a child of the 80s, you may remember a movie called “Neverending Story”. It came out when I was a dorky little kid. This movie contained a certain giant wolf who totally understands trolls and their effect of creating their own great nothing in the world. (link) When asked why he is helping the great nothing destroy their world, this wolf responds, “It’s like a despair, destroying this world. … people who have no hopes are easy to control.”

    Looking around the internets, I see a lot of people sitting around trolling, and a lot people experiencing despair. There are YouTube videos of people complaining, and blog posts of people expressing their hurt, and in many cases there are legitimate reasons for people to be upset. There are people dying because we’ve lost herd immunity (link). There are lesbian teens in texas being killed for falling in love (link). There are so many cases of abuse that it hurts to read the news. There are lots of real reasons to be frustrated about the world we live in and it is easy to complain… and it is easy to lose hope.

    It is dreaming that is hard.

    That makes me choke up rather.

    She urges us to change the world, and gives moving examples of people doing that. (They remind me of one she didn’t mention: Wangari Mathai, one of my great heroes.)

    She urges us to do amateur astronomy if we want to, and offers helpful tools, such as her own CosmoQuest.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkA3p_vTo_k

    Then she talks about trolls who try to mess all this kind of thing up.

    She talks about Anita Sarkeesian. She quotes from that New Statesman piece by Helen Lewis that I quoted from the other day.

    And then she gets to the part where she needed real courage to say it.

    This talk is one I struggled to write. To finish this talk I have to step out of my comfort zone and give an honest acknowledgement that trolling isn’t something that just happens in nebulous random places on the internet and it isn’t just people being verbal in their close-mindedness. Sometimes things are more physical and more scary. As an astronomer, at professional conferences, I’ve randomly had my tits and ass grabbed and slapped by men in positions of power and by creeps who drank too much. This is part of what it means to be a woman in science. With the creeps I generally hold my own and get them to back off like I would with any asshole in a bar. With the people in power… I commiserate with the other women as we share stories of what has been grabbed by whom. I know as I say this that it sounds unbelievable – and how can we report the unbelievable and expect to be believed?

    This isn’t to say women shouldn’t go into astronomy. It is just to say that in the after hours events, you sometimes need to keep your butt to the wall and your arms crossed over your chest.

    Some of you have to have power to stop discrimination and harassment. It pisses me off to know that as strong as I am, I know I’m not powerful enough to name names and be confident that I’ll still have a career.

    Which is exactly what Jen said – before the mountain of shit hit the fan. Exactly.

    It’s often hard for women and minorities to rise to positions of power – to break through that glass ceiling. This is in someways a self-efficacy issue, where the constant down pouring of belittling comments and jokes plays a destructive role in self confidence. At my university, I’ve heard tenured faculty laugh that there is a policy not to hire women into tenure track physics positions. They do this in front of the junior faculty.  I’ve heard people joke that the reason I’m in a research center rather than in Physics is because I have boobs. It’s all said with a laugh. So far, its been nothing actionable or against the law. But it hurts, because I know the women who work for me, strong awesome powerful women like the Noisy Astronomer Nicole Gugiliucci and like Georgia Bracey are going to be hearing this, and it is going to effect their self esteem as they look to build their own carreers. I know it hurts my self esteem. And I know there is nothing I can do to change the reality I am in.  I could move to another university – I could change which reality I’m in – but that would leave behind a university devoid of women role models who are capable in physics and computer science, the two fields that my students come from. I stay, and I try to be the example of a woman doing things that matter. I try to say Brains, Body, Both – it is possible even in computational astrophysics.

    Thank you.

    Here in the skeptics community, we, like every other segment of society, have our share of individuals who, given the right combination of alcohol and proximity will grab tits and ass. I’ve had both body parts randomly and unexpectedly grabbed at in public places by people who attend this conference – not at this conference, but by people at this conference. Just like in astronomy, it’s a combination of the inebriated guys going too far – guys I can handle –  and of men in power being asses.

    I know that there has been a lot of internet buzz over the last two years about these issues. This community is filled with strong women. A Kovacs and MsInformation are two ballsy women I draw inspiration from. These are just two of the many SkepChicks, and many of the Skeptical and scientific podcasts have female hosts. When they see something wrong, they ask for ways to protect people from being hurt. And they do like Surly Amy did and raise money to get women here – women who together can support one another so that when we go home we have a network of women to turn to to support us even at a distance. These are women who react to  problems with a sharp word and a needed call to action that is designed to fix the problems

    I know this is an uncomfortable topic. An I know that my talk is going to provoke some of you who don’t think I should air dirty laundry. But I see a problem and I can’t change it alone.

    Thank you, thank you, thank you.

    Changing our society takes all of us. Doing something is being that guy, and I’ve had two different guys be that guy for me, who jumps between the girl and the boob grabber and intervenes. Doing something is donating to get more women here, and to get more minorities here, and making a point to admit, we’ve got problems – we’re humans – and saying Stopping Harressment Starts with me. (see endnote 2, below)

    We can make TAM a place that is focused on inspiring skeptical and scientific activism – that is focused on how each of us can in our own way make the world better. We can put this bullshit behind us, and we can try to rise above the problems that plague so many conferences in every field. We can be the better example.

    We can make TAM a place that is focused on inspiring skeptical and scientific activism – that is focused on how each of us can in our own way make the world better. We can put this bullshit behind us, and we can try to rise above the problems that plague so many conferences in every field. We can be the better example.

