Helen Lewis has been following the NUS Women’s conference, including the brouhaha about the jazz hands item. She has some questions about some of the votes.

The conference also voted to renew the no-platform on radical feminist Julie Bindel, for (among other things) reiterating her belief that “bisexuality doesn’t exist as a sexual identity, thus erasing bisexual individuals’ identities and experiences” and having “criticised women who wear the niqab in her article for the Daily Mail . . . [by] refusing to believe that Muslim women have made their own decision to wear the niqab she denies Muslim women agency”.

Oh really? What about Muslim women who criticize women who wear the niqab? Are they too denying Muslim women agency? Or are they just disagreeing with what said women do with their agency? I’ve just written a review of Mona Eltahawy’s new book for Free Inquiry; she’s very critical of the niqab and even critical of wearing hijab, even though she wore one herself for nine years. She’s also critical of simplistic non-arguments that it’s a “choice.” I wonder if the NUS Women will no-platform Mona.

If “the NUS Women’s’ Officers and members of the NUS Women’s committee shall not offer a platform to any transphobic speaker, biphobic or Islamophobic speaker”, who decides what qualifies as Islamophobia? It’s true that criticism of Islam can function as a cover for racism, but equally, religious beliefs and practices must not be accepted unquestioningly in a free, secular society. Only this week, Maryam Namazie – who was raised in a Muslim family but is now an atheist and secularist – pulled out of a talk at an Irish university after it was suggested that a discussion on apostasy would “upset” Muslim students.

Precisely.

There were many eminently sensible motions debated, including ones on childcare provision, support for rape survivors and better access to affordable housing. But it was this motion which really caught my eye:

This is an astonishingly conservative motion to be passed by a society which is otherwise so much at pains to stress the variety and fluidity of gender – for example, the conference has also resolved to “refrain from the use of ‘sisters’ and any other binary terms throughout the campaign”.

It is indeed. It’s as if they take manufactured rules about who gets to wear what to be not manufactured at all but biological. I wear jeans – black ones when I’m being “professional” – and I don’t consider that to be cross-dressing.

Cross-dressing is always an exploration of queer identity – because it makes obvious the fact that gender is a performance. The motion suggests that as long as the cross-dressing is not done for “shock value”, it is OK. But the whole point of cross-dressing is shock value. It is jarring to see categories we assume to be stable so obviously undermined and that makes it attractive to experimental, iconoclastic people. It’s why performing artists from kd lang to Conchita Wurst have made gender non-conformity part of their artistic expression.

When I was at university, we had cross-dressing nights of the type now deemed repressive by the NUS. The atmosphere always seemed (at least to me), very queer-friendly; because even the manliest men were being shown quite how much of their gender role was a performance. I’m not claiming that it magically cured homophobia, but it did suggest that people were open to the idea that the unspoken gender conformity of “real life” was, objectively, really weird. If you can accept that there’s no real reason women wear skirts and men wear ties, that gets you closer to acknowledging there’s no real reason that women are expected to be carers and men are expected to be cabinet ministers.

There is one reason women are expected to wear skirts, and that’s ease of access. Remember that whole thing about taking upskirt photos on buses? And how it turned out that’s not illegal? Yeah. That’s why skirts. Do NUS Women really want to codify that? I can’t see why.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A perfect Jesus and Mo today – “perfect” in the egocentric sense of “exactly what I’m thinking about myself right this second”…but also in the more usual sense.

Many thanks to Saudi Arabia for this week’s strip.

Zing!

Support Jesus and Mo at Patreon

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Explaining what women are for. (Some guy shared this link as he was trolling on Twitter, and I saw it.)

The Word of God (Hebrews 4:12-13) does not flatter women (nor men). He tells it like it is, and it is often not the way people think it is (Isaiah 55:8; Romans 1:18). Women are not the same as men. Some, it seems, have not noticed this simple fact. But, the reality is, the Creator made two different kinds of human beings, one male and one female, and He expects them to behave accordingly (e.g. Deuteronomy 22:5). The male was made out of the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). The female was made out of the male’s rib (Genesis 2:21-23). The male is the glory of God, but the female is the glory of man (1 Corinthians 11:7). They are similar, but not the same.

The reason women even exist is not so that they can be independent entities. The reason they exist is so that they can help men.

For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man. (1 Corinthians 11:8-9)

The Lord created the woman for the man’s sake. As it is written,

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.” (Genesis 2:18)

So, that’s what she’s for. That’s all she’s for. She’s not here to decide for herself what she wants to be for, and what she wants to do with her life. A man’s sweater can’t be an independent entity, can it? And neither can his hamburger? Or his car? So neither can a woman.

