This made me laugh.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Journalist hunts the elusive woman atheist
Jul 30th, 2013 10:30 am | By Ophelia BensonSecular Woman responds to the Salon piece on where oh where oh where are the women atheists.
Last week Salon writer Katie Engelhart asked, “Where are the Women of New Atheism?” Since she couldn’t seem to find many, or mention by name most of those she did acknowledge, we decided to give her a hand by rounding up several leaders in atheism and interviewing them ourselves. (We are taking submissions as they come in; please see the contact information below if you would like to participate!)
Most of us made much the same point – the one made by “she couldn’t seem to find many, or mention by name most of those she did acknowledge.” We said it’s stupid to keep asking where the women are when there are so many right out in plain view, and it’s even more stupid to talk about how they’re overlooked when you overlook them yourself.
Kim Rippere said it.
When we are not asked to appear, are not asked for our input (even on a piece supposedly about us), and are sidelined and ignored it is difficult to be or become prominent. Salon merely mirrored the typical media dance in dismissing women in favor of men––even in a story about women.
Amy Davis Roth said it.
It seems to me that almost every year the same article is written, asking where the atheist women leaders are. Then, every year women from the secular community speak up and say, “Look! Here we are and here are other prominent atheist women fighting for social justice and speaking out! We are right under your nose!” And then next the year the same article is written featuring photos of a very specific group of prominent men in the movement and once again asking where we are. Instead of just asking were the atheist women are, without actually looking, perhaps it’s time journalists realized that writing articles about the women who are here and are making a very real difference will encourage even more women to come forward. We are only invisible to the society at large because the media chooses not to focus on us.
Monette Richards said it.
The author should, perhaps, read this article and ask “Where are the atheist women?” because they weren’t named in the title, or in the links to their works or in the picture. The title named men. The pictures were of men. Women’s works were linked to namelessly. The author quotes Bekiempis, saying, “Let’s reframe. For every mention of Hitchens, counter with a mention of Hecht.” Yet, Hitchens was mentioned four times (without counting the picture caption), while Hecht only got in three times. Interview more women. Mention more women by name. Use pictures of atheist women, especially when talking about atheist women. We can, at least, start with the little things?
Noelle George said it.
If we want to increase the number of women involved in atheism, let’s celebrate, recognize, and appreciate the outstanding women who are contributing now. This will not only strengthen our movement from the inside, but it will also draw in talented people outside the movement who want to contribute. This goes for all underrepresented demographics, not just women.
It’s not that women aren’t involved, and it’s not that quality women aren’t involved. But the very question “where are the women” discounts every woman who is here now.
Teresa MacBain said it.
As an atheist woman among many atheist women, I’m insulted! Our movement has a large number of female leaders who are changing the landscape of freethought and making our community more diverse. I was honored to be a speaker at the recent Women in Secularism 2 conference, which celebrated the reality of atheist female leaders in the freethought world.
Mandisa Thomas said it.
Articles that pose the question asking about a specific demographic should be well researched, and indicate an exhaustion of all avenues. If writers really want to know about the diversity of the atheist community, there’s plenty of information and organizations to choose from. Our hard work shouldn’t be in vain.
And others said it. I said it. Most of us said it.
I wonder if journalists will ever learn.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Loony left feminist Taliban strikes again
Jul 29th, 2013 4:34 pm | By Ophelia BensonColin McGinn forgot someone for his all-male contrarians list. Toby Young should be on it, because he’s very like Colin McGinn, right down to the thinking he’s funny when he isn’t.
He doesn’t like feminism. Wo, that’s original!
Right, that’s it. I’m not shopping at the Co-op again. The bog-standard supermarket chain announced this morning that it has caved in to growing pressure from loony Left feminist campaigners and given the publishers of lads’ mags an ultimatum: place your magazines in “modesty bags” before 9 September or we’ll no longer sell them.
Needless to say, this decision has been welcomed by Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem Under-Secretary of State for Women, Equalities and Politically Correct Mumbo Jumbo Foisted On Us By New Labour That The Present Government Is Too Cowardly To Get Rid Of.
“Exposing children to lewd pictures that portray women as sex objects is not appropriate,” Ms Swinson told the Guardian. “That’s why the Co-operative’s decision to implement the Bailey review recommendation for publications with overtly sexual images on the cover to be displayed and sold in modesty bags is very welcome.”
“Modesty bags” is a horrible phrase, and concept – but the magazines are displaying women as if they were pork chops – pork chops with their legs spread. Thinking that’s not great for equality between the sexes is not “Loony Left.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if UK Feminista and Object – the organisations behind the Lose The Lads’ Mags campaign – do start clamouring for the Beano to be taken off sale. Give ’em a finger and they’ll take a hand. These puritanical fanatics are the Left-wing equivalent of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. At this rate, they’ll soon be patrolling our city centres in Toyota Land Cruisers, administering on-the-spot punishment beatings to any man caught looking at a woman’s cleavage for more than a second. Like most red-blooded, heterosexual males, I’ll never be able to leave the house again.
