Tag: Sexism

  • Did a wolf howl?

    What’s going on, has ERV blown a new whistle or what? Suddenly Teh Menz are popping up on an old thread to display their vocabularies.

  • A man generally cannot know

    Someone called “bluejohn” suggested yesterday that I should engage with James Onen of Freethought Kampala on the subject of Rebecca Watson and elevators and sexism. I replied that I already had.

    I had a discussion with James at Facebook, but we fundamentally disagree. I don’t think more discussion (on this subject) would be productive.

    (What we disagreed about is that his view is: men have the right to ask women [politely] for sex, even if they are total strangers and it’s out of the blue, and it’s akin to racism to make a social or moral rule saying they shouldn’t do that. My view is: women’s right not to be pestered in that way trumps men’s right to invite stranger women to have sex.)

    That was that, but I saw this morning that James had flagged up his recent FK post on the subject on Abbie Smith’s thread (the one full of “cunt” and “fucking bitch” and all the rest of the thoughtful, non-sexist vocabulary), so I read/skimmed it. The core claim that I disagree with is there, so…I’ll say why I disagree with it. (Facebook is a crappy venue for a complicated discussion, which is another reason I didn’t pursue the one with James there.)

    James starts with something PZ said back in July:

    There is an odd attitude in our culture that it’s acceptable for men to proposition women in curious ways — Rebecca Watson recently experienced this in an elevator in Dublin, and I think this encounter Ophelia Benson had reflects the same attitude: women are lower status persons, and we men, as superior beings, get to ask things of them. Also as liberal, enlightened people, of course, we will graciously accede to their desires, and if they ask us to stop hassling them, we will back off, politely. Isn’t that nice of us?

    It’s not enough. Maybe we should also recognize that applying unwanted pressure, no matter how politely phrased, is inappropriate behavior.

    James responded:

    Unwanted pressure? Unwanted?

    Here is where the problem lies: a man generally cannot know until after attempting the proposition that it was unwanted. Not only that – it is, after all, also possible for a proposition to be unwanted at first but for the recipient of the proposition to change her mind after persuasion.

    …

    This basically means you can’t really tell if your advance is unwanted unless you actually make your move first, and even when the person seems initially reluctant, she can still be persuaded to take you up on it and can later find herself having fun. That said, there is an interesting debate to be had here about what degree of persuasion one might say is acceptable.

    Yes, it is at least formally true that you can never tell if an advance is unwanted unless you make it. However it is also true that requests for friendship or conversation or sex or similar levels of intimacy from total strangers are not generally wanted, for fairly obvious reasons: we don’t know you. Friendship and conversation and sex are for people we know at least a little. In some situations this can mean just 5 minutes of chat, but it means that. It doesn’t mean a man walking up to a woman and making an invitation. This rule that James calls “arbitrary” makes it possible to walk around in the world without being constantly subject to interference from strangers. The end of that rule would mean women would not have that freedom until they hit age 40 or so.

    Human interaction is complicated thing. I would be curious to see how feminists would propose to delineate between scenarios like these, and those in which the offer was completely rejected despite attempts at persuasion – in such a way that the determination that the advances were completely unwanted can be made prior to actually making the advance. Can it be done? Is it possible to establish a meaningful and consistent default position on the matter? I highly doubt it – there is simply too much ambiguity.

    I wouldn’t propose to delineate between them. I would say I don’t care about delineating between them, because I don’t want strangers “persuading” me to do what they want in the first place. Here’s what you do: if it’s a situation where you can flirt with the person first, then there’s your opportunity for persuasion. Seize it. If it’s not – then that’s just too bad. That’s one person you’re not in a position to invite to have sex with you. You can, of course, and as James says you have a “right” to – it’s not illegal. But you shouldn’t. It’s rude, it’s vulgar, it’s intrusive, it’s self-absorbed, it’s obnoxious…and it’s sexist.

    The solution to such ambiguity is simple – as a way forward, women who attend atheist-skeptic conferences that are absolutely certain they don’t want to be hit on should wear a clearly visible “do not proposition me” sign on their backs. If not, maybe a colour-code can be designated for such women by the event organisers – let’s say, red – and then it could be announced that all women wearing red clothes should not be propositioned or approached by strangers. But will they do this? Most probably not. They will, in all likelihood,  protest that it should not be incumbent upon them to make clear to others not to hit on them – yet at the same time they want to be in a public conference where human beings, the highly sexual creatures they are, are freely interacting.

