Misogyny? What misogyny?

BBC News reports:

Two teenage girls found hanging from a tree in a village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh had been gang raped, police say.

A man has been held over the murders of the girls, who police said were 14 and 16.

Three policemen have been removed from duty for not registering cases when the girls were reported missing.

Violence and discrimination against women in India remains deeply entrenched.

Meanwhile, Farzana Parveen, the pregnant woman who was stoned to death in front of the court house for marrying a man her family hadn’t chosen? That man she married murdered his first wife in order to marry Farzana Parveen.

Muhummad Iqbal, the 45-year-old husband of Farzana Parveen, who was beaten to death by 20 male relatives on Tuesday, said he strangled his first wife in order to marry Parveen.

He avoided a prison sentence after his family used Islamic provisions of Pakistan’s legal system to forgive him, precisely those he has insisted should not be available to his wife’s killers.

“I was in love with Farzana and killed my first wife because of this love,” he told Agence France-Presse.

Police confirmed that the killing had happened six years ago and that he was released after a “compromise” with his family.

But none of this is anything to do with misogyny. It’s just weather, or gravity, or natural selection, or entropy. Nobody mention misogyny.

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

Extra excitement at the Columbus, Indiana Wal-Mart last Saturday.

Police say a gunshot wounded a woman inside a central Indiana Wal-Mart store after a man’s handgun fell from his pants and fired.

Columbus police Lt. Matt Myers says the 26-year-old woman was treated for an upper arm wound by medics at the store but declined to go to a hospital.

…

Myers says a 56-year-old man told officers that his handgun was in a holster when it fell from his waistband. One bullet hit the woman who was pushing a shopping cart with her newborn son inside.

Myers says officers confirmed the man had a handgun permit and he wasn’t arrested.

And that’s the end of the story.

The guy had a permit, and he wasn’t arrested – even though he dropped his gun in a popular discount store; even though the gun fired and injured a woman; even though the woman injured had a newborn baby with her. All fine, because he had a permit.

Something not quite right here.

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

Christine Scheller reports at the Huffington Post’s Religion section on Women in Secularism…from the pov of someone not very keen on secularism.

When women leave moderate forms of religion, are their stories less interesting or was it a coincidence that all but one of the deconversion narratives I heard at the Women in Secularism III conference May 17 in Alexandria, Virginia, involved women leaving fundamentalist versions of faith? Because I’m a Christian, and I would leave those too.

So, she’s hinting, there should have been more about “moderate” forms of religion.

The question arose in light of these stories as to what keeps women in religion when it is so often hostile to us? Among the answers suggested were rationalization, a culturally imposed lack of self-confidence, the need for community, a lack of basic life skills and/or education and a longing for purity that also involves disdain for the body.

…

Missing from the discussion was the idea that other women have positive experiences with religion and/or have grappled with similar challenges and come to different conclusions.

Only Jones said it is important to draw a distinction between fundamentalism and more moderate and progressive traditions. She finds the same battles over ideological purity in the secular community that she found in fundamentalism, she said.

“I worry that we’re trying to single religion out as the scapegoat,” said Jones.

Of course one person’s “battles over ideological purity” may be someone else’s efforts not to lose the plot altogether.

In an email after the conference, Jones said it takes a great deal of work for her to admit that religion can be a force for good because she was “treated shamefully so many times by so many people who justified their actions by claiming that they were just following the Bible.”

“I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me angry. It still makes me angry. I’m still in the process of recovering from that pain, and I have no idea how long that process will take,” said Jones.

Nonetheless, she sees parallels between hardline atheism (the perspective that the world would better if we were all atheists) and fundamentalist Christianity (the view that the world would be better if we were all fundamentalist Christians).

“Both are very rigid perspectives. And the world isn’t a rigid place,” said Jones. “There’s abuse in organized atheism — the church doesn’t have a monopoly on that.”

Because Jones had mentioned her involvement in interfaith work, I wondered if that work might inform her perspective. It taught her that there can be more than one philosophical justification for the same human rights principle, she said.

“I don’t care if someone supports gender equality, for example, because they believe it’s a religious tenet. I care that they support gender equality,” said Jones.

I on the other hand do care. Of course it’s better to have a religious believer who supports gender equality than to have one who doesn’t, but the religious believer remains vulnerable to being told by a religious authority that gender equality is not pleasing to god, and believing it. It’s an extra vulnerability in the commitment. That’s not an abstraction: most people have decidedly believed exactly that throughout recorded history.