Got that? He’s not gay. That’s the important thing.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
They were right there
Jul 29th, 2013 4:13 pm | By Ophelia BensonSoraya Chemaly offers answers to the perennial, silly question, “where are all the women in ___?” Actually it’s not in ___, but it might as well be. It’s in atheism, but it could be philosophy or gaming or politics or you know the drill.
In a Salon piece last week called, “Where are the women of new atheism?”, Katie Englehardt described what looks like diminishing participation of women in atheist life. She also encouraged atheist women to more openly embrace their beliefs.
Yeah it’s not that we don’t embrace our beliefs openly – it’s that people always forget to mention us, including Engelhart herself. Yes, Engelhart herself – in the very act of writing (yet another) article wondering where we all were, she herself concealed the names of a lot of us for no earthly reason. Look at it again – the article wondering where we all were.
But before long, these New Atheists were depicted as an old boys’ club—a clique of (white) men, bound by a particularly unyielding brand of disbelief.
Where were the women?
Why, they were right there: stolidly leading people away from the fold. They were irreverent bloggers and institution founders. And scholars. Around the time that the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris tripartite published its big wave of Atheist critique, historian Jennifer Michael Hecht published “Doubt” and journalist Susan Jacoby published “Freethinkers“—both critically acclaimed. And yet, these women, and many others, failed to emerge as public figures, household names.
See that? Two names, but also a whole slew of concealed ones, hiding under all those links. Stupid, isn’t it? Why not include the names in the article, instead of hiding them under links? Is it immodest to name women? Under irreverent you have Jen McCreight, under bloggers you have all the women of Skepchick (like Rebecca Watson, Amy Davis Roth, Elyse Anders, Heina Dadabhoy), under institution you have the pillars of Secular Woman like Kim Rippere and Monette Richards, under founders you have Annie Laurie Gaylor of FFRF. Under many you have Annie Laurie again and under others you have…me.
So that’s one place the women are - they’re being concealed even by people who are ostensibly writing about their very concealment. There aren’t enough face-palms in the world…
Among Soraya’s reasons -
Second, sexism is real and has an effect on women’s participation and leadership within the atheist community. Rape jokes and sexual harassment, as penalties and tools to silence women, exist in atheist and secular groups as well as religious ones. Many people hold the tacit belief that atheism equals rationalism and rationalism is gender-neutral, and therefore sexism can’t exist among atheists. But critical thinkers do irrational things all the time — and unless they actively try to resist existing prejudices, they can easily fall into them. The discrimination based on class, race, gender and sexuality that we see in the broader culture exists in atheist and secular communities too, and requires the same dismantling.
Big time. We’re working on it, but…right now it’s like going up a down escalator.
The Women in Secularism Conference, started by Melody Hensley and the Center for Free Inquiry in 2012, is meant to address imbalance. This year’s conference, which began with an efflorescent expression of the problems at hand, was bigger than last year’s.
Fifth, it’s no exaggeration to say that managing sexism is exhausting, depressing and distracts from work women could be doing as visible spokespeople of fighting for higher and equal pay, or immigration policies that include uneducated women, or ending sexual predation, or advocating for the right to control our own reproduction. All of which, by the way, would probably contribute to the growth of secular and non-religious culture. (There are reasons why seven of the ten most religious states in the US are also rated the worse states for women to live in.) The need to constantly struggle against gender-based prejudice leaves women with less time and energy to work on any of these issues.
Conferences like Women in Secularism Conference or Blackout, a secular rally celebrating diversity started by Mandisa L. Thomas, president and founder of Black Nonbelievers, are vibrant events and important to building communities. But they’re not enough. Kim Rippere, founder of Secular Woman explains, “The secular community needs to be self-reflective regarding acceptance and inclusion both within our community and in society and the media has to stop ignoring women atheists or it will continue to be difficult for women to emerge as atheist leaders.”
Katie Engelhart please note.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Frankly incandescent
Jul 29th, 2013 2:56 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe social networking site’s move came as a female MP called in police over rape threats she received via Twitter and detectives continued to investigate similar highly offensive messages sent to a feminist campaigner.
Caroline Criado-Perez, a writer, faced a deluge of online vitriol, including warnings that she would be killed, after she successfully lobbied for a woman to appear on a British banknote.
The trolls also targeted Stella Creasey, the Labour MP for Walthamstow in east London, for speaking out in support of Miss Criado-Perez.
