The quandaries of gender and gender norms and gender policing…Erika Kleinman’s three-year-old daughter wanted her hair cut very short, really short Mom. It took three tries for Kleinman to cut it as short as her daughter wanted it, and she wondered why she found it so difficult.

When I was in the fifth month of my pregnancy with my first child, everyone wanted to know the sex. “Boy or girl?” When I said, “Surprise,” they were openly horrified. “No one is going to know what to get the baby!” Pink or blue? Cupcakes or puppy dogs? Butterflies or tractors? These conversations annoyed me. I have a foot in my spleen and no bladder capacity and you want to know pink or blue?

Even without the key information of my baby’s sex, people sounded off on how different boys and girls are. Boys are so bold, so daring. Girls are so sweet, such good listeners. Many of these people were college educated, where they ostensibly took one class which addressed binary gender constructs. One lesbian mother described her son as “all boy.” What does that even mean? I don’t hold gay people to a higher standard when it comes to questioning gender roles, but it is testimony of how deep these perceptions of girls and boys run in this culture.

It’s tricky. I’ve been taught by a couple of generations of skeptics not to cling to the starry-eyed aka delusional idea that gender is totally constructed and totally fluid. Ok, but it’s clearly not totally inborn, either, because if it were, why would all the god damn policing be necessary?

That’s one thing that men get a lot worse than women do, as far as I can tell. Depressingly, that’s because being girly or womany when you’re that other gender is such a disgrace, while it’s not so disgraceful in the other direction.

What would happen if we gave up on the idea that boys and girls are so different? As the director of my child’s preschool pointed out, “It can be more effective to highlight our similarities. Instead of putting people into separate corners, it pulls us into one community.” She suggested that when Phoebe says she is a boy, we could say: “Yes, and we’re all human!” What a radical idea.

And what would it be like if instead of describing our children as “all boy” or “just so girly,” we talked about how much our kids love being in charge, how they love to draw, and swim, and have picnics in the park? How they spend hours in the bath, and how much they want to know how things work? How they like being the center of attention or maybe how they take their time to get to know someone? Instead of trotting out the same old stereotypes about what girls and boys are like, we could talk about what our children do; how they move through the world. We could talk about all the ways they are human, and how great it is just to be a part of it.

I wish we could do that. I see no sign of it whatsoever, though – if anything American culture has gotten more macho over the past few decades rather than less so.

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

The RDF has posted an article by Leo Igwe about Helen Ukpabio’s lawsuit and the wider trend in African Christianity that she is only a small part of.

[T]here is an emerging poisonous trend in African Christianity which if not nipped in the bud risks returning Britain to a growth in practices last widely witnessed in the dark ages. The signs are clear. The recent cases of witchcraft related abuse of children in Black communities can be traced back to the practice of this brand of Christianity. So this must be opposed and those who peddle this religious barbarism and who wish to import or encourage it in the UK must be stopped.

This Africanized Christianity contradicts human rights, and civilized values. It contains forms and currents of Christian practice which Western Christianity had abandoned decades and centuries ago. It seeks to turn back the clock on the evolution of a more ‘enlightened religion’ and of the recognition of broadly secular values in UK society. British humanists must resist this vicious brand of Christianity. British humanists should mobilize and come out strongly, critically and vociferously against such dark age Christianity.

Leo says there’s a movement of African pastors to re-introduce Christianity back to the West, the idea being that the West has lost the plot and no longer does Christianity properly, i.e. it does it without all the homophobia and witch-hunting and other reactionary baggage, and the African pastors can nudge the West back into doing it the right way.

But they also do it for the cha-ching.

In April, Ukpabio was in the UK to promote her witch finding ministry. She desperately wants to connect her witchcraft market with the European religious market. She has attempted to establish branches of her churches in the US. But Ukpabio is not the only African pastor scheming to re-Christianize the West. Other Christian clerics are already part of this reverse missionary process. Early this year, Nigerian homophobic pastor and the general overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Rev Enoch Adeboye toured Australia and New Zealand to inaugurate branches of his church.

In August, the UK authorities denied entry to another witch hunting pastor David Oyedepo. Oyedepo is the owner of Winners Chapel. He is known to be the richest pastor in Africa, owning several private jets. During a deliverance session in Nigeria he slapped a girl whom he accused of being a witch. In Cameroon a nine year old girl collapsed and died after a pastor at a branch of Winners Chapel accused her of being possessed by numerous demons and started conducting a ritual exorcism.

There’s money in witch-hunting – money for the pastors, and misery and death for the victims. Speak up and resist, Leo says.

