Tag: Sexism

Jen offers “The Justifications for Saying ‘Cunt’” bingo card. Hilarious but pathetically true.

I got nothin to add. Just go play Cunto.

There are so many ways not to do that. It seems so simple, yet somehow, it proves elusive.

One way is:

If you disagree with a woman, or several women, don’t introduce your disagreement with that familiar Shakespeare tag “the lady doth protest too much.” That’s especially true if you are a man.

Let me explain. (Yes, of course it’s obvious; of course it shouldn’t need explanation; but apparently there are always people who profess not to understand.) There is no need for such a preamble. It is entirely normal to disagree with people by just disagreeing with them. There is no need for a preliminary throat-clearing in which you disparage whatever perceived group your object-of-criticism belongs to via an overused quotation from Shakespeare (or the bible or The Purpose-driven Life).

So, if you are American and your object is French, there is no need to start with a stale joke about The French before you get to the substance. If you are white and your object is not, it is unnecessary to begin with a joke about Other Races. The fact that you are disagreeing with someone from Group X will be clear enough without any introductory joke about Group X talking too much.

So it is with women. If you disagree with a woman, or several women, just disagree with them. Just get on with it. Don’t pause to say they talk too much first; just get on with it. Don’t try to frame the discussion as a matter of women talking too much by talking at all. Don’t try to locate yourself on higher ground by treating women who talk as needing a mild rebuke just for talking, before we even get to the actual disagreement.

I hope that’s clear? It seems very clear to me, but then I have a bias. I have a bias that tells me I get to talk, just like anyone else, and that I’m not doing anything weird or abnormal by talking, and that there is just no need to make stupid creaky is-this-1850 jokes about women talking, just because I talk. Not everyone has this bias, so what seems clear to me won’t seem clear to everyone.

I’ll explain a little more, just to make sure. I’m allowed to talk. Women are allowed to talk. We don’t need permission or approval; we get to do it, just as you do. Jokes about women talking too much are just as funny as jokes about blacks being lazy or Jews driving a hard bargain. They’re nasty ingroup jokes that are meant to keep marginalized people marginalized, and people with any sense don’t make them.

That’s how not to marginalize women, chapter 1.

Nidhi Dutt experienced a little “Eve teasing,” or as you might call it, assault, in Bombay one afternoon.

My colleague and I were piling into a rickshaw, heading back to the bureau. And that’s when it happened. We were suddenly surrounded by a group of boys, barely teenagers.

At first the whole thing seemed harmless, if a little predictable – the cheery interest of a group of bright eyed, smiling boys.

Their approach was not unusual, foreigners and cameras make for an unmissable attraction in India.

But it was only a matter of minutes, possibly seconds, before the smiles turned into a blur of pawing, grabbing hands. Their indecent behaviour was punctuated by cheers, laughter and explicit comments in Hindi.

And that was it. I had been Eve-teased. Or as we describe it in the West, sexually harassed. In broad daylight, on a street in a busy business district of Mumbai.

“Teasing” they call it – a group of boys physically attacking two women. That’s not “teasing” and I don’t think we call that harassment, either, not when it’s unwanted resisted physical contact – I think we call that assault.

This kind of harassment, often described in India as innocent play, is commonplace. Yet this is a country in which the predominant Hindu religion worships female deities and claims to respect women.

Described as “innocent play” is it – being treated as a commodity as public as a toilet? That’s not any kind of play. It’s an assault on women’s autonomy and ability to be in the world without fear.

Oh lordy, it just never ends.

Staks Rosch did an Atheist of the Year contest at the Examiner, asking his readers to nominate candidates and giving them two days to do it. And the nominees are –

• Dave Silverman
• Ricky Gervais
• Hemant Mehta
• Matt Dillahunty
• George Takei

Lisa Ridge did a Facebook post gently wondering why there were quite so few women, as in, none. I read the post and Staks Rosch’s comments and a post he’d written on the subject, and got somewhat warm under the collar. From the post:

I started with an open nomination process in which people could suggest nominations and make a case for their nominations. I would then take that into account in finding five actual nominees. Four nominees because pretty clear early along, but I didn’t have my fifth yet. I noticed however that I didn’t have a token black candidate or a token female candidate.

