Multitasking
I didn’t say anything about “boobquake” because although I thought it was quite funny and a good riposte to ridiculous clerical misogyny, I also have reservations about women joining in with laddism – plus I hate the word “boobs.” They’re tits, dammit! Like the birds.
But Miranda Hale said anything and Jerry Coyne said anything, and then they got some rather strong reactions, so I thought I would say anything.
A commenter at Why Evolution is True made the point succinctly:
There’s a big difference between paying attention to what women are saying and paying attention to their breasts. If women want attention to be paid to what they have to say, they should stop trying to get it with their cleavage.
Exactly; not least because the cleavage distracts attention from the saying. Does this really have to be said? Doesn’t everybody know this? Isn’t that in fact the point?
I think of it as The Cuddy Effect. What do you think of when you see Cuddy? She’s so brilliant, she’s such a great doctor-administrator? I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re supposed to, and I don’t think you do.
In a perfect world we could have both – we could revel in everything all at the same time and nothing would distract from anything else. But we don’t live in that world. We can’t drive and text at the same time, and we can’t not be distracted by sexual signaling.
This fact disadvantages women a lot more than it does men. Women are always already seen (by men, and men do still set the rules – for how tv shows like House get made, for instance) as primarily for and about sex, whether yes or no (yes she’s a hotty, no she’s repulsive). We have to fight to be seen as for and about anything else. The more we play up tits and ass, the more we lose that fight.
This isn’t fair, obviously, but it’s true.
Accidentally closed comments again. Must remember to watch that! Throttled the torrent of “oh you prudish dreary sex-hating second-wave feminist” – tragic!
Is courting laddism an acceptable strategy? It depends on who you think is responsible for the behavior and mindset of cultural dopes — the boobquakers, or the dopes themselves. Speaking for myself, if I grounded my actions on the basis of how I think cultural dopes would respond, then I’d never leave the house out of fear. If I don’t give myself permission to be bold, then I wither in the face of challenges instead of laughing through them. I don’t think anyone should have to live in that kind of mindset, so in that sense I’m delighted by all this mischief.
Still, I know that this is a subjective reading, and that people should be able to choose how to read the situation however they like without being seen as monsters from the second wave washed ashore.
I’m with the boobquake women on this one. I think men can multi-task to the extent of thinking a woman is looking good, and is making a political point, at the same time.
There’s a sort of nerd chic about “boobquake” that I thought was very positive, politically. That is, it was clearly coming from ordinary young women whose natural setting would appear to be a campus or a profession. Who like to be thought of as attractive, just like young men do, and who don’t think attractiveness detracts from their other virtues, either in their own minds or the minds of people who observe them.
Nor do they think that being clever, and likely to wield power when they grow older, should preclude them from dressing up, or dressing down, when they feel like it. That’s good, isn’t it?
And from the few images I saw, they weren’t glamour queens, or trying to be. They were just women with the normal attractiveness of young people, especially when pursuing a cause.
Because there’s another nasty stereotype around, which is that women who wear a top with some cleavage, or something similar, are therefore, ipso facto, a bit dim. This is a stereotype on which male misogynists and some feminists, Germaine Greer for example, seemed to have entered a sort of (un)holy alliance to try to shame and belittle women who dress – let’s say – cheerfully. That era should be over, and young women rejecting it seems to be a good outcome.
So I thought boobquake was nerdy, geeky and rather fun, it wasn’t especially laddish, and it gave the fingers to people who can do with having more ridicule directed their way. It wasn’t an earth-shaking event, as it were, but it was uncomplicatedly a Good Thing.
The “she’s bright so she must be dowdy, and if she’s not dowdy then she must be
Well yes, and I said I thought it was quite funny and a good riposte. But that’s compatible with also having reservations – and having even stronger reservations about some vituperative reactions to other people’s reservations.
But not being sure it was uncomplicatedly a Good Thing was the point. I don’t think it can just be declared to be so.
Ben – right – and I refuse to cower too, but then I’m truly a nerd. I can’t judge by myself because few people are as nerdy as that.
The nerdy, geeky quality is exactly what redeems this whole thing. Love the graphs! What bothers me is women thinking they’re being transgressive when they’re actually conforming to every conventional western expectation. The ultimate transgression–woman wears what makes her comfortable, gets taken seriously for her brains. OH MY GOD!