    Read the whole thing – I know you will, because you can see from this how good it is, and you know there are more videos and graphics.

    I feel a whole lot less isolated now. Pamela rocks.

  • Unthinking capitulation to the hegemonic oppressive politics of PC-fascism

    Steve Moxon took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union in January. The motion is quite funny, because it would do nicely as a summary of The Paula Kirby Thesis:

    This House Believes the Only Limit to Female Success is Female Ambition

    So pull your socks up and get on with it! No whingeing, and by “wingeing” I mean “reporting on social factors that impede women.”

    Moxon didn’t altogether wow the reviewer.

    Steve Moxon, on the other hand gave an appalling performance, his odd choice of showing a powerpoint presentation giving him the air of an enthusiastic but often inaudible lecturer and his offensive thesis that women should aspire to the traditional female role of being young, beautiful and attracting a mate and leave men to the business of leadership and success was met with audible derision from the audience.

    PC bastards.

    Moxon wasn’t the only champion of unPC though.

    Liz Jones, however, was perhaps the most controversial speaker, finishing a staggeringly sexist speech with “I’m not surprised women don’t get to the top: I am staggered we have jobs at all”, after suggesting that women “always put their personal lives first” and spend their time in the workplace chatting and crying. She also declared “I believe women prefer domesticity”, suggesting that “they prefer to be martyrs”, a ridiculous generalisation and display of regressive, misogynist ideas perhaps not unexpected, given the views she has expressed in her columns, but still disappointing.

    Funny how that sounds like Paula too. Victims; whining; crying; martyrs. It’s all the same playbook.

    But never mind that; imagine my joy to find a (very long) comment from Moxon himself right under the article!

    Well what a scientifically illiterate (not to mention PC-fascist) view the reviewer here took of my presentation at the Cambridge Union debate.

    Contrary to her unfounded claim, it was anything but prescriptive of how either women or men should behave: it was an explanation, drilling down through layer beneath layer, of the essential nature of the sexes; this explaining why it is that as ever we don’t see women in top positions to the same extent as we see men.

    He likes that “drilling down” metaphor, doesn’t he. But what does he use to drill with? The power of his own mind? It’s not child’s play, drilling through the layers to discover the essential nature of the sexes. I suspect what he means is just home-made ev psych, applied to find what he wants to find.

    It’s the unthinking capitulation to the hegemonic oppressive politics of PC-fascism that is the worse offence, though. That it’s business-as-usual elitist-separatism hiding behind a pretence to be about equality is not exactly hard to spot, and a fraud on such an unprecedented scale is unlikely to last for very much longer, despite the best efforts of journalists.

    Mmm. That’s what the skeptics of Leeds have to look forward to, is it.

    H/t Jim Lippard

  • There are also global standards

    At least someone gets it: why if person X – let’s call him Merelyatruck – is a sexist shit at blog Y – let’s call it ARF – a woman Z – let’s call her OB – wouldn’t want him commenting on her blog (let’s call it B&W) no matter how fake-civil he pretended to be while there.

    Said eigenperson:

    #87 Justicar:

    I think it’s very clear what Ophelia is saying there. She’s saying that if you are good in Location 1 and bad in Location 2, then you may act well sometimes, but you are not a good person, because a good person tries not to act badly anywhere.

    I would agree with that. While it is entirely appropriate to adapt one’s behavior to the local community standards, there are also global standards by which one ought to govern oneself everywhere, or at least anywhere public. What those standards are is, of course, debatable.

    For example, I know of one prominent scientist (now deceased) who was an absolutely raging sexist while he was at work. He did a lot of harm with his sexism in that context. But, in other contexts, he was not a sexist at all; in fact, he was very respectful to women in every location except his own office at the university, where he would recommend rejecting their applications (if they were grad students) or denying them tenure (if they were professors), or if they showed up in person, verbally abusing them until they went away.

    I am not willing to say that he was a good person, even though in so many contexts he acted according to standards I would be okay with. Because there was one context in which he consistently did not, even after it was explained to him that his behavior in that context was very harmful. This wasn’t just a case of “Oh, gee, I didn’t realize I had that bias!” No, it was very deliberate.

    If Ophelia thinks that the way you act on ERV is willful and harmful, it’s entirely rational for her to say that you are not a good person, even though you behave like one on her blog.

    Why yes, that’s it exactly. Thank you, eigenperson.

  • Marry the nice rapist, dear

    Oh, human beings, sometimes I despair of you. The arrangements you come up with! Do you just get shit-faced drunk one night and decide all the rules, or what?

    There’s this idea that letting a rapist avoid jail by “marrying” the young girl he repeatedly raped, for instance – that’s a real dud. I’ll tell you why. You forgot the girl!! It’s about the man who did the raping, and the men who own the girl. This means a shit life for the girl! Did you just not notice that, or what? Pay attention, ffs.

    In April, the unidentified girl was shopping in the northern city of Zarqa when a 19-year-old man kidnapped her, took her to the desert where he had a pitched a tent and raped her for three consecutive days, judicial sources said.

    She’s 14.

    Police found the girl during a routine patrol, drove her back to her family home and arrested the man.

    Within days news emerged that the boy had agreed to marry the girl, while all charges against him have been dropped.