Miss Creasey said she was “frankly incandescent” at Twitter’s response to the vile abuse she suffered over a 24-hour period.
One user threatened to rape her and “put the video all over the internet”, while another calling himself @rapey1 wrote: “I will rape you tomorrow at 9pm… Shall we meet near your house?”
And that’s what women “deserve” for talking.
The MP copied the messages to Waltham Forest Police’s Twitter account and said she was making a formal complaint to her local police station.
She said free speech was “incredibly important” but said it did not include the right to threaten people with rape.
“It is important that we do not think that somehow because this is happening online it is any less violent, any less dangerous than if people were shouting or abusing Caroline in the street in this way,” she told BBC Radio 4′s The World At One.
“Twitter needs to be explicit that sexual violence and sexual aggression will not be tolerated as part of their user terms and conditions.
“We can all challenge these people and indeed when this happens to me in other occasions I tend to retweet it so people can say, ‘This is not acceptable’.”
So do I. For that reason.
Senior police officers have privately said they are extremely reluctant to get drawn into the time-consuming and highly sensitive area of trying to police the internet.
Andy Trotter, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ communications advisory group, suggested today that Twitter was not doing enough to combat internet trolls.
“While we do work with them on some matters I think there is a lot more to be done. They need to take responsibility, as do the other platforms, to deal with this at source and make sure these things do not carry on,” he said.
They do. We’re sick of being told that rape threats (however figurative they may be) don’t violate any Twitter rules.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Twitter says oh all right
Jul 29th, 2013 2:21 pm | By Ophelia BensonIt will add a report abuse button.
Twitter today said it had introduced a button for reporting abuse on its latest iPhone app and is now looking to expand this function.
A spokesman said: “The ability to report individual Tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone, and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.
“We don’t comment on individual accounts. However, we have rules which people agree to abide by when they sign up to Twitter.
“We will suspend accounts that once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules. We encourage users to report an account for violation of the Twitter rules by using one of our report forms.”
Ms Criado Perez, who has received support from MPs and celebrities, said: “It’s sadly not unusual to get this kind of abuse but I’ve never seen it get as intense or aggressive as this.
“It’s infuriating that the price you pay for standing up for women is 24 hours of rape threats. We are showing that by standing together we can make a real difference.”
So.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Heat/kitchen
Jul 29th, 2013 1:54 pm | By Ophelia BensonEmma Barnett gets lots of sexist abuse online, and she got a couple of sexist online abusers to call in to her weekly radio program to explain why sexist abuse is a good thing.
First troll up was Peter from Whitechapel. He was quick to deliver some clichés – such as if Criado-Perez can’t stand the heat on Twitter, then she should get out of the kitchen.
But not content with his trite and quite frankly misplaced advice, I pushed harder and whoah – then the real Peter emerged.
“She was asking for it,” he told me. According to this nitwit, if you campaign about issues such as keeping a woman on English banknotes, you should “expect to receive rape threats”. I delved further.
“If you put your head above the parapet, like she has, then you deserve this type of abuse. It’s what you get when you are a woman shouting about something,” Peter told me, starting to get a little irate.
Of course. We already know this. It’s what we’ve been told over and over and over again in our own particular corner of the internet. “If you are a public figure, you have to expect abuse.” I’ve been told that, in those words, many many times. I’ve been told it with one or two words changed another many many times. “If you write things, you will get pushback.” “If you can’t handle abuse you should stop doing things that attract abuse. You should get offline.” “You should stop talking about the abuse you get, because women aren’t victims.”
I haven’t seen the claim about deserving it so much, though. That’s another step, that Peter takes. What I see is the claim that it just will happen, it’s inevitable, it follows public writing the way mildew follows rain. I don’t see the claim that we deserve it because we are women shouting about something. I think that is the underlying belief, or not so much belief as hatred in the form of an assumption, but I think most people are shy of putting it like that. It’s interesting that Peter isn’t shy in that way.
Then Gary from Birmingham decided to call in – and while the experience was quite vile, I can only thank him for his horrible honesty. Because while Peter was a good starter troll – Gary provided the full-fat version of what it is to be a woman-hating internet troll.
Gary, a deep-voiced menacing-sounding man, sat in an eerily quiet home, told me in no uncertain terms that “feminists like Caroline were undermining what it is to be a man” and needed “sorting out”.
“Men are predators,” he explained calmly. “And this [rape threats] is what we do.”
Do I detect a fan of vulgarized evo psych?
Regrouping, I then asked him how he would feel if, like Criado-Perez, his mother (you hope the one woman he may respect for creating him, so he could you know, fulfil his male predatory purpose on earth and all that) received 50 rape threats an hour?