Churches that promote these abusive practices have no place in contemporary Britain. Pastors who own these churches should be told clearly that they are not welcome; that their brand of Christianity is unacceptable and particularly so in modern day Britain. We cannot realize a secular country when we allow African Pentecostal pastors to come and spread their gospel of hate and violence. When we turn a blind eye or tolerate the induction of witchcraft narratives into black migrant or diasporic communities we insult the memory of Kristy Bamu, Victoria Climbié and other child victims of witchcraft related abuse.

So let’s do the opposite of turning a blind eye.

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

Originally a comment by screechymonkey on Stand by your man.

Note: the comment is quite embedded in the discussion where it was posted, which is usually not ideal for a guest post, but it makes a lot of the general points about why it matters when “role model” celebrity male athletes beat up women, and I want to see them made.

Kevin, for a guy who’s not trying to defend Rice, you’re getting awfully heated about your position here, and not engaging in fair discussion.

For example,

So you are saying there’s a double standard — one for football players and another for the rest of the world. Because “role model”. And because “making an example” of Rice will instantly solve all domestic abuse problems everywhere and always.

Got it.

Quixote never said that punishing Rice “will instantly solve all domestic abuse problems everywhere and always,” or anything remotely like it. I fail to see why you’re engaging in this kind of hyperbole. Quixote didn’t claim it, and surely you’re not claiming that this is the relevant standard? That we don’t take any action to punish someone unless it will instantly solve all such crimes everywhere and always? No point in jailing one murderer, then, unless it will stop all murders everywhere and forever!

As to the bit about “role models,” yes. The NFL has already taken it upon itself to enforce the off-field, not-strictly-related-to-employment behavior of its players, as has every professional sports league I can think of. Standard player contracts have morals clauses. The league has fined or suspended players for racist or other inappropriate comments on social media or elsewhere (e.g. Riley Cooper), and for criminal behavior that the criminal justice system declined to punish (e.g. Ben Roethlisberger).

None of us just woke up recently and decided to impose this “role model” higher standard on NFL players starting with Ray Rice. The NFL has imposed it on them for quite some time, and Commissioner Goodell made it a point of emphasis when he took the job. The NFL and other sports leagues market themselves, their athletes, and their sport generally based on its character-building properties. We’re just asking the league to be consistent and treat domestic violence like the violent crime it is.

And as to the question of the victim: what does she want? She wants to be left alone. And she doesn’t want her life or his to be ruined by this incident. Why are you diminishing her agency by demanding something on her behalf that she doesn’t herself demand?

The victim’s wishes are not the determining factor in most systems of justice. They can and should be taken into account, but they aren’t dispositive. The criminal justice system doesn’t require the victim’s permission or approval to prosecute someone (though it may be difficult as a practical matter to prosecute without cooperation). A school principal who declined to punish a bully because the victims said not to would be doing a poor job. An employer who kept a violent employee around just because the victim had forgiven him or her would be making a dumb decision.

Basically what you’re saying is, “why should the rest of us care if Janay Rice decides to stay with an abusive man?” I think society has an interest in punishing violent assholes without waiting for them to assault someone other than their partner, or for them to finally assault their partner in a way that the partner won’t forgive (or can’t, because they’re dead). And while I don’t pretend to understand the complex reasons why victims stay with their abusers, I don’t think that it’s the kind of decision that we need to give 100% deference to. I’m not a hard-core libertarian — I’m ok with a little “paternalism” in the form of punishing abusers without the abused’s sign-off.

Again, I have no problem criticizing Rice and no problem with the court system dealing with him. It’s this blood-lust over-the-top fury that has me puzzled. Why? Because it was videotaped? So the lesson really is to “take the stairs”? Because people would be way less upset over this if there were no video.

I agree that the video probably shouldn’t make as much difference as it has. But we’re talking about human beings here, and there’s something visceral about images, and especially video, that provokes a stronger reaction.

But I think the more important factor here is that the video took away most of the excuses. Far too many people — including those in charge at the NFL and the Ravens — seemed to have more empathy for Ray than Janay. They saw the initial, post-elevator video, and immediately their minds turn to constructing scenarios under which Ray’s actions are justifiable or at least excusable in some way: “well, maybe she was viciously attacking him and he was just defending himself,” “well, maybe he just shoved her slightly and she lost her balance and hit her head,” “well, maybe she ran into his fist.”

It’s the same way that so many people reacted to the prospect of harassment policies at conferences by constructing scenarios where they were the accused harasser, or why referring to a man’s advances as “creepy” sets off all sorts of rationalizing among some people (“Maybe he’s just socially awkward!” “Maybe he has Asperger’s” “I bet she would have been fine with it if he looked like Tom Brady!”)

The inside the elevator video forced all of these people, who had been trying so hard to put themselves in Ray’s shoes, to ask themselves whether they could see themselves throwing that punch. And, as shitty as many people can be on domestic violence issues, most of them don’t really condone someone who is no physical danger just throwing a left hook to the jaw of a much smaller partner. So suddenly the speculation and the scenario-spinning screeched to a halt and almost everyone was forced to admit that, yeah, this was a barbaric act.