    The boy had agreed to marry the girl. Well that’s nice, but he had also agreed to rape her – he agreed with himself – so why is his agreement so crucial while hers is left entirely out of the picture? What, in short, is the difference between her life in that tent and her life “married” to the man who grabbed her, abducted her, and raped her for three days? “Oh noez, he raped you! Well we’ll fix that: now he gets to rape you legally forever. You’re welcome.”

    Israa Tawalbeh, the country’s first woman coroner, sees “nothing wrong in Article 308 as such”.

    “The problem is how some local and international human rights groups interpret the law,” she said.

    …

    “Accepting marriage under Article 308 is better than leaving girls to be killed by their parents or relatives,” she said. “I think the law fits our society and reality. It protects the girls by forcing attackers to marry them.”

    Ah but there’s a third possibility: the girls’ parents or relatives don’t kill them anyway. Didn’t think of that, didja!

     

  • Why women can’t have nice things

    The gaming article linked to Helen Lewis in The New Statesman: Dear The Internet, This Is Why You Can’t Have Anything Nice.

    A Californian blogger, Anita Sarkeesian, launched a Kickstarter project to make a web video series about “tropes vs women in videogames”. Following on from her similar series on films, it aimed to look at women as background decoration, Damsels in Distress, the Sexy Sidekick and so on.

    What a good subject. Women in the media – it’s such a mess these days, there can’t be enough work done on this. Hooray for Anita Sarkeesian.

    Except some kind of Bastard Klaxon went off somewhere in the dank, moist depths of the internet. An angry misogynist Bat Signal, if you will. (It looks like those charming chaps at 4Chan might have had something to do it.)

    In Sarkeesian’s own words:

    The intimidation and harassment effort has included a torrent of misogyny and hate speech on my YouTube video, repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me, organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website.  These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape.  All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded.

    Thank you. Thank you misogynists. Thank you for making it so unpleasant for us to do anything in public. Thank you for making us pay a huge price for saying things. Thank you for punishing us for the crime of being female and in possession of an opinion.

    Lewis takes a look at the Wikipedia page.

    There are also references to Sarkeesian being “of Jewish descent”, an “entitled nigger” and having a “masters degree in Whining” (because why stick to one prejudice, when you can have them all?) More than a dozen IP addresses contributed to this vandalism before the page was locked.

    Meanwhile, her YouTube video attracted more than 5,000 comments, the majority of them of a, shall we say, unsupportive nature. The c-word got a lot of exercise, as did comments about her personal appearance, and a liberal sprinkling of threats of violence.

    Check, check, and check.

    Sarkeesian decided to leave the comments on her video, as proof that such sexism exists. I think it’s important that she did, because too often the response to stories like this, “Come on, it can’t be that bad”. There are two reasons for this: first, that if you don’t experience this kind of abuse, it’s difficult to believe it exists (particularly if you’re a man and this just isn’t part of your daily experience). Secondly, because news reports don’t print the bad words. We’ve got into a weird situation where you have to get a TV channel controller to sign off a comedian using the word “cunt” after 9pm, but on the internet, people spray it round like confetti. We read almost-daily reports of “trolls” being cautioned or even jailed, but often have no idea what they’ve said.

    This story should be shared for several reasons. The first is that a horrible thing happened to Anita Sarkeesian. She did nothing to deserve the torrent of abuse, and the concerted attempts to wreck her online presence. It’s not the first time this happened: Bioware’s Jennifer Hepler was similarly hounded out of town for expressing some fairly innocuous statements about videogames. Every time this happens, more women get the message: speak up, and we will come for you. We’ll try to ruin your life, tear you apart, for having an opinion.

    Check.

  • Enough to drive some of my friends from the game

    It’s not just the atheists and skeptics. It’s not just the US. It’s not just bloggers. It’s everywhere. It’s (notoriously) in gaming; it’s in Australia (gee, really?!).

    I’d talk to fellow players who’d moved servers, convinced that Thaurissan (an Oceanic server, with a high volume of Australian players) was suffering from the same rot as Australian society in general. Alas, as it turned out, there was sexism in pretty much every server and realm, enough to drive some of my friends from the game.

    Thus making it even more sexist, thus driving even more women from the game; repeat. Cf recent events. Women murmur about sexism; man rebukes women for murmuring about sexism; explosion of sexism takes place; women go elsewhere.

    This is how it works. Where there is rabid constant relentless sexism, women will be driven away because it isn’t fun, so the place where there is rabid constant relentless sexism gets even worse. That’s why it’s shortsighted and foolish to encourage the rabid constant relentless sexism, unless you actually like that kind of thing, which reasonable people don’t.

    I tell you this because it seems there is still a considerable slice of society that either believes that women don’t play video games, or that they do, but sexism in gaming isn’t that bad a problem.

    To which I can only really say: O RLY?

    A few weeks ago, cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian set up a Kickstarter campaign, seeking crowdfunding to produce her series about gender roles and sexism in gaming, Tropesvs. WomenInVideoGames.

    Sarkeesian’s campaign began to receive donation pledges, but then all hell broke loose: the bro dudes got wind of her campaign and set about doing all they could to burn it to the ground.

    Oh how familiar that sounds.

    I’m inclined to think that gaming, like its broader relative, “geekdom”, is one of those areas where the less reconstructed men of the world feel they still have a grip on the “old fashioned” way of doing things (i.e. objectifying women and slinging hate-speech around like confetti), and they’re not about to give it up without a fight. They still feel like they have a say when it comes to who gets to play in the treehouse.