Ophelia,
I understand where you’re coming from. I have the same reaction to PETA’s nude model campaign — which is nothing but an attention-grabbing exercise that I seriously doubt has changed anyone’s mind about animal rights. PETA has almost exclusively used highly attractive professional models and actors — and almost always female. (And just to show how pathetic the PETA campaign is, one of their few male nudes was Steve-O, a man famous for swallowing a live goldfish as popular entertainment.)
But “Boobquake” (and I’m with you — it’s an awful name) is about ordinary women, not just models, responding to a clerical accusation that female immodesty causes natural disasters. As such, the instigator of all this, one Jennifer McCreight, proposed to test the clerical hypothesis by wearing “the most cleavage-showing shirt I own.” In other words, wearing clothes she was already comfortable wearing. This is not about flashing skin to attract attention for an unrelated cause. It is about responding to clerical disgust of female sexuality by being comfortable about one’s body and by challenging the stupid and hateful equation of female sexuality and mass death with a tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless empirical experiment.
Yup. Jennifer McCreight needs no introduction around here (she included me in her female atheist poll, for cryin out loud – she can do no wrong!), and I too love the charts. It’s more the reactions of others that I’m getting at; also saying why I didn’t link to it in the first place; good joke, good idea, but…but…
Do I get brownie points for having speculated (correctly, though privately) that was the exact reason why you didn’t comment on it?
Certainly you do. And when you exchange them, can I have some of the brownies?
Ah, I see. I had construed from your comments that you were opposed to Jennifer McCreight’s choice of activism, now I see you were objecting to laddish “supporters” who took it as an opportunity for a perv-a-thon. My apologies.
I would say, though, that there is nothing wrong with giving Jennifer attention and links while saving some ammunition for the lads and leerers.
In fact, I now notice that you said as much in your opening sentence. I am irritated with myself for drawing the wrong inference. Apologies once again. It’s hair shirt time for me.
Ophelia, this is a bit like the accommodationism debate. Each side thinks the other side “started it” and is acting like a bunch of bullies. It looks to me as if you and Jerry came in quite late (after Jen had already been bullied) and started criticising people (like me) who had criticised the bullies. Jerry only copped flak when he then wrote a post criticising me for criticising the bullies. Of course, from my point of view I was pleased to see so many people defending me; it didn’t feel good being criticised by someone I like and respect as much as Jerry.
Now, maybe I’m wrong about some of the order of events. But it’s just that my own comments defending Jennifer were after she seemingly got bullied by whomever, and started having to sound defensive. And likewise I’m sure people like Greta Christina think that they’re defending Jen from bullies who “started it”.
I’m just sayin’. It’s just a meta-level comment about how these disputes work and the psychology of the people involved. No one ever feels like they’re the bully.
With the accommodation debate, we get these folks who’ll say Mooney didn’t start it: it was Dawkins when he gratuitously slagged off Ruse somewhere. But then it turns out that Ruse had slagged off Dawkins at a still earlier time … but then, something else happened even before that which upset Ruse. And on and on it goes.
Of course, from my point of view Mooney did start the most recent round of the accommodation wars with his gratuitous attack on Jerry’s review of those books by Miller and Giberson. That seems pretty much independent of such things as the bad blood between Dawkins and Ruse. I’m just saying that the origins of these sorts of disputes can be more complicated than they look to any one person from the inside. I hope you’d agree with that.
But what? Some men will look at these women and make stupid jokes? Or be aroused? Or think other feminists enjoy showing their cleavage too?
And what if they do? Is that the fault of Jen and the women who took part in the event? Are the perceived bad consequences to be put at their door?
To quote From Greta Christina‘s “A Feminist Defense of Boobquake”:
If I asked “Is a woman in a low-cut top responsible for a boorish man who jeers ‘Show us yer tits’?”, I think you would answer “no”, unambiguously no.
So, why the concern about the reactions to “Boobquake”?
(I know, you don’t like the name. Too bad. It’s a perfectly good name for a reductio ad absurdum of an absurd religious claim, anyway. Ridiculing pompous bigots with profanity is sometimes the only way to pierce through their projected walls of self-importance.)
You see, Ophelia, normally I admire very much what you write, but I’m afraid there’s something amiss here, if even feminists can’t stop themselves from some sort of learned negative reflex when they see other women not only taking control of their bodies (which can be labeled as a kind of moral duty, after all) but also clearly enjoying them and above all using them to carry a message.
And a very pointed message, indeed.