In addition, certain sports reporters (Peter King, Adam Shefter) passed along reports from “sources” that the league had seen the inside-the-elevator video and that it provided some mitigation that justified the league’s mild punishment of Rice. So suddenly people who were puzzled by the league’s decision but were trusting that the league had access to additional information that justified it, had their position cut out from under them.

So that’s why the video matters. For many people, it eliminated the doubt, the uncertainty, the gosh-who-knows-what-really-happened agnosticism and forced them to confront the cold hard facts that the rest of us were pretty confident in all along.

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

Phil Plait writes about Surly Amy’s art installation at CFI-Los Angeles in Slate today.

For having the temerity to say that women should have equal rights, opportunities, and treatment as men, she gets a tsunami of hatred, venom, death threats, rape threats, and more. It would be enough to break down hardened people, and it has. But not Amy. She manages to not only deal with this horrifying onslaught but also turn it into art.

I mean that literally. With the help of several other atheist and skeptical women, Amy has created an exhibit called A Woman’s Room Online: a free-standing 8×10 foot room that is being installed in the L.A. Center for Inquiry office. It will look superficially much like any office in which a woman might work, with the usual accoutrements.

But each object will be covered with messages these women have received on Twitter, Facebook, and email. Real messages, actual things sent to them that are the vilest, most hateful examples of the worst humanity has to offer.

I was invited to contribute to the exhibit but I didn’t, for various reasons, but it’s a brilliant idea.

Phil has seen some of the pieces, and been horrified by them.

The words are hard to read, so difficult to imagine an actual human sending them to another human. They run the range from self-satisfied and arrogant to graphic and explicit threats against body and life. Sexism and misogyny had been brewing in the atheist and skeptical movements for some time but exploded when Rebecca Watson brought attention to them, and people were further polarized after Richard Dawkins made his “Muslima” comments in response. That was years ago, and things are no better … as we’ve also seen in so many other online communities as well.

Perhaps sunlight is the best disinfectant, and art has a way of focusing that light. Over at Skepchick, Amy herself wrote a description of her installation, and I strongly encourage you to read it.

I think this is an important piece of art. I suspect a lot of people really don’t have any idea just how much filth women (not only feminists, but just women on the Internet guilty of Posting While Female) have to slog through every day just to exist online. It’s horrifying—and sadly, used as a way to shut women up; read Amanda Marcotte’s recent post about this.

The more sunlight the better.

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

Well it sounds like something from the Onion, but the Standard is a real paper. A flight from LA to NY had to make an unscheduled landing in Kansas City in order to boot off a passenger who wouldn’t stop singing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

Well, yeah. Five hours of that? That would be baaaaaaaaaaaad.

The domestic service from Los Angeles to New York was diverted to Kansas City so marshals could remove the woman from the plane because she kept singing the song repeatedly.

The singing began shortly after the flight took off, but around halfway through it became too much for fellow passengers and staff to bear.

The woman was filmed being escorted from the plane, in handcuffs, still belting out the 1992 number one hit.

It would be too much to bear, definitely.

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

The Detroit Free Press reports on the protest in support of Barbara Webb.

More than 100 people attended Sunday’s nearly two-hour rally.

“We value human diversity,” said Amanda Ruud McVety, 29, of Birmingham, a 2002 Marian graduate who helped organize the rally to coincide with morning masses at nearby St. Regis Catholic Church. “It’s time to show that — through actions and through words. It’s time we look at (homosexuals) as equals and not shame them for who they are.”

Another Marian alum, 2001 graduate Rachel Chapman Kopera, started the Facebook page, “I Stand With Barb Webb,” which had more than 3,300 members as of Sunday afternoon. A petition on change.org also asks for Marian administration to support LGBT students and staff.

McVety said the firing of Webb goes against the social-justice teachings instilled in Marian students.

I wonder if the administration of the school is more liberal (and more feminist) than the local bishop, and felt it had to fire Webb to avoid surveillance and intrusion by the reactionary male hierarchy.

Amber Mazza Cunnings, a 2001 Marian graduate, said the movement is about bringing light to a social injustice she said the school teaches its students to confront.

“Marian teaches us about social justice in profound ways,” said Mazza Cunnings of Farmington Hills. “This is a human rights issue. There’s a mother and a child involved. (Standing up for them) is what we were taught to do.”

Brigid Johnson, 17, a senior at Marian, said the teacher’s absence was not explained to students. Teachers have told students they are forbidden to speak about it, she said.

How’s that working out for them?