As a storyteller, I understand that dramatic narratives can be the most compelling, but far too much public discourse about religion is driven by arguments with fundamentalism.

Really? Surely a great deal more public discourse about religion is driven by the assumption that religion is the source of goodness.

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

Navi Pillay, the UN human rights High Commissioner, commented today on the murder of Farzana Parveen.

“I am deeply shocked by the death of Farzana Parveen, who, as in the case of so many other women in Pakistan, was brutally murdered by members of her own family simply because she married a man of her own choice,” said High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

“I do not even wish to use the phrase ‘honour killing’: there is not the faintest vestige of honour in killing a woman in this way,” she added in a news release, which also noted that Pakistan has one of the highest rates of violence against women globally.

And why is that? Because they think their holy book makes it ok.

According to reports, some 20 members of Ms. Parveen’s family, including her father and two brothers, attacked her and her husband when they were on their way to the Lahore High Court, where they were due to contest her father’s allegations that she had been kidnapped by her husband and that their marriage was invalid.

“Every year, hundreds of women are killed in Pakistan as a punishment for marrying a man their families have not chosen or for refusing an arranged marriage,” Ms. Pillay said.

According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 869 women were murdered in so-called ‘honour killings’ in the country last year, but the real figure could be much higher, with many such killings believed to be disguised as accidents, or not reported at all.

“The Pakistani Government must take urgent and strong measures to put an end to the continuous stream of so-called ‘honour killings’ and other forms of violence against women,” said Ms. Pillay.

“They must also make a much greater effort to protect women like Farzana Parveen. The fact that she was killed on her way to court, shows a serious failure by the State to provide security for someone who – given how common such killings are in Pakistan – was obviously at risk.”

Will the Pakistani Government pay any attention? It seems very unlikely.

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

Oh goody, Soraya Chemaly and David Futrelle were on an NPR talk show – On Point – today to talk about Rodger and misogyny. Before I listen, how about a quick look at the comments…

…uh oh.

Coastghost • 16 hours ago

Perhaps Americans have grown too unaccustomed to reading various plays by Aristophanes or certain epigrams by Martial or certain satires by Juvenal, or certain poems by Villon or certain stories by Machiavelli, or certain aphorisms by Schopenhauer or certain stories by Maupassant . . . . perhaps if we had not become so keen to shield our eyes from what vexes or discomfits, we would today be well-equipped to consider familiar themes upon their recurrence.
Perhaps we’ve cultivated overmuch our taste for only the palatable.
Or perhaps contemporary utopian feminism may not be telling us anything wholly true (or actually realistic) about either women or men.

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

Hard to believe but apparently not a hoax – “Joe the Plumber” says your dead kids don’t trump my rights.

Adam Weinstein at Gawker has the details.

Continuing his tradition of providing answers to questions no one fucking asked him, Joe decided to post an open letter to the families of victims killed in Elliot Rodger’s murder-suicide rampage over the weekend. Just the victims who were shot, though; not the ones who were stabbed.

His message of hope and love: Stay the fuck away from my guns.

I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But:

As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.

And that’s the important thing here – that Samuel Wurzelbacher aka “Joe the Plumber” gets to keep his guns and stick to them too.

There’s something refreshingly honest in Joe’s acknowledgement that this tragedy is all about him. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of an ethos that’s obsessed with the self and the self’s freedom without a concomitant empathy for other selves and their freedoms. Joe’s rant illuminates quite starkly how the right-libertarian absolutist interpretation of individual rights comes into direct conflict with the lives of his fellow countrymen and their children. To talk of responsibilities is to water down a right, and we cannot do that, no matter what the cost! (On the other hand: “They talk about gun rights,” Martinez said in his stirring press statement about his son. “What about Chris’s right to live?”)

Doesn’t count. Trumped by Wurzelbacher’s right to have guns.

It’s part of a larger move in conservatism away from appeals to the common good and toward an antipathy for anything but the self. Where conservatives used to justify the free market, for example, in Adam Smith’s practical terms—the invisible hand provides for all, a rising tide floats every boat—they now rationalize it in Ayn Rand’s fundamentalist terms: Who gives a shit if the market is good or just? It’s right. Now get the fuck out of our way, you illogical bromide-hawking self sacrificer.

And what movement is unsettlingly full of Randian libertarians? Why, it’s the organized skepticism movement, that’s what.