Amen.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Great. Another mobbing. NUS Women, the National Union of Students Women, are apparently having a conference and they tweeted a ludicrous and embarrassing tweet, so…of course they’re being Twitter-mobbed, because it’s Tuesday.

First the ludicrous tweet.

Well jazz hands trigger my anxiety, so could we do a square dance instead? But wait, square dances trigger some people, so maybe we could meditate for 2 minutes instead? Yes that should work, and I can’t see any possible downside at all.

Ok fine, it’s a silly suggestion, but Twitter mobs are overkill for silliness. The hashtag is mob-city.

We can’t have any nice things!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Deep rifts? Between the US administration and Netanyahu?

The White House issued a passionate call for eventual Palestinian statehood on Monday as it stepped up criticism of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for appearing to question a two-state solution to Middle East peace.

“An occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end,” Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, told a conference of liberal activists in Washington. “Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely,” he added.

…

“A ‘one-state solution’ would effectively end Israel’s nature as a Jewish and democratic state,” he added. “Unilateral annexation of the West Bank territories would be both wrong and illegal. The United States would never support it, and it’s unlikely Israel’s other friends would either. It would only contribute to Israel’s isolation.”

At the UN, too.

The United States will not take the floor at the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday as it debates human rights violations committed in the Palestinian territories, a US spokesman told Reuters.

The step is unprecedented at the 47-member state forum, where Washington has unfailingly defended Israel since US President Barack Obama became president in 2009.

The decision not to appear follows signals that the Obama administration is undertaking a “reassessment” of relations with the Jewish state.

Not before time.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Jeez, you’d think at least nursing would pay women as much as men. But no.

Even though nine out of 10 nurses are women, men in the profession earn higher salaries, and the pay gap has remained constant over the past quarter century, a study finds.

The typical salary gap has consistently been about $5,000 even after adjusting for factors such as experience, education, work hours, clinical specialty, and marital and parental status, according to a report in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association.

Well boo.

Muench and colleagues used two large U.S. data sets to examine earnings over time. One, the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, provided responses from nearly 88,000 participants from 1988 to 2008. The other, the American Community Survey, offered responses from nearly 206,000 registered nurses from 2001 to 2013.

Every year, each of the data sets found men earned more than women; the unadjusted pay gap ranged from $10,243 to $11,306 in one survey and from $9,163 to $9,961 in the other.

*blinks*

While the study didn’t address the reasons for persistent gaps in pay, it’s possible that men are better at negotiating raises and promotions or that they are less likely than women to take extended breaks from the labor force to care for young children or aging parents, said Patricia Davidson, dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland.

Um…hello? To repeat, with emphasis added –

The typical salary gap has consistently been about $5,000 even after adjusting for factors such as experience, education, work hours, clinical specialty, and marital and parental status

Next up –

It’s also possible that the study exposed a gender difference in career choices, rather than a genuine lack of equal pay for equal work, said Linda Aiken, a nursing and health policy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

Again…

The typical salary gap has consistently been about $5,000 even after adjusting for factors such as experience, education, work hours, clinical specialty, and marital and parental status

Are the words “even after adjusting” simply invisible to some people? Is this a new disorder, should we call it Sommers Syndrome?

H/t Janet Factor

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This one is so dense I can’t see how anyone can believe it.

A Republican congressman has introduced legislation that would force cadets at the Air Force’s Academy to say “so help me God” during their oaths every school year. He said the legislation is necessary because Americans don’t have “freedom from religion.”

Yes we do. Freedom of religion includes freedom from [requirements to adhere to] religion. Of course it does.

He said the bill would protect the freedom of Our Sojers.

“Our Constitution’s very First Amendment protects every individual’s freedom of religion. But our servicemen and women who protect our county with their lives are seeing that freedom under fire,” he said in a statement.

The U.S. Air Force Academy announced in 2013 that cadets would not be required to say “so help me God” while reciting the Honor Oath.

Cadets are not required to say it, so that’s freedom of (and from). They’re not required not to say it. Rep. Sam Johnson is talking as if not being required to is being required not to. He can’t really be that dense.

Johnson said the Air Force’s Academy only made the end of the oath optional “because of one radical atheist group’s demands!”

“Let me be clear: Americans have the freedom of religion – but not freedom from religion. That’s why I am introducing legislation that requires Congressional approval before any change would be made to military oaths,” he continued.

“The moral foundation of our country is in serious danger if we allow radical groups to dictate whether or not we can freely express our religious beliefs! It’s time to take a stand.”

Making a religious oath optional ≠ making a religious oath forbidden. Making it mandatory is what interferes with people’s freedom of religion. Some religious people think oaths are blasphemous, or a trivialization of god.

But I suppose I should be grateful he’s not running around hitting people in the face with bricks.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An open letter from PEN South Africa:

The savage attack on Zainub Dala shows the terror of the freedom to use words, and the desire to obliterate them.