Webb told the Free Press last week that her termination letter did not give a reason for her dismissal, but previous conversations with administrators pointed to a morality clause allowing firing over public conduct of “lifestyle or actions directly contradictory to the Catholic faith.”

She said she found out she was pregnant in June and told the administration in July. She said the school’s administration gave her the choice in August between resigning with health insurance benefits that would continue into the spring, as long as she did not discuss what happened or being fired.

She said she chose to be fired.

On Sunday morning, she said she was overwhelmed with the support she has received from the community, and is hopeful the students at Marian benefit from the situation.

“It’s not about me anymore,” she said. “Really, it never was. It’s time for the students at Marian to have an outlet. There’s no (Gay-Straight Alliance) club for students to express themselves. It’s time to change the outlook for the future.”

I’m Facebook friends with her now so I’ve been looking at her wall, and it’s full of really quite beautiful stuff – friends and relatives rallying round, little nephews and nieces around a table making posters for the protest, former students saying what a great teacher she was. A great bunch of people; the school will obviously be the loser here.

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

There’s a petition you can sign urging Marian High School to unfire Barbara Webb.

Barb Webb was recently forced to resign as a teacher at Marian High School in Michigan because she is pregnant and starting a family with her female partner. Webb was a well-loved teacher at the school – having been a chemistry teacher and volley ball coach for 9 years. There has been outrage from students, parents and alumni at a school that prides itself in ‘enabling young women to value human diversity and live responsible lives and inspiring its students to ‘Empower, Explore, Excel’

Webb told school officials that she was pregnant and hoped to work out some kind of maternity leave arrangement (or leave of absence) as her contract prohibited her from being public with anything that is contrary to Catholic doctrine. Marian denied her the request for leave. She was asked to resign or her employment would be terminated.

We call on Marian High School and Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) to rethink their policies and start supporting LGBT staff and students.

Love is Love in all its forms – at a time when Barb Webb should be preparing for motherhood and the beautiful journey starting a family – we want to show our support and solidarity and ask Marian High School to never make this mistake again. Help Marian make the right decision. This is a human rights issue and every act of justice that we take can collectively get us one step closer to equality!

Pope Francis: “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” We must always consider the person. September 2013.

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

The deniers and minimizers are starting to succeed in training me to see deniers and minimizers where they aren’t. Like in this tweet from The New Republic:

The numbers on how many women are raped each year might be off by more than 88%: http://on.tnr.com/Yue1dc

I assumed they meant what Sommers would mean by tweeting that. Wrong. By “off” they meant too low, while Sommers of course always means too high.

The article by Claire Groden:

The recent CDC report, based on surveys conducted in 2011, found that almost one in five women (and 1.7 percent of men) have been raped in their lifetimes. In a single year, 1.6 percent of women reported experiences that are considered rape—almost two million cases. But the NCVS report recorded just 243,800 cases of rape or sexual assault in that year, 12 percent of the CDC findings. Meanwhile, a report compiled by the FBI, which only documents cases that were brought to police, shows only 83,425 rapes that year.

Why the big disparities? Different goals, and different kinds of questions.

This difference made the CDC’s survey broader, especially in the case of victims who were under the influence during the attack. The CDC counted alcohol- and drug-facilitated rape, asking if the respondents had ever experienced various sex acts while “drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.” But, as Scott Berkowitz at RAINN, the Rape and Incest Abuse National Network, pointed out, not all of those 1.2 million cases in 2011 would be considered rape by the Department of Justice. Due to the survey question’s phrasing, a person who had been drunk—but still considered herself capable of giving consent—might have answered yes to that question. A CDC spokesperson clarified that being unable to consent is key to the CDC’s definition of rape. 

That’s confusing. There’s a note at the end of the article saying a clarification by the CDC had been added, and that last sentence must be the clarification, which seems to be saying the opposite of what the previous sentence says. The interpolated “but still considered herself capable of giving consent” confuses the issue. Anyway…Groden seems to be saying that the CDC survey includes women who maybe sort of consented but were drunk or high.

Still, the CDC numbers are a reminder of how many sexual assaults and rapes go unreported. The total number of rapes reported to police in 2011 was 83,425—far lower than either the NCVS or CDC numbers. If the 2011 CDC estimate—almost two million people cases—all fit the legal definition of rape, that would mean only 4 percent were reported to the police. Even excluding alcohol- and drug-facilitated rapes, the 716,000 counts of completed or attempted penetration recorded by the CDC still add up to more than eight times the cases recorded by the FBI and almost three times as many as the Department of Justice. While finding an indisputable number of rape victims seems to be a Holy Grail, the CDC report certainly reveals that the most widely accepted estimates aren’t high enough.

Many rapes don’t get reported; many rapes don’t get counted. Imagine my lack of surprise.