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

From the Daily Beast this time. Emily Shire writes that #YesAllWomen is a good thing BUT it is not a perfect thing. Worryworry.

#YesAllWomen has led to an outpouring of simultaneously enlightening and disturbing examples of common-day occurrences of female harassment in theworkplace and world of dating. These, in turn, have inspired a number of men to tweet out their support and recognition of the dangers and double standards that misogyny has wrought.

However, #YesAllWomen also transformed a highly disturbed, socially isolated college student into a figure somehow worthy of legitimate discourse about the serious issues of misogyny. While it is inspiring to see positive conscious-raising tweets about the female experience come out of a national tragedy, there is also something dangerous about taking a deranged 22-year-old at his words. We don’t know what exactly drove Rodger to violence, and we can’t conclude that misogyny over mental illness or social rejection was the root cause.

Well we don’t know for certain, no, because we never do. Maybe what he said and put on video was all a smokescreen. We don’t know. But we do know what he did say and did put out there on video. We can conclude that he told us that misogyny was his inspiration. We can’t conclude that was the “root cause,” no, because it would take technology that doesn’t exist to know that. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing is a big blank; it doesn’t mean the black box is still on the ocean floor.

Obviously it’s not that misogyny leads directly to shooting sprees in all cases without exception. Obviously shooting sprees are extremely rare. Obviously there are vastly more misogynists than there are spree shooters.

But when someone announces his hatred of women and his plan to shoot as many as he can, we are allowed to connect his shooting spree to his misogyny. That’s not making a big unjustified leap.

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

Sarah Ditum wonders why there’s an expectation of privacy for misogyny but not for the women who are its targets.

Public life is full of men with manifest habits of misogyny, but whenever this is challenged, one excuse is reliably rolled out: that was private, it doesn’t affect his job. Men, it seems, are the champions of doing two entirely contradictory things at the same time.

That’s been the consensus around Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore’s misogynistic emails. And yes, they were misogynistic – not just a bit sexist if you looked at them funny, not “private banter” (as the headline of India Knight’s Sunday Times column described them), but absolutely misogynistic: Scudamore discussed women’s breasts, described women as “irrational”, and called women “gash”, reducing women to a grotesque image of their genitals. This is the language of someone who doesn’t even think women are people. In fact, Scudamore had so little respect for women that, according to Rani Abraham (the PA who leaked them), he sent these missives through a work email account that it was her job to monitor. One of the women discussed so crudely was a Premier League employee – and was copied into the emails. (Abraham says she left the job because she could not tolerate working for a man who used such language.)

That reminds me of something – it reminds me of one of Carrie Poppy’s tweets under #NotAllWomen:

Because my old boss adopted a little girl’s voice to impersonate me crying over my own assault. #YesAllWomen

Carrie too left the job because she could not tolerate working for a man who used such language.

Scudamore left no daylight between his professional life and his sexism. Yet it has been insisted in every outlet from the Times (Leader) to the Mirror (Carol McGiffin) to the Guardian (Marina Hyde) that emails sent at work, through a work account monitored by an employee, about and to colleagues should be classed as a private matter. (And yes, I noticed how many of those pieces were bylined to women. Maybe working in a massively sexist institution like a newspaper skews your sense of what is acceptable.) If these emails had been on any other topic, the idea of classing them as “private” would be laughable: it’s only because they’re misogynistic that people are anxious to separate them from Scudamore’s public role.

So this is an example of the same thing, I take it. Racism? Not acceptable. (Can be directed at men.) Homophobia? Not acceptable. (Can be directed at men.) Misogyny? Protected. (Is directed only at women.)

The hideous truth is, though, that you can do worse than call women “gash” and still have it tucked away as a private matter. In Kirsty Wark’s Blurred Lines documentary on the new culture of misogyny, Rod Liddle is shuffled out to provide the contrarian point of view, arguing (in the face of all evidence) that women experience no worse abuse than men, and what women do experience is neither specific to gender nor related to violence. Liddle has repeatedly attacked women for their looks in his Spectator column, so he’s certainly no neutral in the sex wars, but there’s also something even more concerning in his history – something which, I think, should permanently rule his opinions on the abuse of women out of contention.