    In many ways, it often feels as though women can’t win when it comes to fighting sexism within gaming (both itself and the community surrounding it): you’re either derided as a “girl gamer” who is only posing with a PS3 to be popular, or decried as a feminist bore because you dare to suggest that having a major female character suffer sexual assault is lazy character development.

    That too.

    Hipster misogyny is all over the place. Fighting it is probably hopeless, but one has to try.

    H/t Emily

  • Both sides

    A weekly podcast called Ask an Atheist devoted the episode recorded yesterday to what it calls “The Problem of Dogmatic Feminism”.

    It got some things wrong.

    At the beginning Becky and Sam (the hosts, along with Eileen who said only one thing) said that both sides in the dispute over feminism and atheism/skepticism were “doubling down”; it’s not as symmetrical as that. They said good men are getting shot down and men are being demonized; that’s way too sweeping.

    After they said this in general terms for awhile Sam pressed Becky for specifics, so she named Rebecca, me, Stephanie, and Jen. She sort of kind of blamed the Women in Secularism conference. She talked about the more recent dispute with DJ, and said that he had apologized for the “gossip after regretted sexual exploits” remark; that’s entirely wrong, he hasn’t apologized for that. She said that we ”dogmatically” say that male speakers who hit on women are automatically predators; no we don’t. What Stephanie and Jen have argued is that speakers at events are as it were one up; they have a status that resembles that of teachers in relation to students – or, one might add (but they haven’t, that I’ve seen) priests in relation to parishioners. There’s also therapists in relation to patients, ditto doctors. I don’t think it’s dogmatic to argue that it at least can be exploitative to leverage that position to get moar sex. The complication, obviously, is that plenty of people will be perfectly happy to have sexual attention from a speaker, just as plenty of students will be perfectly happy to have sexual attention from a teacher. The role itself is inherently seductive. Becky may have this complication in mind when she calls it “dogmatic” to say that speakers should just refrain from hitting on audience members, but she didn’t spell it out, and given the rest of what she said in that part of the podcast, that’s unfortunate.

    It improved a little after that, and Stephanie called in and corrected them on some points. But of course the ERV gang is flooding the comments, so that will make intelligent discussion impossible there. Anne C Hanna gives it a good shot though.

     

  • Attention whores unite

    Oh looky here – That Weird Atheist Girl on the concept of the “attention whore.” Back in November. Funny how it just never goes away, isn’t it.

    As any women who’s online a lot (in certain places) or who games will tell you, the number one sin is admitting you’re female (in any way). You can never do this, even if it’s relevant to the current conversation. Everyone assumes you’re male unless you say that you’re female (ugh, it’s like they think they’re real people or something!). The second you let that bit of information slip, you’re told one (or more) of the following three things: (1) tits or GTFO, (2) get back to the kitchen, or (3) you’re just an attention whore.

    Hipster misogyny, in other words, as Natalie Reed put it.

    It’s depressing that the battle for feminism has to be waged all over again but this time against what would otherwise be one’s own tribe – the off-center, the nerdy, the eccentric, the seeded onion roll as opposed to Wonder bread. Four centuries ago when I was a yoof and Second Wave feminism was roaring, the opposition was…you know…the growns, the stodgy, the timid, the conformist, the unthinking.

    Well no, that’s not actually right. That was part of what put the roar in: the fact that lefty men were not one bit better than anyone else. You know: the position of women in SNCC is prone. Hardeharhar, that’s a good one. But still – the way I remember it they caught on pretty quickly, if only because they had to. But hipster misogyny just sits there, sniggering and saying tits or GTFO.

    TWAG is on the board of directors of the Florida Humanists (pres. EllenBeth Wachs), and she introduced a no-harassment policy. Go Weird Atheist Girl!

  • Report all the things

    You’ve probably seen DJ’s comment at Skepchick, if you’ve been following this, and you’ve probably seen Stephanie’s excellent analysis of it today. I just want to say a couple of things – which probably duplicate things Stephanie and others have said, but never mind.

    First.

    let me say how sincerely and deeply regretful I am that I blamed you as the messenger. No woman – no person – should ever be blamed for being a victim or for speaking out about sexism or any social problem. I was wrong to write anything that could even be construed that way, and it was never my intent. I am sorry.

    How could it never have been his intent? What does he mean “could even be construed that way”? He said

    I think this misinformation results from irresponsible messaging coming from a small number of prominent and well-meaning women skeptics who, in trying to help correct real problems of sexism in skepticism, actually and rather clumsily themselves help create a climate where women — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe, and I find that unfortunate.

    And when Rebecca pressed him for specifics, he replied

    Rebecca: Off the top of my head, your quote in USA Today might suggest that the freethought or skeptics movements are unsafe for women. This is from the article:

    “I thought it was a safe space,” Watson said of the freethought community. “The biggest lesson I have learned over the years is that it is not a safe space. . . ”

    (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2011-09-15/atheist-sexism-women/50416454/1)

    So how could it possibly not have been his intent to blame women, and specifically Rebecca, for speaking out about sexism? There is no other way to “construe” what he said.

    Second.

    Talking about sexism isn’t the problem, sexism is the problem — I completely agree. But when trying to solve the problem, I believe reporting instances of being groped or grabbed (these may be criminal acts) to be the most effective way to help organizers make sure events are safe for everyone.