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

Soraya Chemaly explains some reasons Cathy Young is wrong to say that men get harassed online more than women do.

In addition to the difficulty of comparing data sets of varying size and depth, however, comparing male versus female online “harassment” is problematic for many reasons.

First, as Young points out, women’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based and that has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in our history. The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”

It seems silly having to explain this. People who have a better spot on the hierarchy ladder are not as harmed by harassment as people who have a worse spot are, because harassment is itself a power move – a ladder spot enforcer.

For girls and women, harassment is not just about “un-pleasantries.” It’s often about men asserting dominance, silencing, and frequently, scaring and punishing them.

…

Rape and death threats made by strangers are also common, however. They coexist online with violent sexist, racist commentary on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook and the sharing of gifs, images, jokes and memes depicting gross violence against women as “humor.” The “humor” can sometimes spill over into aggressive cyber mob attacks, which, as Citron explains in her book, disproportionately target women and people of color. These mobs include hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, systematically harassing their targets. #Slanegirl, a trending global public shaming of a teenage girl filmed performing fellatio is one example. Attacks on public figures like Anita Sarkeesian or Caroline Criado-Perez can take on surreal qualities whose effects can’t be underestimated—either on the individual attacked or on the environment.

Well actually they can be underestimated, by people like Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers (who enthusiastically hyped Young’s article), but they shouldn’t be.

The harassment men experience also lacks broader, resonant symbolism. Women are more frequently targeted with gendered slurs and pornographic photo manipulation because the objectification and dehumanization of women is central to normalizing violence against us. Philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Rae Langton describe in detail how this works: women are thought of and portrayed as things for the use of others. Interchangeable; violable; silent and lacking in agency.

Women take online harassment more seriously not because we are hysterics, but because we reasonably have to. There is no gender equivalence in terms of the denigrating, hostile and sometimes exceedingly dangerous environmental effect that misogyny has, online or off. It has a long history and cannot be isolated from actual violence that we adapt to avoiding every day. The fact that that violence has always suppressed women’s free speech is only now becoming too obvious to ignore.

Despite the best efforts of the Cathy Youngs of the world.

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

So now Janay Rice is saying she’s pissed off at all these meddling people who got her husband kicked out of the NFL. She did a post on Instagram saying so:

I woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend. But to have to accept the fact that it’s reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass of for all his life just to gain ratings is horrific. THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you’ve succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow & show the world what real love is! Ravensnation we love you!

Well, of course it has – that’s a lot of money thrown away.

Sorry, but it can’t be helped. The law can’t give big athletic guys an exemption so that they can keep drawing those big salaries for playing football, and football teams and their league absolutely should not turn a blind eye to domestic violence so that they can keep the talented players. Nope nope nope.

Imagine if it were their daughter he’d punched in the head – should the NFL just ignore that and try to cover it up when reporters ask about it? No it should not.

The guy did what he did. That’s not the public’s fault, it’s not journalism’s fault, it’s not his wife’s fault.

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

Irshad Manji made a meme out of a sentence from that statement by British Muslims for Secular Democracy that a group of supporters (including me) signed last week, and that the Independent published.

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

Ok so catching up on the Ray Rice thing, which I didn’t follow before – I just watched the “apology” video. It’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.

First he apologizes to the bosses, the fans, the kids – “everyone that was affected by this situation that me and my wife were in.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLVS0Jfgy4

Situation? They were in? He punched her in the head and knocked her out.

That’s a terrible beginning, and it doesn’t get one bit better. He goes on that way for six and a half minutes. It’s all about him. He talks about generalities without ever actually admitting to what he did, without ever mentioning it, without ever saying the words, and using “we” and “us” the whole time as if both of them had punched Janay Palmer in the head.

When you’ve seen this thing happen with me and my wife. People asked questions about what happened. Sometimes in life you will fail, but – I won’t call myself a failure. Failure is not getting knocked down, it’s not getting up.

He actually said that. Dude, you’re not the one who got knocked down, she is, and she was knocked down by you. To the floor. You dragged her out of the elevator and dropped her face-down on the floor outside.

Me and Janay wish we could take back 30 seconds of our life.

No. Just the one. Just Ray Rice, not the woman he punched unconscious.

People told him “You’ll get through it.” He chokes up. “One thing you gave me is trust.” He gets all maudlin and emotional…about himself. It’s disgusting.

• “I’m working on our relationship. I have Janay’s best interests.”
• “Just wanted to thank my supporters.”
• “Showing us a better way. Bringing us together.”
• “We were able to get through this. To let y’all know – we’re still the same people.”
• “I think my wife has something to say – we were in this together.”

And what does she say? “I do deeply regret the role that I played in the incident that night.” She does deeply regret being so annoying that he was forced to punch her in the head and knock her out.