On Wednesday March 18 author, Zainub Priya Dala was violently attacked as she left her hotel during the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban. A woman driving alone, she was harassed by three men who forced her off the road, cornered her, held a knife at her throat, smashed a brick in her face, and called her “Rushdie’s bitch”. The day before she had been asked about writers she admired: Salman Rushdie’s name had figured on a long list of others. People walked out in protest.

Writers do not fear difference of opinion. On the contrary, we thrive on difficulty, on complexity, on posing vexed questions and exploring unresolved ideas.

We sketch characters with conflicting emotions, fraught relationships with their families, their lovers and their gods, we place them in troubled circumstances, sometimes offer them redemption. This is the stuff of good drama, of engaged fiction. We gravitate towards, not away from, debate and nuance, knowing that the more considered the idea the better the text.

But what we do not thrive on, and what we will not tolerate, is violent intimidation. Like us, Dala is a writer. She is a reader. She is both a consumer of and producer of words. She would not have avoided a conversation; she would not have shut down a debate. But debate, conversation and engagement are not possible in the face of violence.

And this type of violence – cowardly, sinister, designed to create fear in the moment and silence in the future – is the sort that simultaneously demonstrates its terror of words and its desire to obliterate them. In South Africa, our freedom of speech and movement is a fundamental right. Our Constitution insists on them. It is the same Constitution that protects the rights of those uncomfortable with or offended by Rushdie’s work.

The question of freedom of expression, of speech, has occupied South African writers for decades and is one that has changed shape over the years as we’ve moved from repression to democracy and into the troubling era of the “secrecy Bill”. As South Africans, as writers, we have not always experienced freedom but we have always known what we were fighting for, sometimes at a fatal cost.

We have always known that freedom of expression is, at its deepest, most profound level, the right to speak without fear. It is the knowledge that sharing an opinion with the public should at best be met with passionate engagement, at worst with disinterested dismissal. It is, in its simplest form, the right to speak. It is also the right to listen and to be heard.

There is no glory to be had in attacking an unarmed woman alone. There is nothing heroic about attempting to intimidate people into silence. This was an unconscionable and shameful act. Above all, it was criminal.

As writers, as South Africans, we wish to make this plain: we will not be silenced and intimidated by brutish thuggery. We stand in solidarity with Dala. She is one of us, and in the tradition of our country’s resistance and resilience, we say clearly and unanimously that an injury to one is an injury to all.

PEN South Africa, the local chapter of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers; Njabulo Ndebele, Nadia Davids, NoViolet Bulawayo, Rustum Kozain, Mandla Langa, Margie Orford, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Imraan Coovadia, Gabeba Baderoon, Fourie Botha, Imran Garda, Kirsten Miller, Thando Mgqolozana, Ben Williams, Tshifhiwa Given Mukwevho, Dilman Dila, Siphiwo Mahala, Fiona Snyckers Helen Moffett, Nthikeng Mohlele, Percy Zvomuya, Jacob Dlamini, Zakes Mda, Ivan Vladislavic, Elinor Sisulu, Rachel Zadok.

For more information click here.

We stand in solidarity with Dala.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There’s a program at Duke, the You Don’t Say? campaign, in which student athletes say why it’s not cool to use a particular slur.

One sample:

You Don’t Say? Campaign

I had to look through a lot of them to find it, but there is one for “cunt.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Humphrey and the boys agree that in principle they’re all in favor. Oh yes certainly. We’re all thoroughly in favor of equal rights for the ladies.

As Sir Humphrey says…

And speaking as an ardent feminist myself -

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhZRDoGZg00

H/t Cassidy McJones

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Via Musawah – in India the Supreme Court ruled against polygamy.

In a historic decision last month, the Supreme Court denied a Muslim man the right to have more than one wife and upheld his termination from employment for committing bigamy. The court observed that polygamy was not integral to Islam and the practice was not mandated by religion simply because it was permitted. Similarly, in 2005, the SC had boldly acknowledged that, despite codification and the introduction of monogamy, too many Hindu marriages, like Muslim marriages, continue to be bigamous. This latest SC decision is in line with the reform of Muslim personal law that it initiated three decades ago in the Shah Bano case.

In a catena of cases, the SC has held that the freedom of religion protects only those practices that constitute an “essential and integral part of religion”. Therefore, Muslim personal law can claim the protection of Article 25 only if it is established that marriage, inheritance and the other areas it covers are “essential and integral parts” of Islam. The bench was of the view that a Muslim [man] who wants to take more than one wife is engaged in neither professing and practising nor promoting and propagating his religion. Thus the SC rightly upheld service rules that mandated that an [male] employee can have only one wife. There is substance in the argument that though the basic source of Muslim law is the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet, the relations it regulates are not religious. They are, on the contrary, social relations well within the province of the state. Therefore, Muslim polygamy has no religious motivation.