    But what if the groping happened where no one else saw? What about non-contact harassment? What about misogynist slurs as opposed to groping or grabbing?

    One, groping and grabbing is far from all there is to harassment, or a hostile climate. Two, reporting is fraught with difficulty unless there are multiple witnesses, which there usually aren’t. And irony of ironies, DJ’s complaint about women skeptics demonstrates exactly how and why reporting is fraught with difficulty. It all goes around in a circle, so his urging women to report all the things is just a sour joke. Oh right, we’ll do that, so that you can scold us some more.

    This is all very obvious, and yet there are people who think it isn’t, so I say it one more time.

  • Reporting harassment and naming names

    Maybe we can make a little progress here.

    DJ Grothe has a comment on his Facebook wall (I don’t know if it’s public or not), replying to this comment:

    I wish you could see, DJ, how a different frame would improve your position. Don’t say that the talk is causing a problem, say that the talk has increased the JREF’s desire to continue making TAM a safe and fun place for women.

    D.J. Grothe: I certainly agree, and don’t believe any conversation about sexism is the problem — sexism is the problem. But there may be disagreement about the best ways to combat that problem. I favor direct communication and reporting harassment and naming names (such helps organizers remove offenders etc). And I remain optimistic that people of good will can disagree on such strategic issues and continue working in common cause.

    Ok; this is one place where the gears start to grind, and maybe further discussion will help us make a little progress. (That’s what we want, right? Not Deep Rifts!! but explanation and better understanding. Right? But of course.)

    Here’s the problem: it’s not that easy. It’s sooooooo not that easy.

    Reporting sexual harassment (hereafter SH) is not easy – and by not easy I don’t mean it’s a nuisance, or difficult the way learning a new language is, I mean there are inherent problems and obstacles and penalties that make it all but impossible in most cases. I’ve just been chatting with some UK friends on Twitter about it, and they all instantly produced examples from their own experience.

    1. SH is by its nature covert. People usually don’t do it in crowded rooms full of witnesses, although sometimes they do, as Ashley Miller has been telling us.
    2. SH by its nature doesn’t leave evidence, unless it ends in rape.

    1 and 2 all by themselves are enough to show that reporting and naming names are not always going to be even possible, let alone easy. Then there are all the other problems – it’s a friend, it’s a boss, it’s a colleague, it’s someone super-important or famous or money-giving or otherwise of value to the organization you work for; it’s a neighbor, a landlord, a relative, a friend’s relative.

    Then there’s the “I’m a skeptic!” problem. On the one hand you have 1 and 2, and on the other hand you have people saying “I’m a skeptic, where’s your evidence?” People are saying this about SH among the atheists and skeptics right now, often with venom and malice and cunty epithets. So that’s another obstacle, innit. On the one hand women should report it and name names, on the other hand I’m a skeptic and where’s your evidence.

    DJ, this is a problem. It’s a structural problem within skepticism. That’s not your fault or our fault (we women who have been talking about it lately), it’s just a problem. On the other hand when you blame us for talking about it in general terms instead of reporting it and naming names, well that much is your doing.

  • Skepticism gone wild

    There’s such a thing as hyper-skepticism (as Jason calls it) – as skepticism pushed past (or steered right around) reasonable skepticism into its own opposite, questioning items that there’s no real reason to question. Evolution by natural selection is one such item; Obama’s birth in Hawaii is another; the utility of vaccinations is another; the superiority of non-alternative medicine to alternative medicine is another.

    The reality of casual contempt for women is another. The fact that that reality makes at least some women feel less than “safe” is another.

    Salty Current elucidates in a comment at Jason’s.

    It’s not a safe space when women publicly talking about the problems of harassment and misogyny are accused by prominent people in the movement of doing it as some sort of self-promotion or drama-stirring for attention or blog hits, or when the behavior cited in their examples is ignored, dismissed, or excused. It’s not a safe space when women who talk about these issues publicly then have to face a stream of vicious, misogynistic attacks and slurs.

    No, it’s not.It’s odd the way this fact keeps getting brushed aside. Streams of vicious verbal attacks feel like steps on the way to worse attacks, including violence. That’s not batshit crazy, you know, because sometimes streams of vicious verbal attacks are exactly that.

     

  • Words, actions, or attitudes

    They’re on the story in the UK, too.

    The skeptical community is aflame once again over the issue of sexual harassment following the remarks of JREF president DJ Grothe in response to a 50% reduction in female attendance at TAM 2012.

    Remarks remarking that the angry feminazis scared off the women who should be registering for TAM because TAM is totally entitled to those women and the angry feminazis have a hell of a nerve scaring them off.

    There is not really room to pretend there is not a real problem with sexism and harassment in our community, as this data from the American Secular Census shows, women are 26% more likely to feel unwelcome, discriminated against, or harmed at Secular events 14.4% of women have felt  unwelcome, discriminated against, or harmed in the secular movement and the factors that most influence these worrying statistics are as follows:

    77% – Words, actions, or attitudes of other participants

    46% – Words, actions, or attitudes of organizers, leaders, or employees

    23% – Unwanted advances by other participants

    15.4% – Unwanted advances by organizers, leaders, or employees

    15.4% – Programs or positions of the organization itself

    8% – Choice of activity or venue

    Words, actions, or attitudes, you see – it’s not just unwanted advances. Unwanted advances are a pretty small percentage. It’s important to keep this in mind.