I’m just fucking gobsmacked and disgusted and enraged.

You know what? One of the things we’re constantly told when we wonder why schools and universities spend so much money and time on football is that it builds character and wonderful social skills.

BULLSHIT.

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

The library came up with that book I told you about last June, Nell Bernstein’s Burning Down the House, about the US’s horrendous and out of step with other developed countries way of dealing with juvenile offenders by throwing them in jail for years. I’ll share some items.

On average, we spend $88,000 per year to incarcerate a young person in a state facility – more than eight times the $10, 652 we invest in her education. In many states, this gap is even wider. In California, for example, the cost of a year in a youth prison reached a high of $225,000, while education spending dipped to less than $8,000. [p 6]

And what’s the payoff? Children turned into repeat criminals. Locking children up does nothing to rehabilitate them and does much to wreck them.

…for as long as we have locked children away in the name of rehabilitating them, the evidence has mounted that this approach is a failure on all fronts. Sky-high recidivism rates… – higher than 80 percent in some states – indicate that whatever is taking place inside our juvenile correctional facilities, no one is actually being “corrected.” [p 7]

It doesn’t just fail to correct, it succeeds in criminalizing.

In fact, multiple studies have shown that putting youth behind bars not only fails to enhance public safety, it does just the opposite, driving low-level delinquents deeper into criminality and increasing the likelihood that they will wind up behind bars again and again. [p 7]

What does work, Bernstein is convinced, is a consistent relationship with at least one trusted adult. Prison isn’t the place to find that.

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

So, this guy? Ray Rice, this guy who plays football for the Baltimore Ravens? The one who punched his girl friend so hard he knocked her out, and was suspended by his team* the NFL for the whoppingly punitive two games?

Today a new video was released that shows the actual knockout punch, and the team has now fired him.

Before all they had was a video showing him dragging her unconscious body off an elevator and dumping her on the floor just outside it.

I don’t quite understand why the first video wasn’t enough.

Within hours of the video’s appearance on TMZ.com, Rice’s team, the Baltimore Ravens, tweeted, “The Baltimore Ravens terminated the contract of RB Ray Rice this afternoon.”

The video shows Janay Palmer, now Rice’s wife, being hit in the face in the elevator. Palmer then lunges at the running back before he delivers a blow that knocks her out. When the elevator doors open, Rice drags Palmer’s body outside, leaving her face down on the floor, her legs still inside the elevator.

The clip sparked outrage from fellow football players, coaches and fans, and many called for the NFL to cut Rice sooner. Herm Edwards, a former coach for the New York Jets, said he would have taken action before the video was released.

The most depressing part of the story is that Janay Palmer went ahead and married him.

*Thanks to Nick Little, Leo Buzalsky and others who corrected my howler.

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

Raw Story reports that Mars Hill church is shrinking operations as more people learn what a pathetic patriarchal mess it is.

An August profile of Driscoll published by The New York Times explained that he had been accused “of plagiarizing, of inappropriately using church funds and of consolidating power to such a degree that it has become difficult for anyone to challenge or even question him.”

A month earlier, it was revealed that Driscoll had posted hundreds of inflammatory Internet comments almost 15 years ago.

Although the media focused on his comments about the U.S. being a “pussified nation,” bloggers who followed Driscoll closely argued that his views on women and sex were the larger problem.

Hello? Calling the US “a pussified nation” is itself a view on women that is a problem.

On Monday, “Love, Joe, Feminism” blogger Libby Anne pointed out one of the more disturbing notions from Driscoll’s Internet trolling days.

Well then let’s go to the source, and while we’re at it get the name of her blog right – it’s “Love, Joy, Feminism.” Joe isn’t part of the story. Take it away Libby Anne:

Things have been getting worse and worse for Mark Driscoll in recent weeks. But what I want to point out for a moment is one of Driscoll’s posts from 2001, when he was posting to a church message board under the name William Wallace II. I have rarely seen an evangelical man assert male superiority and prominence this directly.

The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may see, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while.

While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wondering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.

You  you you – notice that Driscoll assumes that women aren’t reading. Does he think they can’t read?

Yes, really. Men’s penises are on loan from God, and women were created to be “homes” for men’s penises. So much for any claims of men and women being “equal before God.” No, men were created by God and loaned penises. Women were then created by God to be penis homes.

Therefore, if you are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But, though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be breaking into another man’s home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home.

Notice that all women are portrayed as another man’s penis home, whether or not they are married. This squares with what I was taught—every woman is some man’s future wife, and that man owns her body even before they meet.

Penis home! It all seems like such a lot of effort for such a trivial thing. You’d think God could have just built the home around the penis, so that the two were always united and the penis was always happy, instead of forcing men to have to put up with a whole entire human being that talks and argues and walks around independently. It’s as if we couldn’t have just mittens, we had to drag a sheep around with us all winter.