His first answer was genius: “She wouldn’t because my mum’s not a feminist.” Right.
I asked the question again and his reply defied belief: “She would know these men wouldn’t actually come and rape her. They don’t mean it. Rape is a metaphor.”
Well, no, it doesn’t defy belief, not to me. Maybe that’s because of Garry Trudeau. Did you know that in the very early days of Doonesbury, while Trudeau was still an undergraduate, he did one in which after an argument with Nicole (the resident feminist at the time) Mike turned to the “camera” and said, “I should rape her for that”? It’s true. I remember it – I can even visualize it, maybe partly because the drawing was still so crude then. It’s so obscure though that it’s hard to find it even mentioned on Google. I found a mention in an interview in 2000 though.
Arlington, Va.: Mr. Trudeau –
Do you ever look back at strips from years past and wince at things that are no longer humorous or what you now think are wrong-headed? I recall looking at your original Yale cartoons and seeing Mike making a joke about rape that would be considered absolutely beyond the pale today. Given that you can’t take individual jokes back, are there any characterizations or situations you wish you hadn’t done, like Phuong as the lovable Viet Cong or maybe some of Duke’s foreign exploits in countries that later became more generally known as tragedies?
Garry Trudeau: Many of the early strips from college make me cringe, especially the one you mention, which I deleted from subsequent editions of the book.
Yep. I must have had that early edition of the book, or I wouldn’t remember that “joke.” Funnily enough (or not), I thought it was absolutely beyond the pale then. I was amazed by it – no doubt another reason I remember it – because Trudeau seemed so generally good on those things. He was sympathetic to Nicole, he gave her good, funny lines. I loved the one where she’s explaining feminism to Mike and he slowly catches on and ends up saying “I get it, you’re saying women are as good as men,” and she says “No, I’m saying we’re better than men” and gives a wicked smile. It’s always been one of my favorite feminist self-mocking jokes. (The others all come from Dykes to Watch Out For.) The rape “joke” seemed wildly off – and was, or it wouldn’t make him cringe now.
Anyway, it doesn’t defy belief, to me, to say that the rape talk thrown at women online is mostly figurative rather than literal. But it doesn’t need to be literal to be abusive. Telling Jews you want to put them in ovens wouldn’t have to be literal to be abusive. Telling someone, in anger, you’d like to beat her or him to a bloody pulp doesn’t have to be literal to be abusive.
(There’s also the fact that sometimes people take threats to be figurative and they turn out to be literal.)
Gary from Brum is playing with a very nasty toy.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Creepy in a Frankenstein sense
Jul 29th, 2013 11:21 am | By Ophelia BensonEric Schliesser at NewApps took a look at the “Genius Project” excuse and found it well and truly creepy.
2. There is as Jonathan Kramnick pointed out to me on Facebook, something decidedly creepy (in a Frankenstein sense) in the very idea of Genius-Development.
3. McGinn admits to deliberately erasing the lines between the professional and the personal. This is not unique to McGinn in the discipline. As Jason Stanley noted “there is an overly personal and unprofessional aspect to the friendship and socializing in the profession.” (This feature of Stanley’s comments got lost in subsequent discussion over his views about the prevalence of assortative mating in philosophy.) We are dealing here with a phenomenon that is at the heart of many of the ‘culture’ problems within professional philosophy.
Maybe they’re all trying to re-enact Socrates and Alcibiades?
Commenters pointed out that he had included identifying information about the grad student, and how awful that was. For example:
Two things of note in this latest missive from Dr. McGinn:
1.) The behavior, and indeed the very project, he describes, both manifest classic grooming behavior by a practiced sexual predator.
2.) The inclusion of identifying information on the accuser is plainly retaliatory and should fall squarely in violation of most universities’ AA/EEO policies concerning retaliation against reporters of harassment and discrimination.
The more I learn about this, the more appalling he seems to be.
There’s also the whole issue about credibility and rhetoric and narcissism. Canadian Grad Student looks at that:
Why place any credence on his testimonial over the graduate student’s complaint? McGinn’s account is a bizarre, slightly unhinged narrative ostensibly crafted to make him the victim of quasi-conspiratorial machinations, but which reveals instead a staggering narcissism and inability to conceptualize how others might perceive him in this situation (the cult of the hand? the genius project? ‘breaking taboos’ with hand job jokes?).
If one finds what he has written compelling and plausible rather than strange, abnormal, and flatly pathological I begin to worry: who reads this and thinks, “yes, of course: a genius project–now finally this whole thing makes sense!” Why not a more mundane story where a serial sexual harasser cows graduate students with his stature until one brave soul reports him? What is more plausible, that an entitled, narcissistic jerk fabulates a Pygmalion back-story, or that a famous tenured scholar with legal representation is victimized by the local feminazis? Come on. Talk about a litmus test for one’s grip on reality.