That’s an interesting distinction. I think it’s a good one, but it’s one that I think judges in the US would shy away from making…because it would entangle them in theological judgments that aren’t their province. That tends to mean that religious people have a lot of latitude to claim that this thing they want to do is a core religious belief. We’ve seen how that plays out.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More river graphics.

The Missouri has such an eccentric course. Poor Lewis and Clark, thinking it was just going to flow tidily west into the Pacific and be a super-useful transportation route.

Missouri river basin (Wikimedia Commons)

West! North! West! North north north north! Westnorthwestnorthwest west west west SOUTH!

And then it breaks into three smaller ones and the Pacific is still way over on the other side of a lot of mountains.

And then look at the comparative volumes. I had NO idea the Ohio was 20 times the size of the other two.

Wikimedia

H/t Alex

The Mississippi is really the Ohio. Who knew??

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I got curious, for some reason I don’t remember, about what causes one river to flow into another, so I did some Google-work and found a big ol’ source on rivers in Virginia. I love this one graphic:

(Source: USGS National Atlas)

Rivers rivers everywhere!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Here’s the thing. If you have a conspicuous history of complaining about “American women” objecting to what you consider trivial problems like sexual harassment, it’s silly for you to insist that you’re an “ardent feminist.” You can’t do both, as the saying goes. You can take constant potshots at feminism, or you can be an ardent feminist, but you can’t do both. You can claim you’re an ardent feminist while taking constant potshots at feminism, but it won’t be an honest claim.

Just last November – such a short time ago – Kimberly Winston made clear what a yawning gap there is between the claims to be a passionate feminist and the reality.

Bottom line: He stands by everything he has said — including comments that one form of rape or pedophilia is “worse” than another, and that a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate.

“I don’t take back anything that I’ve said,” Dawkins said from a shady spot in the leafy backyard of one of his Bay Area supporters. “I would not say it again, however, because I am now accustomed to being misunderstood…”

It isn’t misunderstanding.

Dawkins, however, disagrees. He is, he said, not a misogynist, as some critics have called him, but “a passionate feminist.” The greatest threats to women, in his view, are Islamism and jihadism — and his concern over that sometimes leads him to speak off-the-cuff.

“I concentrate my attention on that menace and I confess I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial,” he said.

That right there – that’s what rules out being a passionate or ardent feminist. A man who “gets impatient” with women mildly objecting to unwanted sexual invitations is not an ardent feminist, however convinced he is that he fits the description, and however often he tweets that he is he is he IS.

“And so I occasionally wax a little sarcastic, and I when I have done that, I then have subsequently discovered some truly horrific things, which is that some of the women who were the butt of my sarcasm then became the butt of really horrible or serious threats, which is totally disgusting and I know how horrible that is and that, of course, I absolutely abominate and absolutely repudiate and abhor.”

Years too late.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Shulevitz ends that op-ed with a story that needs separate treatment, because it’s a whole other issue, and one I have very strong feelings about.

A few weeks ago, Zineb El Rhazoui, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago, protected by the security guards she has traveled with since supporters of the Islamic State issued death threats against her. During the question-and-answer period, a Muslim student stood up to object to the newspaper’s apparent disrespect for Muslims and to express her dislike of the phrase “I am Charlie.”

Ms. El Rhazoui replied, somewhat irritably, “Being Charlie Hebdo means to die because of a drawing,” and not everyone has the guts to do that (although she didn’t use the word guts). She lives under constant threat, Ms. El Rhazoui said. The student answered that she felt threatened, too.

A few days later, a guest editorialist in the student newspaper took Ms. El Rhazoui to task. She had failed to ensure “that others felt safe enough to express dissenting opinions.” Ms. El Rhazoui’s “relative position of power,” the writer continued, had granted her a “free pass to make condescending attacks on a member of the university.” In a letter to the editor, the president and the vice president of the University of Chicago French Club, which had sponsored the talk, shot back, saying, “El Rhazoui is an immigrant, a woman, Arab, a human-rights activist who has known exile, and a journalist living in very real fear of death. She was invited to speak precisely because her right to do so is, quite literally, under threat.”

The response of the student in the audience makes me want to punch a wall. She does not “feel threatened, too” – not in the sense that Zineb El Rhazoui does. A number of El Rhazoui’s colleagues and friends were murdered just a few weeks ago, and allies of the murderers have made death threats against her on social media. Zineb El Rhazoui is an ex-Muslim, an apostate, an unbeliever – when she says she lives under constant threat she doesn’t mean people disputing her ideas, she means people who would be happy to shoot her with machine guns.

Those students don’t know they’re born.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)