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

A Catholic school near Detroit has fired a teacher for doing something it considers ooky a sin.

A Detroit-area teacher says she was fired from her post at a private Catholic all-girls high school after she and her lesbian partner announced they were expecting a child through non-traditional means.

So it turns out the Catholic church isn’t so “pro-life” after all, at least according to this school. It disapproves of the future existence of this expected child, disapproves enough to fire the mother from her job at its school. Homophobia trumps “pro-life” it seems.

Hundreds of supporters for Barb Webb, a teacher at Marian High School in suburban Bloomfield Hills, rallied on Sunday at the school after she posted on Facebook that she had been forced from her job after she become pregnant “outside the Catholic way.”

Webb said she was asked late last month to choose between resigning or being fired, but decided against leaving voluntarily although she said the school had offered healthcare for the remainder of the school year had she chosen to resign. She was 14 weeks pregnant at the time.

Well let’s see the protests roll out. It will do the school good.

School officials could not immediately be reached on Sunday for comment about the firing, which comes as legal decisions favoring gay marriage continue to mount in the United States.

Nearly 30 state and federal courts have ruled against same-sex marriage bans since last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman.

A U.S. court of appeals is due to rule on same-sex marriage bans in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee this month.

A Facebook group in support of the teacher, “I Stand With Barb Webb,” grew to more than 3,200 members shortly after its inception last week when Webb’s post went viral. Current and former students and parents have urged the school to reverse its decision.

Go on, Marian High School. Do the right thing. Don’t be evil.

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

Oh the hell with it, it’s just going to have to be a recurring, updatable thing.

The insult-tweets of the former philosopher, now American Enterprise Institute hack, Christina Hoff Sommers.

Updating.

Oh goody, she does a Dear Muslima.

Sexism in US: Some video games use damsel-in-distress tropes.Sexism in Iran: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9487761/Anger-as-Iran-bans-women-from-universities.html 

She sent that out a couple of hours after RTing her source:

Retweeted by Christina H. Sommers
Jack @SkipTerrio · 18h
For the edification of the 3rd wave #feminist mob, this is what an ACTUAL #patriarchy looks like:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9487761/Anger-as-Iran-bans-women-from-universities.html …
(cc:@CHSommers)

Jim Lippard objected.

.@CHSommers Therefore… ? Beheading is worse than a migraine, therefore no one should complain about or treat migraines?

Sommers informed him that the subject wasn’t migraines.

Bad analogy @lippard. The endangered damsel trope is not a migraine. It’s a reverie enjoyed by millions of people: Men, women and children.

That’s the kind of thing that makes me twitch with fury – the smug, determined mindlessness of it. How much attention do you have to pay to understand that a popular “reverie” is not automatically harmless just because it’s enjoyed by millions? Lots of very popular fantasies are woven into thought-structures that are harmful to subordinated people! The fact that many people enjoy such fantasies does not magically render them harmless.

Or, as Jim put it:

.@CHSommers Some people still like lawn jockeys & Confederate flags, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right to criticize them.

But again, Sommers explains:

Another false analogy @lippard.Not saying damsel trope is good BECAUSE people like it–saying its harmless, so leave those who like it alone.

Cool, except that there’s no reason to think it is harmless.

————————–

Now it gets meta.

A few minutes ago.

Oh my! An alarmed critic has created “Sommers Watch” to monitor my tweets.Don’t miss the comments. http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2014/09/sommers-watch/ 

I told her I’m not alarmed but disgusted.

Her fans are telling me I’m bullying her. Well, I might be, if she were a nobody and if she were not being so free with the insults. But she’s not a nobody:

• She’s a Name anti-feminist
• She has a gig at the American Enterprise Institute
• She appears on mainstream (as well as less mainstream) media regularly
• Her tweets get shared by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker
• She has 12 thousand-plus followers

And we already know she’s free with the insults. So no, I don’t think I’m bullying her.

——————–

Three hours ago.

@GoodJKnight I don’t think @maddoxrules disagrees. But attacking genres that millions of men (and lots of women) love is hardly inclusive.

We have to like everything that already is, and label all attempts to improve them “attacking.” We have to defend the popular and bend all our efforts to making the unpopular even more unpopular.

—————

An hour ago.

The gender warriors made a huge tactical error when they went after the gamers. Wrong group to irritate.

Spoken like a true bully. “Wrong group to irritate” because they’re many and noisy and mostly pseudonymous and not inhibited about threats and harassment. How ugly of Sommers to gloat about it. (And “the gender warriors” of course knew all that, but were brave enough to proceed anyway. How squalid of Sommers to pretend it was just a stupid mistake.)