Exactly. The combination of the obvious vanity and absurdity of the material in the posts with McGinn’s apparent confidence in their quality and persuasive power is very puzzling to an outsider, and I would imagine worrying to insiders.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Behold, the generic asshole
Jul 29th, 2013 9:53 am | By Ophelia BensonRight-on dude is right-on.
And yet…
Yeah.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The…genius project?
Jul 28th, 2013 6:18 pm | By Ophelia BensonChaospet on “hand jobs” and sophisticated philosophers.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Being totally right entirely altogether
Jul 28th, 2013 6:01 pm | By Ophelia BensonAnd then there’s McGinn’s Plea for Calm with its paean to epistemic virtue.
Shouldn’t we philosophers be setting a good example of epistemic virtue? We are supposed to be rational, judicious, calm, impartial, non-ideological, just, fair, balanced, careful, scrupulous, accurate, above-the-fray. But such virtues have not been evident recently. Instead we have seen hysteria, presumption of guilt, ignoring of evidence, ignoring of due process and procedural justice, sloppiness, inaccuracy, ideology, vindictiveness, lack of reflection, simple stupidity, ideological fervor, ad hominem invective, and so on and on. This has been sickening to behold and shameful to the values we as philosophers are supposed to live by.
It is true that many people have not been guilty of these vices and failings. They have insisted on basic principles of reason and justice (and have been traduced for doing so). I salute them. I suspect that the bitter divisiveness that we have seen will only continue and deepen, because it reflects a basic difference of moral psychology. The divisiveness will not concern a single case but be pervasive and general. The ideologues and nutcases will hate the rationalists, while the rationalists will despise their opponents. None of this will be pretty. The ideologues will dig in, as ideologues always do, while the rationalists will grow ever more impatient and contemptuous. This will play out in the day-to-day workings of academic departments and personal relationships. Unless and until the epistemic virtues are respected, I expect to see continued strife and bad feeling. This will do nobody any good.
It’s a different version of the same thing – he’s the good one, the exemplar of epistemic virtue, and people who are critical of his behavior are monsters of epistemic depravity. He is rational, judicious, calm, impartial, non-ideological, just, fair, balanced, careful, scrupulous, accurate, above-the-fray. His critics demonstrate hysteria, presumption of guilt, ignoring of evidence, ignoring of due process and procedural justice, sloppiness, inaccuracy, ideology, vindictiveness, lack of reflection, simple stupidity, ideological fervor, and ad hominem invective. All the hooray words on his side of the ledger, all the boo words on their side.
You would think – speaking of epistemic virtue – that it would occur to him that that’s not convincing, at least. Maybe it’s too much to expect him to think it might not be fully accurate, but you’d think he could manage to notice a certain implausibility to the way he loads one scale with chocolates and cherries, and the other scale with pond scum and excrement.
What a spectacle.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
How can we know?
Jul 28th, 2013 5:37 pm | By Ophelia BensonFrom What is it like to be a woman in philosophy – some commentary.
How can we know who the predators are?
On a day when the profession is all abuzz about the resignation of a senior philosopher due to allegations of sexual harassment, I find myself wondering about all the women who have been suffering in silence. Many commentators on this issue add remarks along the lines that they know of much worse cases where nothing has been done. So how are we supposed to feel safe in our professional community? I’m left with a sense of depression and dread at that the thought that there are serial sexual harassers in our midst, walking around us anonymously, ready to strike again at any time. “Oh, but everyone knows who they are,” it’s often said. Well, I don’t know who they are, and I’ve been around awhile and am fairly active in the profession. I don’t know whether I’ve unknowingly invited a serial sexual harasser to speak at a conference I’ve organized, or contribute to a book that I’ve edited, or … So how can the young women in our profession expect to know who these predators are?
Quite. Everyone doesn’t know who they are. And woe betide any woman who tries to say who some of them are…
Stories of harassment being taken seriously?
The recent news of a prominent philosopher having to quit his job because of accusations of sexual harassment is so radical because it seems that philosophers never get in trouble for sexual harassment. I’m a tenured woman philosopher with an excellent job. I’m very well-connected. I have heard tons of detailed stories about sexual harassment that went unpunished, either because the victims chose not to pursue (dangerous and perhaps fruitless) attempts at formal charges or because departments and administrators refused to respond in a serious manner.
Women just have to rise above it.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Well that would explain it
Jul 28th, 2013 5:05 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe secret of why Twitter is so bad at doing anything about sexist abuse on Twitter is no longer a secret. All is explained.