     

  • Wait – that was last year…

    Ok there’s another thing…

    I was re-reading Chris Hallquist’s post, trying to figure out what there is about what DJ said that he finds worth agreeing with, and I noticed something I overlooked before. From the much-quoted bit of the comment that DJ posted on more than one blog (two? more than two? I forget) –

    Last year we had 40% women attendees, something I’m really happy about. But this year only about 18% of TAM registrants so far are women, a significant and alarming decrease…

    Last year was very soon after The Great Eruption (of misogynist bile in response to elevator item). This year is in the wake of The Great Eruption. That could be part of the explanation right there. Women likely to attend TAM have had most of a year to digest The Great Eruption, and it may be that some of them just think there might be more of the same kind of thing at places like TAM because there is so much of it in other places. I think that myself, actually. I’m not certain about it, but I think it’s quite likely that there will be some Eruptionists at TAM, and that they might do some erupting.

    I wonder if DJ has considered that possibility. I suppose even if he has he could still shove the blame onto people objecting to The Great Eruption as opposed to The Great Eruption itself, but still…I wonder.

  • Rebecca explains

    Rebecca Watson explains why she won’t be at TAM this year.

    During my visit to Germany last week, I was asked by a conference attendee how I thought we could get more women to attend skeptic and atheist conferences. I gave the answer I nearly always give: when we increase the number of women on stage, we increase the number of women in the audience. As usual, I gave this example: The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) run by the James Randi Educational Foundation. I pointed out that when I first started attending (TAM 3), there were very few women on stage and the audience was only about 20% women. I explained that last year (TAM 9) an effort had been made to have women comprise 50% of the speakers. Most of those women were on panels and workshops, but it was a huge step. That, combined with ongoing promotion in places like Skepchick where Surly Amy raised thousands of dollars to give travel grants to dozens of women, helped finally raise the percentage of women in the audience to 40%.

    Skepchick helped to promote TAM to women, and to send women to TAM. Skepchick has been good to TAM.

    So it’s odd for me to be announcing that I will not attend TAM this year, because I do not feel welcomed or safe and I disagree strongly with the recent actions of the JREF president, DJ Grothe.

    I’ve attended TAM since TAM 3 in 2005, and since TAM 4 I’ve actively raised money for grants to send more women. That’s actually how Skepchick got started – selling calendars to raise money for women to go to TAM. Signed calendars were even auctioned off at TAM in order to raise even more money for the JREF. For several years, we at Skepchick actively tried to work with the JREF to help increase the number of women on stage, as well, creating long lists of potential female speakers and suggesting panels and other events that would be of interest to women. TAM was the main event for Skepchick, even after we started running our own event at SkepchickCon.

    You would think JREF would be grateful. But then DJ Grothe, president of JREF, blamed women talking about sexism and harassment for a reported decline in women registering for TAM. Say what?

    DJ was blaming women skeptics for creating an unwelcoming environment. I found that claim astonishing, since I was only aware of women speaking frankly about their own experiences and their own feelings. I couldn’t imagine that DJ would be literally blaming the victim for speaking out. To be sure, I asked him in that thread to give us examples of what he was talking about. To my surprise, this was his response:

    Rebecca: Off the top of my head, your quote in USA Today might suggest that the freethought or skeptics movements are unsafe for women. This is from the article:

    “I thought it was a safe space,” Watson said of the freethought community. “The biggest lesson I have learned over the years is that it is not a safe space. . . ”

    (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2011-09-15/atheist-sexism-women/50416454/1)

    Over the past several years, I’ve been groped, grabbed, touched in other nonconsensual ways, told I can expect to be raped, told I’m a whore, a slut, a bitch, a prude, a dyke, a cunt, a twat, told I should watch my back at conferences, told I’m too ugly to be raped, told I don’t have a say in my own treatment because I’ve posed for sexy photos, told I should get a better headshot because that one doesn’t convey how sexy I am in person, told I deserve to be raped – by skeptics and atheists. All by skeptics and atheists. Constantly.

    This is quite obviously not a safe space for me or for other women who want to be free of the gendered slurs and sexual threats and come-ons we experience in our day-to-day lives. But apparently, DJ thinks I am lying about that, since apparently my feeling that the freethought community is not a safe space is “misinformation.” I should apparently put on a smile and pretend it doesn’t happen, because by reporting on my treatment, I am creating “a climate where women — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe.”

    As Jews in Germany circa 1936 might have created “a climate where Jews — who otherwise wouldn’t — end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe.” As the Southern Poverty Law Center creates a climate where people who are the object of systematic vocal hatred end up feeling unwelcome and unsafe. That’s not to compare TAM with Nazi Germany or racist pockets of the US, of course, but then Rebecca didn’t name TAM in the item DJ quoted, either; she (or rather USA Today, indirectly quoting her) said “the freethought community.”

    And once again we see that the tragedy isn’t necessarily in the initial problem – like say a man propositioning a woman who has just said she doesn’t want to be propositioned, at 4am in an elevator – but in the reaction to a mild rebuke from the woman. The nonstop avalanche of rape threats she gets because she had the temerity to say “Guys, don’t do that.”