    I don’t think they can’t have it both ways. Feminists need to take responsibility for the things they are asking for. Either visibly label yourself as unapproachable, or expect that during the course of a conference a person who takes an interest in you might proposition you, as it is their right to do so. It is also your right to decline such an offer. If you have a problem with this, then just don’t attend these conferences. And its as simple as that.

    Just stay at home, in purdah, in other words. “Simple” indeed.

    Now…maybe there is some room for maneuver here. Maybe James is thinking of a conference as the equivalent of 5 minutes chatting – as a kind of introduction in itself. I’ve been thinking about the street (or it might be a bus, or the supermarket) in what I’ve said. But even with a conference-as-introduction – as I’ve said before, an invitation for coffee in the afternoon is one thing, while the same in an elevator going up at 4 in the morning is quite another. Given that that’s the invitation in dispute, there’s still probably not much room for maneuver.

     

     

     

     

  • What misogynists call outspoken women

    It’s about time.

    Rebecca has pointed out the activities of her more obsessed and malevolent haters. I’ve been following one particular clump of them, at intervals, all this time – yes they’re still at it. Would you believe it?

    I’ve now amassed a following of obsessive creeps who have seemingly devoted their lives to hounding me down and making sure I never dare to speak my bitch mind again. Their tactics? Scientologist-level private investigation to dredge up the deepest, darkest mysteries of my past combined with grade school-level name-calling. It’s impressive, really. Really. Really.

    You sure as hell have, I thought as I read that. Boy have you. The ones at Abbie Smith’s blog – that’s the clump I mentioned above – are the ones I know about, and that exactly sums up what they’ve been doing.

    Abbie Smith at ERV was, as far as I could tell, the first to actively encourage people to replace intelligent discussion and inquiry with blind hatred and bile. That’s where the name “Rebeccunt Twatson” apparently arose – see? Impressive! If you listen hard enough, you can hear the ghost of Ambrose Bierce chuckling and nodding his head in approval.

    And Twain and Mencken joining in. Right. Abbie Smith has also repeatedly called Rebecca a bitch – or a fucking bitch – in comments at ERV. People who should know better have egged her on. It’s been disgusting.

    Then there’s a blog called Grey Lining written by someone named Franc Hoggle. Apparently nearly every post is now about me. Lucky me! He focuses on the really important things, like how I made a YouTube video recently in which I mistakenly said that Galileo was executed by the Church. Within minutes, I updated the video to flag the fact that I was wrong, but that doesn’t matter. Hoggle says that I must be “dumber than dog shit” and suggests I be taunted for the rest of my days. How dare anyone ever get anything wrong and then immediately correct it!

    That’s when Franc Hoggle isn’t vomiting his hatred all over the undead ERV thread on the subject.

    Then there’s this elevatorgate blog, in which a man attempts to convince my fellow SGU co-hosts to kick me off the podcast. I learned of this one from Steve Novella, who emailed it to me with the subject line “Another stalker”…

    I think Steve discovered that blog because that person was one of the ones derailing this SkepticBlog post about the SGU 24-hour podcast. That’s right: a quick, simple, upbeat post from Steve publicizing our 24-hour show was quickly turned into a whine-fest from people demanding Steve “fire” me from the show. To support their argument, they linked to the above blogs because they seriously believed that it would convince others. As you can see in the thread if you dare to dig through it, they were not successful.

    I followed that one, too, mouth hanging open in astonishment.

    (They talk a lot of shit about me too, by the way. Nowhere near as much as they talk about Rebecca, or PZ, but still a lot.)

    …they can continue to call me a cunt. After all, they derive so much joy from it, and to me it only makes things clearer. “Cunt” is what misogynists call outspoken women with contrary opinions, in an attempt to silence them.

    That’s what this is really about: silencing. No one starts an entire site like the “elevatorgate” blog in the hopes of having a debate. No one comes up with a nickname using a word like cunt because he wants to resolve differences. No one tells a woman she would be lucky to get raped because he wants to offer solid evidence to contradict her point that misogyny is just as bad amongst skeptics and atheists as it is elsewhere.