The rules are off. They’re no good. As rules, they are inadequate to the task. If the rules don’t say that tweeting ”I will rape you when I get the chance” is not allowable when the recipient objects to it and reports it, then the rules are kakk.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Irony-deficient people miss his brilliant irony chiz chiz
Jul 28th, 2013 3:59 pm | By Ophelia BensonI haven’t found a grab of those posts of Colin McGinn’s but he didn’t take all the posts down, and there is plenty of intolerable smugness and self-admiration still on display.
(Honestly – I’ve read other people who write this way – this horribly arch, self-conscious, pseudo-Wildean, labored, unamusing way – can’t they see how awful it is? Clearly not, but then – why not?)
The real biscuit-taker among the surviving posts is perhaps the one titled “Epater les bourgeios” [yes, sic]. You know what it’s going to be before you read more – he’s a flouter of convention, a wit, a challenger of pieties, and all these peasants have misunderstood. Yawwwwwwwwwwwn – never heard that one before.
My cultural heroes are: Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Philip Larkin, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Peter Cook, John Lennon, and Larry David (among many others).
Cringe cringe cringe cringe. I can hardly bear it.
I like some of the writing (and in the case of Peter Cook performing) of some of those guys too, but I wouldn’t dream of calling any of them a “cultural hero”…or of making a hero out of any of them even without saying so. I think I stopped doing that once I was out of my teens, and even if I hadn’t, I would have chosen more carefully.
What they all have in common is the quality captured by the French phrase “epater les bourgeois”, which the OED defines as “shock people regarded as conventional or complacent”. We might paraphrase this in a number of ways: taunt the prudish and prim, ridicule the conventional and boring, outrage the pious and conformist. The cultural tradition that falls under this description sees itself as in favor of art, freedom, creativity, spontaneity, playfulness, life, and experience; it casts itself as standing against stifling social norms and dull conformity. It is given to provocation, controversy, and shock tactics. Accordingly, it is often pilloried and persecuted, and of course misunderstood. It does not see itself as against morality as such, but it does view conventional pieties with a beady and skeptical eye. It is on the lookout for hypocrisy, dogma, intolerance, suppression, and sheer dullness of spirit. These to me are admirable values that I try to bring into my own life. I am particularly fond of provocative irony, which has got me into trouble on more than one occasion (especially in irony-deficient America). I am often amazed that people fail to see the irony in this or that utterance of mine.
I trust readers will see the relevance of these remarks to current events.
He sounds like a teenager. Literally. I remember thinking like that, I remember fancying myself in almost that way…when I was fifteen. Then I got over it. I learned not to betray that much vanity with that much reckless abandon. I even learned not to think of myself that way – I learned not to flatter myself in that unabashed way even inside my own head. That’s why that shite makes me cringe so hard – it’s so shamelessly self-flattering and complacent.
And the guy’s a philosopher. Lordy.
Maybe the University of Miami made him resign not so much because of the gross-out emails but because he writes like that.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The “genius project”?
Jul 28th, 2013 12:47 pm | By Ophelia BensonIt gets worse.
There was a second post from McGinn, explaining and self-defending some more. It too is now unfindable, but Bill Benzon at Crooked Timber quotes enough to get the astonishing drift.
From McGinn’s post on The Genius Project:
The student (hereafter NN) and I were engaged on what we called “the Genius Project”. The purpose of the genius project was to make NN into a truly original and outstanding young philosopher (one who could expect to find an attractive job later). Part of this project involved techniques for encouraging unconventional thinking, and the concept of “taboo-busting” was deemed helpful towards this end.
Toward the end:
Most of the genius project took a more conventional form, but it is within this context that they [two email messages] should be interpreted. They were not just gratuitous snippets of risque prose, sent out of the blue. I believe that had the genius project continued it would have borne significant fruit; and indeed a colleague has remarked to me that NN’s philosophical abilities went from “good” to “superb” following the several months during which I was attempting to make her into a “genius”.
You have got to be kidding.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Criado-Perez Twitter abuse case leads to arrest
Jul 28th, 2013 11:54 am | By Ophelia BensonA guy has been arrested over the deluge of threats aimed at Caroline Criado-Perez on Twitter.
The 21-year-old was detained earlier in the Manchester area on suspicion of
harassment offences.
Oh yes? Interesting.
Via her Twitter page on Sunday evening she said she was at a police station making a statement and that there were “many more threats to report”.
The Metropolitan Police said an allegation of “malicious communications” had been made to officers in Camden on Thursday.
An online petition set-up in response to the abuse called on Twitter to introduce a “report abuse” button and received thousands of signatures.
Labour said on Sunday that it had written to Twitter complaining that it had been “weak” to tell Ms Criado-Perez to take her complaints to the police.
“Of course it is right to report such abuse to the police,” shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper wrote.