    And so here, the tragedy isn’t in the initial amount of harassment. It was (initially) only slightly more harassment than I had had to deal with in my every day life, after all, outside of this community. No, the tragedy is when the president of the organization that inspired me to join this community tells the world that women feel unsafe and unwelcome because of me. Because I talk about the men who harass me in this community, even while I encourage more women to attend these conferences and stand up and be counted, while I give conference organizers tips on improving the experience for women, and even while I help raise thousands and thousands of dollars to send women to these conferences.

    It’s deeply depressing.

     

     

     

  • Not ready for the flood

    Paul Fidalgo did another good roundup of Stuff on Women in Secularism last week (“another” in addition to the one I linked to before that one).

    He quoted Jen on the perils in talking about “commonly-showcased speakers who are also bad-actors toward women”:

    Look at what happened to Rebecca Watson when she simply said “guys, don’t do that” about an anonymous conference attendee. Imagine the shitstorm if there were public accusations of sexual misconduct of some very famous speakers. I’m not ready for the flood of rape and death threats. I’m not ready to be blacklisted and have my atheist “career” ruined by people more powerful and influential than me. I’m not ready to be sued for libel or slander. I’m not ready for the SSA or other organizations I’m affiliated with to also be harmed by association. And that’s exactly how all of these other women feel – hence the silence.

    And commented on this situation himself:

    The fact that we have a prominent leader in our movement—or anyone in our community—who has to be concerned about a “flood of rape and death threats” has to be a screaming alarm for us to change our attitudes and confront reality. We are the reality-based community, after all. And we are also (many of us) humanists, and the fear and repression that this atmosphere represents is contrary to those values, contrary to basic morality, and is truly the very thing we as a community claim to be against when it comes in a religious context. I hope that a result of this discussion is not more vitriol and defensiveness, but a newfound resolve to act and make things better. We’re hypocrites if we don’t.

    So far there has been some more vitriol and defensiveness, but also their opposites, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

  • Suck out that moisture

    How about the Zimbabwean senator from the Movement for Democratic Change who thinks the way to prevent AIDS is to vacuum all the disgusting goo out of women?

    He also thinks they should stop taking showers so that they’ll be too smelly to fuck, and shave their heads so that they’ll be too bald ditto, but the disgusting goo idea is more sciency than that.

    He also gave an interview in which he stated that “Women have got more moisture in their organs as compared to men so there is need to research on how to deal with that moisture because it is conducive for bacteria breeding. There should be a way to suck out that moisture.”

    Yes indeedy.  There should be a way to suck it out, and a way to make it mandatory for women to have it sucked out. Sounds kind of rapey, but think  of the upside – for the first time in human history, women who aren’t all slimy and disgusting. Booyah.

  • What then is to be done?

    So, what to do about sexual harassment? Well for a start, as Jen says, it helps to be aware of it.

    I didn’t realize so many people were oblivious to these problems. I thought because I was so quickly brought into The Know, this had to be something everyone in the movement was aware of. But it wasn’t. After I made my comment, dozens of people kept asking me for the names on The List (which I didn’t give – see my previous points). I was independently approached by multiple big names at the conference who wanted to help and learn what they could do to make their conferences safer.

    Stephanie Zvan has given an excellent suggestion: Our conferences need to start adopting anti-harassment policies with guidelines of how to handle harassment that are clearly known to everyone, including speakers.

    And that’s happening already.

    And her blog post is already having results. Groups are pledging to adopt this policy, including American Atheists and the Secular Student Alliance (which had an anti-harassment policy last year but will make it more prominent). I encourage you to ask other major atheist and secular organizations to adopt similar policies with a link to Stephanie’s post. Because an easy first step is to put pressure on organizations to address this problem. EDIT: Freethought Festival and the Minnesota Atheist Convention have also pledged to adopt a policy.

    Only a few hours in. I’m impressed.

  • When the environment makes gender salient

    Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender, p xxvi:

    When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expectations become more prominent in the mind. This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination.

    There is a large body of research that demonstrates this. It’s not some fuzzy thing that we just guess at.

    This is why it’s so maddening that sexist sneering and “joking” and one-upping and epitheting is still, after all this time, considered normal and ok in a way that the racist or ethnic equivalent just is not.

    Want to test that? Just imagine Tom Harris, Labour MP, tweeting “What a hero! Fearless protester chucks an egg at EdM and runs away. Like a Jew. Throws like a Jew too.”

    SeewotImean? He’d never say that. It would be career suicide. But girl? Oh well that’s completely different.

    No it isn’t. No it isn’t, you brainless heartless bastard. You just added another mite to the huge pile of stereotypical inferiority that girls are subjected to from birth. You just made gender salient, and you reminded the gender in question that it’s sneaky and cowardly and weak. And you wouldn’t do it to people of other races, or nationalities, or immigration status – but you’re happy to do it to girls.

    What a hero.

  • On a billboard

    I saw this billboard while on a bus yesterday; it was urging adoption of pets from shelters, and it was a big banner portrait (not a photograph) of five Yellow Lab puppies. Four of the five are looking straight out, while just one of them is tilting the head…and has a pink bow behind the ear. Well gee, guess what we’re supposed to think – the one with the bow is A Girl.

    So why is there only one girl then? Why four forthright direct Boy puppies and just one flirtatious coy bow-behind-the-ear Girl?

    (And why single her out? Why signal her sex? Why put a bow behind her ear? When the fuck do puppies ever wear bows behind their ears?!! How would you even attach it? And why would you try when you know the puppy would yank it off in two seconds flat? What is your point?)