Imagine saying something similar about the Little Rock Nine or the Freedom Summer campaigners in Mississippi in 1964. “The civil rights workers made a huge tactical error when they went after the Mississippi white supremacists. Wrong group to irritate.”

The next in the pair.

College deans, news editors, politicians–ran for cover when gender hardliners made strident demands. Gamers–male & female–fighting back.

The word “strident” is a sexist dog-whistle. Sommers can’t possibly be unaware of that. She’s doing this crap deliberately. It’s ugly stuff.

———————

An hour ago.

Shows like Oprah & The View make no effort to be male inclusive. They privilege female perspective.Where are the haranguing gender bloggers?

Two hours ago.

Excellent discussion of college rape panic & how males are treated like monsters and females
–fragile maidens. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/09/05/us_colleges_sexual_assault_crusade_123851.html

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

Mark Joseph Stern reports that Judge Richard Posner’s ruling striking down Indiana’s and Wisconsin’s gay marriage bans is a masterpiece of wit and logic.

Ironically, by writing an opinion so fixated on the facts at hand, Posner may have actually written the one gay marriage ruling that the Supreme Court takes to heart. Other, more legacy-minded judges have attempted to sketch out a revised framework for constitutional marriage equality, granting gay people heightened judicial scrutiny and declaring marriage a fundamental right. But Posner isn’t interested in making new law: The statutes before him are so irrational, so senseless and unreasonable, that they’re noxious to the U.S. Constitution under almost any interpretation of the equal protection clause.

That will probably surprise no one who has read Posner’s book Sex and Reason. It’s still good to know, though.

Posner’s opinion largely follows the points he made during his forceful, trenchant, deeply empathetic questioning at oral arguments. To his mind, there’s no question that gays constitute a “suspect class”—that is, a group of people with an immutable characteristic who have historically faced discrimination. Refreshingly, Posner performs a review of “the leading scientific theories” about homosexuality to illustrate that being gay isn’t a choice. (Compare this with Justice Antonin Scalia’s gay rights dissents, in which he suggests that there’s no such thing as a gay orientation at all and that “gay” people are just disturbed individuals performing debauched sex acts.)

In some way, on some subjects – and this is one – libertarian legal theorists are very much preferable to Catholic ones.

Posner’s opinion largely follows the points he made during his forceful, trenchant, deeply empathetic questioning at oral arguments. To his mind, there’s no question that gays constitute a “suspect class”—that is, a group of people with an immutable characteristic who have historically faced discrimination. Refreshingly, Posner performs a review of “the leading scientific theories” about homosexuality to illustrate that being gay isn’t a choice. (Compare this with Justice Antonin Scalia’s gay rights dissents, in which he suggests that there’s no such thing as a gay orientation at all and that “gay” people are just disturbed individuals performing debauched sex acts.)

This review is actually unnecessary, since both Indiana and Wisconsin conceded that gay people are born that way. But it serves to reinforce Posner’s analytical framework—basically, that a state can’t disadvantage a suspect class of people without a rational basis. Note that low bar: Not a compelling interest, or even a substantial one. If the states could only prove a rational interest in excluding gay people from marriage, their laws would pass constitutional muster.

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

Metaphors aren’t just decoration, they’re more like the foundation. Michael Chorost explains in the CHE.

[I]n their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, the linguist George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in the seemingly literal statement “He’s out of sight,” the visual field is metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.

From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors. Our eyes point to where we’re going, so we tend to speak of future time as being “ahead” of us. When things increase, they tend to go up relative to us, so we tend to speak of stocks “rising” instead of getting more expensive. “Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” they wrote.

I’ve noticed the time one often. I don’t think I could think of it any other way however hard I tried.

Researchers are exploring all this with fMRI studies.

If cognition is embodied, that raises problems for artificial intelligence. Since computers don’t have bodies, let alone sensations, what are the implications of these findings for their becoming conscious—that is, achieving strong AI? Lakoff is uncompromising: “It kills it.” Of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity thesis, he says, “I don’t believe it for a second.” Computers can run models of neural processes, he says, but absent bodily experience, those models will never actually be conscious.

Some think the problem could be solved with sensors and actuators, others think it would be silly to replicate human physical limitations.

What’s emerging from these studies isn’t just a theory of language or of metaphor. It’s a nascent theory of consciousness. Any algorithmic system faces the problem of bootstrapping itself from computing to knowing, from bit-shuffling to caring. Igniting previously stored memories of bodily experiences seems to be one way of getting there.

That interests me – the difference between bit-shuffling and caring. It seems to me to be a big difference.

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

It’s Sunday afternoon, so why not have a spot of Walden, courtesy of Henry David Thoreau and Project Gutenberg.

From Chapter One, “Economy.”

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.

What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach”; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

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