“But social media platforms also have a responsibility for the platform they give users.”
Ms Cooper said Twitter should carry out a full review of its abuse and complaints policies.
Yes, it should.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
A professional glass blower might remark
Jul 28th, 2013 11:21 am | By Ophelia BensonLet’s go back in time a couple of months, to early June, to June 4th to be precise, when the story about Colin McGinn broke. What story, and who? The story that McGinn is leaving the University of Miami because of allegedly sexually harassing emails; McGinn is a fairly prominent (for a philosopher) philosopher.
I saw a lot of mentions at the time but didn’t follow them up, I forget why…But I should have, because the story and the meta-story and the meta-meta are all highly relevant. (Relevant to what? To issues I’ve been talking about 1) as long as I’ve been talking at all, and as long as I’ve been blogging 2) more than before over the past couple of years.)
The story broke in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was behind a paywall but then people shared it. The philosopher Sally Haslanger has the whole thing on her website. The core of the CHE account is:
In the Miami case, the female graduate student first approached the university’s Office of Equality Administration, which handles harassment-related cases, near the beginning of the fall semester last year. She had previously taken a course with Mr. McGinn in the fall of 2011, and began serving as his research assistant soon after.
The student, who asked to remain anonymous because she is planning to pursue a career in philosophy, said in an e-mail that she began to feel uncomfortable around Mr. McGinn at the start of the spring semester a year ago. Her discomfort hit a high point in April, she wrote, “when he began sending me extremely inappropriate and uncomfortable messages, which continued until the beginning of the summer.”
The student declined to share the messages with The Chronicle. However, her long-term boyfriend, [name deleted by FP]—a fifth-year graduate student in the department—described some of the correspondence, including several passages that he said were sexually explicit. Mr. [deleted], along with two professors with whom the student has worked, described one message in which they said Mr. McGinn wrote that he had been thinking about the student while masturbating.
Advocates of Mr. McGinn, however, say that the correspondence may have been misinterpreted when taken out of context.
Act 2 is on June 6, when McGinn posted a defense on his blog. There are links to it all over the place but he must have taken the post itself down, because the links just go to the main page, and even the Wayback Machine doesn’t find the post. But it’s not difficult to get the gist from other people’s commentary on the gist – it was that it was all a misunderstanding because he was just making sophisticated jokes which his graduate student was too stupid and unsophisticated to understand. Jokes like what? The New Apps blog quotes:
As the entire philosophical world knows by now, Colin McGinn has posted what some call a “defence” against allegations made against him. The defence is that one can jokingly trade on the literal meaning of ‘hand job’, i.e., job done by or to the hand.
Similarly, a professional glass blower might remark to his co-worker with a lopsided grin: “Will you do a blow job for me while I eat this sandwich?” The co-worker will interpret the speaker as indulging in crude glass blower’s humor and might reply: “Sure, but I’ll need you to do a blow job for me in return”
McGinn remarks:
These reflections take care of certain false allegations that have been made about me recently (graduate students are not what they used to be).
Oh.dear.god.
Which is pretty much what Henry Farrell said about it at Crooked Timber.
A stupid, unfunny joke. Self-flattery about the sophistication of the joke. Condescension about the graduate student’s lack of sophistication in not appreciating the sophistication of the joke. The skeeviness of the “joke.” The conceit, smugness, entitlement, arrogance, obliviousness, and sexsexsexism of making the joke in the first place and the “defense” in the second place. The utter shittiness of trying to laugh it off with a boys’ club explanation of a boys’ club “joke” while dissing the student in the process.
Vomit.
One gem of a comment on Henry’s post, by t e whalen -
It’s fortunate that Professor McGinn’s teaching load has been recently lightened, as he now has the opportunity to expand his blog post into an article or book. I think he’s breaking some new ground in the intersection between Gricean implicature and moral philosophy. For instance, he seems to consider it obvious that a non-cooperating conversationalist who intentionally flouts Gricean maxims in such a way as to make the “timeless” meaning of his utterance a social or moral violation does not actually commit a wrong. Or, alternatively working backwards, if the speaker can make an argument that the utterer’s meaning of an utterance with a morally objectionable timeless meaning could have been innocuous, he can thereby avoid moral criticism. He goes even further, suggesting if an interpreter interprets an intentionally maxim-flouting utterance according to its timeless meaning, and acts upon that interpretation, the interpreter, not the speaker, commits a moral wrong.
Would it matter in these situations whether the statement embedded in the utterer’s preferred meaning was factually true? Can the speaker avoid interrogation of his intent in making a non-cooperative utterance?
There are so many interesting philosophical and linguistic avenues to explore here, and I wish Professor McGinn the best of luck in pursuing them in his well-deserved and copious new leisure time.