    Oh it’s about silencing all right – they make that very clear. They try to pressure everyone who invites or hires Rebecca to do something to univite her or fire her. This is frankly and explicitly about silencing.

    And it’s a fucking outrage.

  • Attack of the male-blaming biases

    Tom Martin tells us about the tragic misandrist sexism at LSE and in feminism generally.

    …a close analysis of the core texts shows all the old, male-blaming biases are still there.

    Patriarchy theory – the idea that men typically “dominate” women – is omnipresent, when research shows women tend to boss men interpersonally.

    That’s an idiosyncratic and wrong definition of patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system, not a description. It’s a system by which men have authority by right and women are subordinate. It’s not about what happens “typically”; it’s about what it supposed to happen: it’s a web of laws, customs and traditions.

    Texts highlight misogyny but never misandry, its anti-male equivalent – despite research finding that women verbalise four times more misandry than men do misogyny. And the core texts highlight violence against women only, despite decades of research showing that women are more likely to initiate domestic violence.

    Again: misogyny is not just about what happens in conversation (what women “verbalise” more than men do), it’s about systems, culture, norms, laws, hiring patterns, the media. As for violence…please. Whatever women initiate, men are not the gender most at risk from domestic violence.

    …discussions about actual men’s issues are generally absent across curricula.

    Except for the fact that human issues have always been taken to be men’s issues and men play a vastly disproportionate part in dealing with them, so that discussions about those issues are male-dominated by a huge margin. It’s fatuous to pretend otherwise.

    In a world which verbalises four times more sexism against men than it does against women, it’s high time gender studies set a better example, so we all might emulate it.

    I call bullshit on that particular “statistic.”

  • “Feminist Whore”

    Okay this is fascinating. From a post on a gaming website:

    Dead Island, whose PR and publishing team won an advertising award earlier this year for a pricey and very artistic trailer, finds its way back into the news this week in a much less pleasant way.  A non-final “developer’s build” version of the game, which was accidentally released on Steam a couple of days ago, has been cracked by an enterprising fan.  Turns out that one of the unlockable “Skills” for one of the two female avatars is called “Feminist Whore” in the original code base:  re-titled “Gender Wars” in the “sanitized fit-for-public consumption” version of the game, it allows the character to deal extra damage to anything male.

    Now the game’s “International Brand Manager” and publisher have to scramble and apologize for what must appear, to any sane adult, as an unplanned glimpse of the naked, bald-faced, slavering hatred of women which lives and breeds in their developers.

    They’ve hurried to say that the person responsible for this misogynistic snippet of code was a “Lone Gunman” tech monkey, who introduced the phrase into the debug code as a “private joke”.  Thus the notion that all feminists were angry whores would “represent the views of only a single person” on that development team—or in this industry in general—and only one guy (at most) should suffer any professional consequences, naturally.

    Wow…how very very familiar that sounds. What a lot of it we have been seeing lately, some of us (like me for instance) with amazement shock horror surprise consternation alarm confusion.

    …virulent misogyny is not a freak incident in this business.  It is actually the norm in many studios.  It’s extremely common in the culture of gaming as a whole, and it is present in developers, gamers, publishers and the gaming press in copious abundance.  Anyone who doubts that insults like “Feminist Whore” are unwelcome in gaming has only to check the forum thread where the “Feminist Whore” skill was first discovered.  You’ll see a typical string of comments which you might see on virtually any gaming forum.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few comments attached to this post later that will be equally cringe-worthy and repugnant.

    This seems to confirm a thought I had when reading Skeptic Lawyer’s post on manners, in particular her thoughts about geek subcultures. The thought was that maybe that’s where a lot of (or hell, for all I know all of) the more frothingly and obsessively misogynist commenters on ERV’s elevator posts originated. Maybe they’re all members of the geek subculture community and maybe that community is particularly infected with unabashed misogyny. What Arinn Dembo at Gamasutra says and what her commenters say provide a lot of evidence for that.

    I like this one:

    Rushing to dismiss feminist questions stinks. Always. A vicious dismissal of the concerns of others because you have some haughty anti-PC bent doesn’t make you George Fucking Carlin. It makes you a vicious pig. You are not an iconoclast and your protection of a broken and diseased culture also stinks.

    Yeah.