Ok…

Seriously? Seriously? I’m reminded of these unfortunate traffic stops that Mel Gibson keeps having, or of Michael Richards going overboard with the “edgy” thing. Doesn’t everybody know by now that it’s a tad insulting to attach the words “a token” to the words “black” and “female” automatically like that, as if it were simply obvious and universally acknowledged that a black and a woman couldn’t possibly be qualified? Doesn’t everybody? Because I do. It seems to me I learned that some decades ago. Why didn’t everybody else? Too busy being so happy to be someone who would never have the words “a token” attached to his label that he couldn’t manage to keep up?

Or to put it another way…what a rude dismissive contemptuous entitled thing to say. Newsflash: it is not the case that there are no black atheists or female atheists or black female atheists who are good enough to be nominated as Atheist of the Year. It is not the case that any black or woman so nominated would be a worthless talented zero who was nominated solely as a “token” of good will. It is the case that implying otherwise is deliberately insulting.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an obvious and well deserved black nominee and if I had six spots to fill, I would have definitely picked him. But should I put him in just to have a token black guy or should I leave him out and hope that he continues his efforts and makes it next year?

Oh, poor Neil Tyson, not quite good enough to measure up to Ricky Gervais. How does that work? What “efforts” would Tyson have to “continue” to be good enough for Rosch’s list?

Still, there is no female nominee. There were a few that I thought might be good candidates, but they would only be token candidates rather than making it in on their merits. I always love Greta Christina for example, but her accomplishments in 2011 don’t particularly stand out. I thought about Rebecca Watson, but her only claim to fame this year was Elevatorgate and that hardly is worthy of atheist of the year.

What? What?? What? Greta Christina would be a token candidate because all that public speaking and writing wasn’t merit enough? Especially compared to the enormous merit of Ricky Gervais and George Takei? Rebecca Watson’s only claim to fame was Elevatorgate because all that public speaking and writing and podcasting wasn’t?

I really don’t want this to become Elevatorgate II: Electric Boogaloo especially since I consider myself a feminist for the most part. But I really didn’t think I should throw in token nominees. In the comments section, Greta Christina made a case for the token nominee and that is something I will have to consider next year. Unfortunately, many of the comments on Blag Hag seem to be from people who aren’t interested in discussing the issue rationally and just want to yell and scream about male privilege. There is certainly male privilege in the world and in the atheist community and I don’t want to ignore that, but at the same time I don’t just want to have a token female nominee.

Wonderful. Brilliant. “Token nominee” three times in one paragraph. Perfect. Never let anyone say The Atheist Movement™ is not friendly to women. On the other hand maybe The Atheist Movement¸™ I’m part of isn’t all that friendly to Staks Roschs. I suspect it isn’t.

Frat boys are such fun. The very word reminds me of fun-loving George Bush, whom I usually thought of as frat boy. Some frat boys at the University of Vermont sound super fun.

The fraternity circulated a questionnaire to its members, asking their names, major, favorite frat-related memories, favorite actor, and who they would pick to rape. Just normal questionnaire stuff, you know.

Another source:

We were sent a copy of the questionnaire, which mostly consists of benign questions like name, birthday, major, amount of time with SigEp and favorite SigEp memories, hobbies, future goals, etc. It’s actually kind of nerdy and cute, until you get to the final three “personal questions.”

1. Where in public would I want to have sex?

2. Who’s my favorite artist?

3. If I could rape someone, who would it be?

Boys just wanna have fun, boom boom.

Oh look, we’re back on this corner again. Some drearily unthinking guy writes a patronizing “funny” article story about women for Nature, people say how drearily unthinking it is, and everybody says “oh lighten up, ladies.” It’s just a joke, huh huh huh. Jokes never do any harm, any fule kno that.

In a pig’s eye, says Christie Wilcox at SciAm blogs.

Reinforcing negative gender stereotypes is anything but harmless.

It was Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson who, in 1995, first coined the term stereotype threat. It refers to how the knowledge of a prejudicial stereotype can lead to enough anxiety that a person actually ends up confirming the image. Since that landmark paper, more than 300 studies have found evidence for the pervasive negative effects of societal stereotypes.

When it comes to women, studies have shown that stereotype threat is very real. Women are stereotyped to be worse at math than men due to lower test scores. But it turns out that women only score lower when they are reminded of their gender or take the test in the presence of men. In fact, the greater the number of men in the room with a female test taker, the worse she will do. The gender profile of the environment has no effect, however, on women’s verbal test scores, where no such inferiority stereotype exists.

So this kind of thing does matter. There is no “just a joke.”