Heh. Ya.
The thing is – it’s notorious that philosophy is one of the worst fields in terms of oblivious stupid entitled sexism. Jenny Saul at Feminist Philosophers remarked – on the 4th, before the “defense” appeared -
It’s an astounding new development in the field for allegations like this to be taken so seriously that someone is forced out AND for this not to have been hushed up.
Janet Stemwedel has some thoughts on reactions from haters of feminism, some of which she quotes.
There are a few things that jump out at me from these comments.
One is that the commenters railing about the corrupting influence of feminism on moral and epistemic fairness, on rationality, on the fabric of social interactions, et cetera, never actually bother to spell out what they mean by feminism. It’s hard to discern whether the (potentially distinct) Anonymouses have amongst themselves a coherent view in mind that they are against.
Another is that their litmus test for being a feminist (and therefore an advancer of this corrosive-but-not-explicitly-defined ideology) seems to be that one believes it is likelier that Colin McGinn transgressed proper professional boundaries with the graduate research assistant to whom he sent the “handjob” email than that the graduate student in question is lying.
Interestingly, though, these Anonymous anti-feminists who believe themselves capable of exemplary rationality and objectivity in weighing the facts around the Colin McGinn case mount some pretty elaborate efforts to construct possible scenarios in which the facts in evidence exonerate McGinn and damn the graduate student. For all their lips service to “fairness,” they seem to utterly reject interpretations of the facts that weigh against McGinn.
Elevator, anyone?
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
What did your last slave die of?
Jul 28th, 2013 8:35 am | By Ophelia BensonThe statues join the Magdalen laundries protest in Dublin.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Chasing Twitter
Jul 27th, 2013 6:17 pm | By Ophelia BensonWuhay – Stephen Fry is on board.
Hurry up @twitter @biz and you in charge. Shouldn’t be hard http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23477130 …
From that BBC article -
A petition calling on Twitter to add a “report abuse” button has received thousands of signatures.
It follows a deluge of abuse and rape threats received by Caroline Criado-Perez, who successfully campaigned for women to be included on UK banknotes.
MP Stella Creasy told the BBC she was “furious” Twitter had yet to do anything about Ms Criado-Perez’s abuse.
It’s completely typical of Twitter though. Also Facebook.
Ms Criado-Perez’s cause has been supported by other prominent tweeters, including the journalists Caitlin Moran and Suzanne Moore and Independent columnist Owen Jones.
Ms Moran has called for a 24-hour Twitter boycott on 4 August to try to get Twitter to come up with an “anti-troll policy”.
Labour MP Ms Creasy said: “This is not a technology crime – this is a hate crime. If they were doing it on the street, the police would act.”
She told the BBC she had been chasing Twitter for the past 24 hours but they had not yet responded to her.
“I am absolutely furious with Twitter that they are not engaging in this at all,” she said.
A Twitter spokesperson said: “The ability to report individual tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.
“We don’t comment on individual accounts. However, we have rules which people agree to abide by when they sign up to Twitter. We will suspend accounts that once reported to us, are found to be in breach of our rules.”
No you won’t. Don’t say that; it’s not true.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
A deafening silence from Twitter
Jul 27th, 2013 12:03 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Independent reports that Twitter is facing a major backlash for not responding to abuse. I am pleased to hear that – Twitter has been crappy about dealing with one kind of abuse I get there, and it’s so crappy about offering ways to deal with other kinds that I didn’t even try.
A host of MPs and other leading public figures have threatened a boycott after a feminist campaigner highlighted numerous threats of rape and other violent acts being sent to her on Twitter. Caroline Criado-Perez, who finally won her fight to have prominent women represented on Britain’s bank notes this week, claimed that her complaints to the site have been ignored.
A petition was soon set up demanding more robust action from the site and attracted more than 6,000 signatures within three hours. That figure had passed the 11,000 mark this afternoon.
So. Apparently quite a few people are fed up with this kind of thing. Well, good.
Criado-Perez said that
once the decision was announced by new Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, the abuse escalated and began to attract the attention of fellow Twitter users. She reported it to the police and claims that she tried to alert Twitter’s manager of journalism & news Mark Luckie. But his response appeared to be to simply set his account to private, making his updates invisible to most users. Ms Criado-Perez said she is still awaiting a substantive response.
She added: “The internet makes it very easy to make this sort of threat, and sites that don’t make it easy to report abuse like this make men like those who have been threatening me feel like there will be no comeback. I told some of them they would not get away with it and they just laughed; at the moment, they are right.
“There has been a deafening silence from Twitter. The accounts of the men who said those things are still active. There needs to be a massive culture shift at Twitter.”
Bring on the culture shift.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