In this light, to write off the success of Boobquake as sort of “Cuddy effet” seems to me besides the point. Not to mention disdainful of what a smart, no-nonsense person like Jen intended in the first place, and how well she managed the media attention! (And that is no little achievement in itself.)
Recently, in “No Sex In Skepticism”, Stephanie Zwan made a very similar point: men in skepticism, as in other venues of life, often use their masculinity, sex-appeal, rugged physique, etc., to enhance their communication, in more or less subtle ways. But when it comes to women, lo and behold! The use of their femininity is suddenly deemed to be a liability, not an asset, to communication of a skeptic and/or feminist message.
Maybe it’s time that Boobquake convey to us all the inanity of this distinction?
Ah, but boobies are birds too!
But what the loony theocrat actually said was that by dressing immodestly, women were tempting men from the path of islamic righteousness, purity, and chastity; and it is any deviation from the latter which leads to natural disaster. Why were the men not reacting, I ask myself. Is it because in the west men have been shown to have abysmally lowered sperm counts over the last sixty years, or that we can notice the sexual attractiveness of other men and women whilst appreciating what lies between their ears, the most attractive part of anybody?
I have read some research that, for which I cannot currently be bothered to chase up the reference, which connects increasing levels of western male infertility with environmental factors which impinged on the mothers of the males.
The sooner we can stop regarding fe/males of homo sapiens as different species, the better, seems to me. Given the systemic degeneration of the y gene, either the human race will die out within a number of thousand years anyway, unless females find a route to parthenogenesis, as in certain lizards, or we will be succeeded by other primates, cetaceans, cockroaches or whatever!
I fear there’s something that a lot of people are forgetting here ; this is about sexism and suppression of women, and now about women fighting back not with some fancy words or call for equal rights or some such, no they’re fighting back with the very ammunition that was fired from the other side. And I think this is much, much more important than the fun aspect of this whole thing alludes to; it’s sexism revealed as sexism through being sexy as an expression of ridicule. Can there be a better way?
Look at Tim Minchin’s latest pop diddle; by using pretty explicit language (lots of f-words strung together in variety of semantic meaning) he’s pointing out just how absurd the lack of on-topic answers the Catholic Church has given are (they don’t dare to talk about the absolutely sexual side of this). Their disgraceful issue of raping little boys deserve the harshest language with the right set of connotations there are.
Same with boobquake ; it’s fun, of course, but also far more intellectual stimulating that most people admit to. Boobs are good, of course, but don’t let the fun spoil your view of the delicious revenge and ridicule going on.
Thanks for this post – I had my reservations about ‘boobquake’ too.
I think it was a really good idea to get every woman around the skeptic blogosphere to protest together – but boobquake didn’t include every woman, it only included those who felt okay showing off their cleavage (or wearing ‘short shorts’!). Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone feels comfortable or safe doing that – especially women who may be sick of fellas paying more attention to their breasts or bum than their ideas, and who might have been putting up with that crap for years.
(By the way this is not about ‘feeling comfortable with your body’ per se, or ‘taking control’ of it, it’s about willingness to show bits of yourself, that you might ordinarily consider private, to x number of people, some of whom will react in ways that may upset you. There is a difference.)
Also – for a strict Muslim cleric, ‘immodesty’ is things like leaving your hair uncovered, wearing clothes which fit close to your body, wearing sleeveless tops or shorts – ridiculing this guy’s earthquake comment therefore needn’t have been about boobs/tits/choose your noun. Why pick something overtly sexual like breasts, when the same women could have just worn their usual clothes with hair uncovered? This would have been more or less guaranteed to break his modesty rules, and I think it would have made a stronger point. It would have been more inclusive, too.
When was the last time skeptical men protested something by wearing something ‘revealing’?
Russell, well, I didn’t say anything about bullying or who started it. I mentioned “vituperative reactions,” but that’s a more limited claim. I meant to keep the claims limited, because as you suggest, I didn’t follow the subject from the beginning; I didn’t know Jen had been bullied, for example. At any rate, yes, I do agree that such disputes can be complicated.
Irene, thanks, but I don’t actually consider this post “some sort of learned negative reflex.” And I didn’t “write off the success of Boobquake” – maybe you could read the post again and perhaps this time you would see that?
Yes; I know; men get to use their butchness in ways that work differently from the way it works when women use their “femininity.” But that is precisely the problem. You think boobquakes are the way to fix that; I’m not convinced. There are reasons for this – it’s not just a “learned negative reflex.”