Ed may not have meant to demoralize women scientists when he wrote Womanspace, but by reinforcing the stereotype of the domesticated woman as opposed to the scientific man, he did just that. But even worse, as Anne Jefferson said, by approving of such a piece, Nature has given this kind of sexist attitude their highly-valued stamp of approval.

Shame on you, Nature, for contributing to the kind of environment which leads to stereotype threat – the kind of environment that tells girls they shouldn’t bother becoming a scientist. Because while I can shrug off some bigoted humor, they can’t. They’re the ones harmed by such careless support of antiquated gender roles. I am mad at you for them. You have done wrong by little nerdy girls everywhere, Nature, and you need to acknowledge it. Anything less says that you simply don’t care.

Please don’t do it any more.

So there’s this atheist comedian Kate Smurthwaite who did a BBC1 chat thing which went viral, and she got the kind of comments that women get. She posted a selection, and they’re…the kind of comments that women get. There was one about the trash-talking cunt getting her tongue ripped out, and more than one about how she needs to be gang-raped.

And she comments a little.

Interesting to see how a lot of people actually feel. I know almost no-one
would say these horrid things to my face. So in a sense it’s good that the
Internet lets women and other groups see how much some people really hate us.

In a sense, but only in a sense. It’s good to know but it’s also not good to know. If you were planning to be friends with anyone who says shit like that, it’s good to know, but otherwise…it’s probably better just to live out your life in sappy ignorance, happily thinking that most people don’t think or say shit like that. I don’t feel enriched by the squalid ugliness I’ve been seeing for the past few months.

Interesting and horrifying how quickly it all comes back to rape time after
time. There are also a fair few people complaining that the clip doesn’t show
the “bitch” actually getting slapped and posted by people who were clearly
looking for pornography. If anyone ever tells you we don’t live in a “rape
culture” world – show them this. It’s frightening but it does highlight the need
for action to bring about dramatic change.

Yes. And yet ignorance of this kind of thing does look so like bliss, at times.

Oh yay. One of many items I made a note to follow up from Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender was an essay by Sally Haslanger, a philosopher at MIT, “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone),” from Hypatia, 2008. Then yesterday I happened on and re-read an article by Julian Baggini on the scarcity of women in philosophy, and how does it start?

Sally Haslanger is angry. “I entered philosophy about 30 years ago,” she told me at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting in Boston. “I had a budding feminist consciousness, and I thought then that there weren’t enough women on the reading lists in my classes or among my teachers. But I thought things would certainly change, given the importance of the feminist movement. I’ve been though the profession now and worked hard on the Committee on the Status of Women. I’ve worked hard in other forums like SWIP – the Society for Women in Philosophy  – that were trying to advance women’s interests. After 30 years I was seeing that there wasn’t really that much change, and that made me mad.”

So today I looked, figuring it would be unavailable online, but hey what do you know – it’s available. Probably everybody with any sense has already read it, but I missed it. I love that little thrill when you find something you expected not to find.

Why there aren’t more women of my cohort in philosophy? Because there were very few of us and there was a lot of outright discrimination…In graduate school I was told by one of my teachers that he had “never seen a first rate woman philosoph[er] and never expected to because women were incapable of having seminal ideas.” I was the butt of jokes when I received a distinction on my prelims, since it seemed funny to everyone to suggest I should get a blood test to determine if I was really a woman.

…

My point here is that I don’t think we need to scratch our heads and wonder what on earth is going on that keeps women out of philosophy. In my experience it is very hard to find a place in philosophy that isn’t actively hostile towards women and minorities, or at least assumes that a successful philosopher should look and act like a (traditional, white) man.

Does that sound familiar? It does to me. An outspoken atheist simply has to be a (traditional, white) man, because women just don’t do outspoken and atheism. Women do shoes and feelings…at best; at worst they do bitchy cunt things.

Via Peteryxx, on the stereotype thread – an article on why so few movies pass the Bechdel test.

The “Dykes to Watch Out For” test, formerly coined as the “Mo Movie Measure” test and Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel…

To pass it your movie must have the following:

1) there are at least two named female characters, who

2) talk to each other about

3) something other than a man

I’m not sure I need to read any more to know why that’s not going to fly. It’s because movies are about men.

That was easy.

When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film…

I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see.

Toldja. I knew that’s what they think, because it’s what movies and tv are like.

According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience’s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn’t pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was “losing the audience.”

Nothing much to say, is there.