In 2005, Liddle accepted a caution for common assault against his girlfriend, who was then pregnant. Liddle later denied wrongdoing and claimed he only accepted the caution “because it was the quickest way for him to be released”, but nevertheless, there it is: a man with a criminal record of violence against women, being invited to give his professional opinion on the abuse women experience. The caution was not mentioned by Wark. Presumably, it has been dismissed to the realm of the private where men are imagined to be capable of operating an entirely different – even contradictory – set of values to the ones we like to imagine they hold in the course of public decency.

Jesus fuck. I did not know that. They got a guy with a conviction for violence against a woman to talk on a documentary about misogyny, and did not disclose the conviction.

Trust no one.

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

I wrote a public Facebook post in the middle of the night to express my middle of the night feeling of horror at the state we’re in. I’ll put it here too, because this is the state we’re in and it is horrifying.

——————–

I’m beyond appalled, horrified, staggered. I don’t have the words to name my thoughts on the fact that we know racist violence when we see it – we don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that white guys dragging a black guy behind a truck to kill him is not about racism. We don’t get ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that Matthew Shepard was not beaten to death because of homophobia. Why THE FUCK are we getting so many ostensibly-reasonable people trying to argue that Rodger’s murder-spree was not about misogyny?

Apparently we just really are that…expendable.

———————————————————————

It’s produced an excellent discussion. One comment in particular I got permission to publish here; it’s by Michael Šimková.

I’ve noticed in many spaces heterosexual men claim to hate women and at the same time desire them. That is another contradiction many people seem to intuitively understand and I find mystifying. This murderer actually ranted that he hated women because they would not let him love them. That is certainly not coherent using my understanding of love. My impression is that this makes sense to them because they understand women as a desired object, not a subject, and that is what they call love. It is similar to the feelings you might have about a car that won’t start when you were counting on it to get you somewhere. Many people become irate and scream and bang fruitlessly on the car. They hate the car, yet they still want the car.

That seems to be the standard model for heterosexual men now. To regard uninterested women as broken sex toys, and interested women as functional ones. This Rodgers certainly seems to have seen things that way. Under that paradigm, it makes sense to them to despise the same objects they desire and to vehemently reject the notion that their objects should have autonomy. That is also consistent with the legal status of women in most of the world and of history. Originally rape was a crime against the male owner of a woman, not the victim herself, as it sullied his private property. I still see Marxists argue that capitalists oppress proletarian men by hoarding women and that, come the revolution, women would be redistributed with the rest of the wealth, as there must be a 1-1 ratio of women to men because every man is entitled to a wife.

There are endless such examples. All fundamentally seem to be about objectification, which is really nothing new, as feminists have said this for decades only to be decried “because objectification is good” and life would be boring without it.

I think that’s brilliant. Too bad it’s true.

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

Dave Zirin in The Nation:

If a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist does not make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women, I am not sure what will.

Just what I keep thinking, as it becomes clearer and clearer that a mass killing perpetrated by a deeply disturbed misogynist will on the contrary make a lot of us bristle with outrage at the very mention of misogyny in connection with Elliot Rodger’s adventure. It appears that nothing will  make us look at how our society promotes and perpetuates violence against women.

It does not take any sort of genius to draw a line in between the weekend’s shooting, the torments faced by Marissa Alexander or other women who defend themselves, and the fact that the quickest way to invite a barrage of social media hate is to say something as simple as, “I don’t think rape jokes are funny.” These dots connect to create a gun pointed at the ability of women to possess the most elemental human right in what is supposed to be a free society: the right to be left alone.

It doesn’t take a genius, but it does take someone who thinks women shouldn’t be treated like shit.

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

There’s an Elliot Rodger fan page on Facebook that keeps returning after people manage to get one taken down (with great difficulty because Facebook is Facebook).

Facebook has removed fan pages for mass murderer Elliot Rodger, but new ones keep popping up — including one that targeted a woman who alleged its creators have harassed her for years.

Using one misogynist campaign in the service of another misogynist campaign. Enterprising.

Facebook has since said earlier versions of the pages were removed.

A man claiming to be behind the page, an Internet radio host who goes by the moniker Wild Goose, told QMI the “page was set up [in] order to rustle the jimmies of feminists around the world who are attempting to hijack this tragedy in order to further their own agenda.”

Nice company the Zaras and Hales are in.

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

And in Pakistan…

A Pakistani woman has been killed by her relatives outside Lahore High Court for marrying against their wishes.

Police said 30-year old Farzana Bibi died on the spot after being attacked with bricks and sticks.