    I’ll tell you why: it’s the Smurfette Principle. It’s the Muppets principle, the Toy Story principle, the Lion King principle, the Ice Age principle, the Winnie the Pooh principle, the Wind in the Willows principle. It’s the everybody is a boy except for a very rare weird stupid coquettish thing in skirts or with a bow behind her ear principle.

    The Smurfette Principle was named by Katha Pollitt in the New York Times magazine in 1991. Not a god damn thing has changed in those 21 years.

    Take a look at the kids’ section of your local video store. You’ll find that features starring boys, and usually aimed at them, account for 9 out of 10 offerings. Clicking the television dial one recent week — admittedly not an encyclopedic study — I came across not a single network cartoon or puppet show starring a female. (Nickelodeon, the children’s cable channel, has one of each.) Except for the crudity of the animation and the general air of witlessness and hype, I might as well have been back in my own 1950′s childhood, nibbling Frosted Flakes in front of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and the rest of the all-male Warner Brothers lineup.

    Contemporary shows are either essentially all-male, like “Garfield,” or are organized on what I call the Smurfette principle: a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined. In the worst cartoons — the ones that blend seamlessly into the animated cereal commercials — the female is usually a little-sister type, a bunny in a pink dress and hair ribbons who tags along with the adventurous bears and badgers. But the Smurfette principle rules the more carefully made shows, too. Thus, Kanga, the only female in “Winnie-the-Pooh,” is a mother. Piggy, of “Muppet Babies,” is a pint-size version of Miss Piggy, the camp glamour queen of the Muppet movies. April, of the wildly popular “Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles,” functions as a girl Friday to a quartet of male superheroes. The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.

    And it even applies to puppies for christ’s sake. There are four male dogs for every female – ask any biologist; this is a known fact about canine reproduction.

    Not.

    Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. And it would be nice to see that change, one of these days.

  • I get email

    I got one today from someone who has commented here a few times as nmcc or NMcC, and who commented yesterday to tell me how wrong I am about the word “cunt” and to say “Sarah Palin is a cunt.” I deleted that comment and put him – his email address showed he’s a Nigel – in moderation. The message I got this morning expressed surprise at the deletion of the comment. (It started with “Hi” – this is more significant than you might think.) I replied, brusquely,

    Really? You would have thought “Sarah Palin is a cunt” was well within my commenting policy? I’ve been very explicit about that. Other things not within my commenting policy: “Al Sharpton is a nigger.” “Woody Allen is a kike.” “Salman Rushdie is a wog.”

    I hope that clears things up.

    ——– Ophelia Benson, Editor Butterflies and Wheels ———

    He replied. This is how he replied:

    Dear Ms Benson,
    Thank you for taking the time to reply to my email.
    I must say, I don’t expect much in the way of civility from the ‘new’ atheist type, but I confess I thought elementary good manners by way of an introductory salutation might not have been beyond you. Obviously not.
    In regard to my comment: This is simply a difference of opinion, though one that you have blown up into a difference of principle – or, rather, you have attempted to do so. In my opinion (I assume I’m allowed to have an opinion since we don’t live in a ‘new’ atheist world yet, and neither, thank Christ, are we ever likely to!), and as I said in my comment, the word cunt, like the word dick, and like the word asshole, are rarely, if ever, used to refer to a particular anatomical feature of a male or female. Words can take on a life of their own. Language evolves and grows and changes to the degree that words are unrecognisable from what they first meant, implied or described. The word gay, of course, is an obvious example.
    I use the word cunt all the time. So do a lot of people I know. I never use it with the slightest thought of it having any connection with the female genitalia. To my knowledge, neither does anyone else.
    So, in fact, you are quite simply wrong to ascribe any inference of misogyny to me or anyone I know. Indeed, your introducing the terms nigger, kike and wog,  simply shows how ludicrously – not to mention hysterically and self-righteously – wrong you are.  The simple fact is, there is NO comparison to be made with the words mentioned. All 3 of those words, as far as I’m aware, were specifically coined to refer to others in a racist and openly hateful and derogatory way. Those words refer to specific people and are used to degrade and denigrate those specific people. The word cunt is NOT used in any such way by the majority of people who use it. It most certainly is not used to denigrate or degrade women.
    You have a different opinion. Good for you. Keep advocating your point of view. Perhaps you’ll change my mind on the issue.
    I am unlikely to change your mind for the simple reason that you have got no qualms about DELETING my point of view, and would further, in the unlikely event of you ever being in a position to do so, have no problem in countenancing my being made to conform to your mistaken and ludicrous views through threats of censorship.
    I, on the other hand, am a democrat, and would not entertain for a second the idea of shutting anyone up, let alone you.
    Incidentally, have you any idea how pathetic you appear to me in your phoney concern for women’s interests?
    Are you not the person who is encouraging your fellow dopey ‘new’ atheists to attend a gig at an American military base? What was it you called those state-sponsored thugs and murderers? Oh yes, ‘good people’.
    Tell me, what’s worse: Using the word cunt completely bereft of any hateful connotations or intentions in regard to women, or sanctioning and applauding those who, at the behest of a religious nut, are responsible for wrecking their already impoverished lives through murdering and maiming their children and husbands?
    Go ahead, tell me. You hypocritical cunt.
    Yours sincerely,
    Nigel McCullough