…

Farzana Bibi’s parents accused her husband, Muhammad Iqbal, of kidnapping her, and had filed a case against him at the High Court.

However, she testified to police that she had married him of her own accord. Police said the couple had been engaged for a number of years.

As she arrived at the court building for a hearing, police said about a dozen family members pulled her aside and began to attack her and her husband, who managed to escape.

What a lovely “family.”

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

Originally a comment on How dare you treat Rodger’s murders as political?

What’s funny is that saying ‘don’t politicise the issue’ *is* politicising the issue. Here’s my word on the subject, from my tumblr:

It’s quite simple, really. Whenever something happens in the ‘real’ world, whenever people get injured or killed due to neglect or human malevolence, there is always a cavalcade of gainsayers admonishing everyone not to ‘politicise’ the tragedy (at least whenever it’s a tragedy that can be lain at the feet of white men). Whenever there’s a shooting, the NRA falls all over itself to say that anyone who might propose reasonable gun control measures is ‘an opportunist’ who should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of violence for their own political ends. Whenever men attack women (in such a way as to garner widespread attention), there is a contingent of people who deny that widespread misogyny and rape culture had anything to do with it, and anyone who claims otherwise is ‘an opportunist’ who should be ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of violence for their own political ends.

We’re unlucky enough to be able to experience both of these groups of people rising in response to the horrible violence perpetrated in California. Despite the fact that the perpetrator participated in misogynist communities, despite the fact that he posted a video manifesto that positively dripped with hatred of women just before he fulfilled the threats he made with a gun. We’ve been warned on the one hand that Americans’ ready access to firearms had nothing to do with this man’s ability to slaughter people, and on the other hand that his obvious misogyny had nothing to do with his targeting of women. We’re told to shut up, not to draw any conclusions (or even engage in any kind of discussion) about the issues that this violence raises.

The thing is, these people (let’s call them ‘denialists’, since that’s what they do) always tell us to shut the fuck up, no matter what. They beat us about the head any time we talk about feminism, about social justice, about welfare or gun control or climate change or a million issues that involve compassion for other humans. So when the denialists tell us ‘don’t politicise this tragedy’, they’re turning the tragedy into a political attack against us.

There’s a difference between politics and culture, just as there’s a difference between politics and policy. Politics entails using real-world events to orchestrate attacks on one’s opponents or to shore up support amongst one’s allies. That’s not always a bad thing; often, it’s a vital and necessary activity in order to successfully enact policy and/or shape culture. But political activities are not synonymous with policy or cultural activities. Pretending that they are is inherently political, since it serves no purpose but to attack your enemies and bolster your allies.

But, of course, we cannot expect anti-feminists and misogynists to be consistent.

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

Oh yes.

Tobias Buckell and John Scalzi on Twitter:

Tobias Buckell ‏@tobiasbuckell  10h

I love how the phrase ‘no politics’ always comes from someone swimming in politics… just of their own brand. So little self-recognition.

John Scalzi @scalzi

.@tobiasbuckell “MY politics aren’t REALLY politics, you see! They’re just plain COMMON SENSE!”

Oh yes. That “I think you are homing in on what disturbs me – it’s about trying to spin tragedy for political purposes” from earlier today is a classic example. “Your view of this is political, while my view of it is from a distant point in space where politics no longer exists.”

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

Oh no, feminist writers stirring up moral panics – someone call – VaculaMan!

Justin Vacula The Daily Mail is over-the-top with its headline, too, calling him the “Hunger Games Assassin.” I guess we can be outraged by tabloid publications. I’d rather not.

Anyway, to recap and follow up on recent comments, I think that focusing on misogyny and people like Valenti/Macrotte/SPLC representatives talking about this as being part of a “war on women” or “proof that misogyny kills” is as silly as people saying women who kill their male sons by microwaving them being “proof that misandry kills” or a “war on men.” It’s just much more complex and it’s really no surprise, unfortunately, that the SPLC and feminist writers are using this to further their agenda by creating moral panic following an isolated incident committed by a troubled individual.

Indeed, statements the shooter made were hateful toward women, but that’s only part of the issue. I don’t, though, think that cultural messaging that men are entitled to have women as rewards has anything to do with this (or at least a major part of it). I further fail to see how a ‘damsel in distress’ trope explained by Sarkessian (or Disney movies) has anything to do with this incident.

Beware the feminists furthering their dastardly agenda of not being treated like shit any more! Won’t someone please think of the microwaved boys?!

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